superman honestly rocks

and Lena Dunham's return to form

Hey friends,

No post last week, I was too busy frolicking in the mountains. I managed not to have a single hot dog after vowing here to eat several of them, which is honestly embarrassing, but I did have a lobster roll and a lot of watermelon and some lovely shower beers. I also bought an alarming and undisclosable number of used books, had a lot of hot tub time, and experienced the distinct and rare pleasure of an unputdownable 700-page paperback (more on this below). It was a lovely vacation but I’m happy to be back, mostly because there’s been too much great stuff to discuss and I can’t stand it any longer. Spoiler alert: heartwarming cinema is back, baby!

Superman

Let it be known that I have never previously seen a Superman movie of any sort. I’m also usually not a big superhero movie person, with the exception of the Dark Knight trilogy because I’m not insane. But I was honestly pretty delighted by James Gunn’s take on Superman. It is a truly optimistic and goodhearted time at the movies, and that is PRETTY RARE THESE DAYS. It embraces the hokey aw-shucks DNA of the franchise in a lovable way while still being genuinely thrilling. It’s well-paced, often funny, and the performances are great. Perhaps most notably, it’s getting a lot of attention for its refreshingly unsubtle parallels to real-life politics, which are pissing off a lot of people at FOX News. An overtly liberal Superman! In these trying times! What an absolute treat.

the creative team behind this GQ shoot deserves the Nobel Prize

The movie wouldn’t work without David Corenswet at its center, who brings the perfect amount of charisma and classic good looks and endearing dorkiness to the Superman/Clark Kent role, who looks uncannily like previous Superman Henry Cavill but with much more life behind his eyes. My relationship to this gorgeous man began in 2019 when I watched the first season of The Politician, a Ryan Murphy production that’s mostly ridiculous but features a lot of great pastel outfits and viciously ambitious teens. The show technically stars Ben Platt, but Mr. Corenswet overshadows literally everyone playing River Barkley, a devastatingly beautiful and kind popular boy who takes his own life in the series’ second episode. I think they named his character River just so Ben Platt could sing “River” by Joni Mitchell at his funeral, which is absolutely fine by me. He’s easily the best part of the whole thing despite being alive for only two episodes, lovably haunting the rest of the show as a benevolent ghost/spiritual mentor. This is all to say I’ve long believed in the potential of David Corenswet, who can play a melty-eyed love interest I’d lay down my life for, as well as an evil and bitchy capitalist tornado scientist who doesn’t take off his sunglasses (Twisters). Range!

Other standouts are Nicholas Hoult (consistently one of the greatest second/third leads of all time) as Lex Luthor, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, and my beloved Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen (who is canonically, in one of the movie’s funniest recurring bits, an absolute babe magnet).

Is this a perfect movie? It is not. There are a lot of extraneous side characters who will surely be saddled with halfhearted spinoffs. The CGI leaves something to be desired. But it’s a good movie. A nice movie. And sometimes that’s all you can ask for.

Too Much

this scene is the second coming of the Before Sunrise listening booth sequence

I was thinking I wouldn’t get to cover Too Much until next week’s letter, but to no one’s surprise I watched the whole thing in about two days flat. Lena has done it again. In a story based loosely off her own real-life romance and subsequent marriage to British musician Luis Felber (with whom she created the show), Too Much follows a New Yorker named Jessica who moves to London after a devastating breakup, only to immediately fall in love with Felix, an indie punk musician she meets at a pub.

Too Much is undoubtedly a tonal departure from Dunham’s previous TV work - while Girls was known for its cringe comedy and satirical sendup of 2012 Bushwick hipster culture, Too Much is more of a quirkily romantic happily-ever-after. But despite its clear love for and inspiration taken from classic British romcoms like Bridget Jones’ Diary and Notting Hill, it doesn’t shy away from darker themes like addiction and assault in addition to the more standard thorny questions of commitment and falling in love and exes and sharing an apartment.

