HAIM understands hot boys

& a bad show you should maybe watch

Hi besties,

Reporting to you live from my bedroom, the only room in my apartment with AC. Since the beginning of this weekend Chicago has been in the pit of a disgusting heat wave that I understand has just hit the East Coast - good luck, comrades! Things I did this weekend include sitting by the lake and jumping in the water every 30 minutes so I didn’t die, and also seeing the country singer known as “Chase Rice” at the (air-conditioned) Salt Shed, which was fine. When I could no longer be outside I enjoyed multimedia content in my cold-ish room. Roundup below!

HAIM is so good at music videos

The Haim sisters and their creative team have an incredible talent for picking up-and-coming actors, ruffling up their hair a little bit and putting them in a music video where they get to prance around for three minutes looking like the hottest men alive. (Their recent videos featuring Drew Starkey and Logan Lerman are required viewing). The latest installment, released in tandem with the new album, features Will Poulter (capping off a pretty spectacular press run), Archie Madekwe (the poor cousin in Saltburn; rumored to be dating Maude Apatow) and Nabhaan Rizwan (the kid who dies in the pilot episode of Industry) looking gorgeous as the Haim sisters wear interesting outfits and grind on them, basically. It’s awesome! Thank you, HAIM! I am personally requesting that their next video feature either Charles Melton or Mike Faist (or both), both of whom would fit swimmingly into the HAIM universe.

We Were Liars (Prime Video)

Bad TV meant for young adults is unfortunately necessary to my well-being. I have to watch something like this every few months or I’ll go insane. Between this and Ginny & Georgia I may be maxed out for the rest of the year (The Summer I Turned Pretty doesn’t count, that’s prestige TV), but I was still pretty transfixed by this subpar show.

We Were Liars is based off of a wildly popular 2014 YA novel that I always meant to read but never did. It follows Cadence Sinclair, a privileged blonde teen who washes up injured on the beach of her family’s estate with no memory of how she got there, as she tries to solve the mystery of her accident. This show is a weird mix of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Succession, and that Nicole Kidman Nantucket show that came out last year. The patriarch of the Sinclair family is pretty much just Logan Roy in that he’s a news magnate who enjoys pitting his adult children against each other, and also in that he is racist.

First of all, everyone on this show is blonde. Like, blindingly blonde. Some are platinum blonde, some are the well-highlighted “buttery chunks” blonde that the stylist for the Carolyn Bessette show totally whiffed. Everyone is SO blonde, except for the two POC characters who get the burden of teaching all of these blonde people about racial injustice and stolen land. In a choice so absurd I had to pause the show and take a lap, an ashamed Cadence reveals to her nonwhite love interest that she’s reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, and apologizes for her white performative justice. I cannot make this up.

There is a whole episode about “Lemon Day” (???)

As you’ve probably already guessed, the writing is really remarkably awful. The main romantic plotline is incredibly wooden and awkward. In constant pithy voiceovers, characters are described as things like “all sugar and effort and strong coffee.” Cadence, who the show informs us is a Very Talented Writer, tells countless stories that all begin with “There once was a princess who lived in a castle.” This show is known for its “crazy twist,” and the twist was indeed nuts, but it also made me unspeakably angry for several hours.

There are glimpses of a better show in here, which is arguably more disappointing than if it sucked all around. The three adult sisters all put in very good performances (Mamie Gummer is particularly great), but the highlight and overall saving grace was future Haymitch, Joseph Zada! He gets a lot to chew on character-wise, and nails both the charismatic and the emotional beats. He gets to do the Risky Business dance. You heard it here first, this guy has the juice.

Anyways, this is a good thing to watch if you’re bored. It’s not great but it’s incredibly captivating.

Moonstruck (1987)

I told my sister I was watching a rom-com starring Cher and Nicolas Cage and she said that concept sounded AI-generated, which I totally get, but this movie was so, so wonderful. Cher, a newly engaged divorcée, and Nicolas Cage, an extremely emotional one-handed tattooed bread baker, fall into a one-crazy-weekend forbidden romance. (He also looks kind of hot here, which really disrupted my worldview). Everyone in this movie is very, very Italian. It’s warm and wacky and extremely well-written, and the romance is startlingly genuine. This is a film that really fervently believes in the magic and uniting power of the moon, which sounds a little hokey but by the end I was fully convinced. I really loved this.

Songs for summer that are just titled women’s names

White suburban dads were right about one thing and that’s the abject importance of Steely Dan. My own dad, specifically, played Peg incessantly and loudly throughout my formative years, and I now cherish it dearly. Josie is a newer-to-me but equally great favorite. These go on repeat as soon as it hits 70 degrees, but they’re appropriate for all seasons.

A romantic summer song that also makes me want to cry. I think it would be nice to play this in the car while driving through a rural area at sunset.

Duh!

Important to me mostly because of its usage in Baby Driver, a great movie largely lost to time due to how hard Ansel Elgort and Kevin Spacey suck. I can often be found mumble-singing “I met you at JC Penney, I think your name tag said Jenny” to myself.

A new jazzy little joint from RAYE about a woman named Suzanne, right in time for pride month. Amy Winehouse-esque. Fantastic.

That’s all, off to go stick my whole face in the freezer! XO!