That Dunham can write and direct the hell out of a sex scene is hardly news. But where the sex in Girls was often all awkward kink and sharp elbows, the relationship between Felix and Jess is dreamy and sexy with the right amount of clumsiness and humanism that really make an intimate scene snap to life. As Jess and Felix, Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe have a convincing, opposites-attract sort of chemistry, though it was Sharpe that really blew me away. His performance as the gentle yet troubled love interest truly disarmed me through the screen in a way I was unprepared for. Honestly, I have not felt so emotionally affected by a fictional man in a TV show since Paul Mescal’s Connell in Normal People. I’m hoping to see Will Sharpe in a lot more things soon (he was underratedly excellent playing the tour guide in last year’s A Real Pain, and is also directing and starring in an upcoming romcom series with Ayo Edebiri!!!)

There are moments where it feels like Stalter’s broad, zany comedy and Sharpe’s more subtle performance are tonally at odds. But there are also moments where it really, really works - episode 3, a delightful homage to Before Sunrise (!) in which Jess and Felix stay up all night together, is a highlight. Stalter seems to settle into the role as the show goes on, channeling the right amount of Hannah Horvath ridiculousness while still charming the audience.

One of the show’s biggest strengths is the soundtrack, which is pretty unbelievably great. Though their tastes are different, music becomes an important part of how Felix and Jess communicate: he makes her a mixtape, she sings him a Bob Dylan song her late father loved while tucking him into bed. I added several songs from the show onto my playlist as I was watching and have been listening to them honestly nonstop since I finished.

truly incredible stuff

Does Too Much have the same generation-defining lightning-in-a-bottle-ness that Girls did? No, but that’s a tall order, and one I think is mostly irrelevant to the actual creative success of the series. I continue to love Lena’s brain and her work, and am so happy this show exists.

The Nix - Nathan Hill

I won’t even beat around the bush: this was an absolute masterpiece. The Nix begins in 2011 Chicago, where our protagonist discovers his estranged mother has been arrested for attacking a Republican presidential candidate, but it doesn’t stop (or start) there. This is a kaleidoscopic, time- and perspective-hopping novel that speaks to perennial issues of politics and media and the counterculture, and to the ways in which history is bound to repeat itself, over and over and over. It’s possible this book reads even better today than it did when it was published in 2016.

The Nix is broad in its ambitions, yet deeply intimate. There’s video game talk, there’s Nordic folklore, there’s coming-of-age romance. Frequent shifts in setting and POV can be hard to pull off, but Hill manages them effortlessly. Information is parceled out carefully. Certain perspectives are withheld and then presented to you at exactly the right moment. Time jumps are calibrated to leave you wanting more, shifting you through time and space, from brain to brain, giving glimpses into the streams of consciousness of even the smallest side characters. This is a novel interested in the impossibility of the truth, the way history and memory are distorted by the eye of the beholder. But it’s also just an entertaining, immersive and often heartbreaking time. It’s the best thing I’ve read this year by quite a good margin.

P.S.

• One really great thing about thrifting books is that sometimes you find weird little ephemera within the pages that someone once used as a bookmark. One of my personal favorites is a photo recently found in a copy of Lydia Davis stories of what appears to be a cow captured in rather ominous silhouette (see below). I also once found an actual nude photo nested in a thrift store copy of Lena Dunham’s memoir, which I think Lena herself would appreciate.

  

  A prized possession

• Before the Superman previews started, AMC showed what I’m told is a theaters-only Timothée Chalamet Cash App commercial, also featuring Izaac Wang from Dìdi. A recession indicator for sure, but it was also a surprisingly creative and charming ad, featuring Wang trying to convince his father (the owner of a small grocery store) to make the move to an online payment system while Chalamet hangs around, cashless, hoping to purchase some unconventional fruit. (This felt to me like a spiritual callback to his “I fuckin love fingerling potatoes!!” line from Don’t Look Up). After the abject awesomeness of his most recent press run, the Marty Supreme publicity tour truly cannot begin soon enough.

• Decided to continue my song of the week entries. I’m having a 1970s July that I expect will extend into August.

xoxo, Lael