Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. |
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This week: Crying with the Crawleys. Bowing down to Billy Eichner. All-in on whatever Mindy Kaling's doing. A perfect video. A terrible tweet.
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The Downton Abbey Movie Is Such a Pleasure |
I'm not a huge fan of how much I cried while watching the new Downton Abbey movie, Downton Abbey: A New Era. It's not something I love about myself. It's not like I heard myself, around 30 minutes before the credits rolled, let out some sort of involuntary honk, like a baby goat bleating, and thought, "This is the kind of person I want to be." I don't think I was always the type who would weep straight through the last act of a Downton Abbey film. Guess someone else is in his new era, too. When Downton Abbey, the TV series, premiered and became this outrageously popular international sensation, fingers flew over keyboards attempting think pieces that might explain the surprise appeal of this period soap opera.
Twelve years later, on the occasion of a second feature-length theatrical release (the first grossed nearly $200 million), its continued popularity is a little less mystifying, in that of course fans of a long-running TV series would be interested in an on-screen revisit years later. But the questions remain: Why did I find it so enjoyable? Why did I cry that much?
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There's an undeniable nostalgia element to Downton Abbey: A New Era that just feels good, an antidote to the poison of "being alive in 2022" that you can actually feel warm and refresh you as it makes its way through your veins. One might say the film uses this like a crutch, one it leans heavily on at its own risk. It's true that it might seem like the first 25 minutes of the film is just a long tracking shot touring through the mansion and stopping for little drive-by hellos to the sprawling cast of roughly 400 characters. Oh hey, Mrs. Patmore! Isobel, I forgot how much I enjoy you! An Anna and Mr. Bates sighting, my heart is full! Truly, this could have been the entire movie and I would have had a lovely time. The pleasure of something like Downton Abbey is how simple it is. Both with the series and the movies, you'll be watching and realize part-way through, wait, that's the plot? Like, it's that basic. "We're having dinner." "Someone is coming to Downton." "Sybill wore pants." Then, of course, they'll wallop you with something outrageous like a main character's surprise death, and because you had been so sedated by delightfulness, you're all the more ravaged for it. The nice thing about such a simple pleasure is that it doesn't really require too much investment. Yes, there are dozens of characters, each with their own mini plotlines that have unfolded over the decade. But you don't really have to remember them. Adorable, spritely cook Daisy apparently has a husband. I had no recollection of that, but it didn't matter. She nuzzled with a guy, I shrugged and thought, "Oh, she's married," and carried on. It's low-investment satisfaction. If I'm going to be truly honest, I forgot that the main family's last name is not, in fact, Downton. The first time "the Crawley family" was mentioned I thought to myself, "Who's that?" Did I feel stupid after? Sure. Did it matter? No! It's Downton, where everything is extremely important and yet nothing is at all. Written by Julian Fellowes, who created and wrote the series as well, the main drama—a word that has never been used more loosely than when in relation to Downton Abbey—is that the Dowager Countess has been left a villa in France by a man she hadn't seen in many, many decades. She decides that she will leave the villa in her own will to her granddaughter, Sybill, whose father, Tom Branson (Allen Leech) and she are finally getting along. There's just a matter to be settled of who in the world this man is who left a villa to grandmama and why. So, a preposterous number of family members and staff travel to the South of France to figure it out. A Downton road trip boat trip movie! Yes, the gripping narrative tension at the heart of a two-hour movie is, "What do we do about this surprise vacation property?" I was rapt. The B plot of the film (if one laid out the various storylines with the constellation of characters in letters, we'd loop through the alphabet twice) is essentially Downton stealing the plot of Singin' in the Rain. A movie studio wants to shoot its next silent film at the house and, despite many a horrified reaction to something so radical and tasteless among the snootier generation ("A moving picture? At Downton!?"), Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) makes the decision to accept because the large fee involved would allow for roof repairs and ensure a sturdy future for the estate. Having the property overrun by a film crew would be but a small price to pay—and, besides, at least her beloved papa, Hugh Bonneville's Lord Grantham, would be in France rather than blowing a gasket over the interlopers. But "mayhem" quickly ensues—on both sides of the Mediterranean!
Over in France, the Crawleys start to piece together what could be a shocking family secret involving their lovingly judgmental granny. But don't worry: It's dealt with tenderly. You'll smile warmly and coo a quiet, "Aww…"
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And over at Downton Studios, things are sent into disarray when news comes in that no one wants silent movies anymore—it's all about the talkies!—so production might have to shut down, especially since the leading lady has a harsh, squawking speaking voice that is basically unlistenable. But here, too, things are dealt with in the silly Downton way you can't help but smile at. Lady Mary herself, won over by the charms of the film's director (Hugh Dancy), steps in to provide the speaking voice of the doomed actress, who mimes the dialogue. So what about all that crying? You don't have to be the world's most elite cinephile to venture what character might, after all these years of teasing a specific event on the show and in the previous film, be at the center of the emotional climax. Even if we decided to be the world's biggest jerk and directly say what happens, some might not consider it a spoiler because it's that obvious and such a long time coming. That long history matters. The decade of investment in these characters and their relationship makes it so the tears are earned. It's a beautiful sequence. But the surprising thing about the film isn't that. It's how many highs there were to balance such profound sadness. There are gorgeous moments of victory for characters we've been long rooting for. Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), you get to smile! Joseph Molesley (Kevin Doyle), you get to smile! And the keeper of my heart, Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol), so do you, and I'm still floating because of it. There's obvious nostalgia. There's the appeal of watching something that doesn't test you, that just feels nice. Sure, this Downton Abbey sequel is less A New Era than the same one we've always known. But with the uncertainty and unpleasantness of the tumult in our current times, what a welcome relief—a joy, really—that is. |
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I Can't Stop Watching the Bros Trailer |
There is something that happens every time a new trailer for a rom-com or romantic film or TV series with gay leads comes out. I cheer. Obnoxiously. I tweet about it and write about it and sing its praises as if I'm Jennifer Holliday unhinging her jaw to belt out the final riffs of "And I am Telling You I'm Not Going." This is amazing! This is important! This deserves our praise! I would never take any of that back, especially after observing how, in recent years, each of those projects would be met with an equally passionate and impressively vocal—think, in this case, Jennifer Hudson unhinging her jaw to belt out the final riffs of "And I am Telling You I'm Not Going"—criticism. It's not just the expected backlash from conservatives and homophobes, but attacks from within the LGBT community from people who are frustrated that the characters might not represent a kind of queerness they idenitfy with, a diversity that reflects reality, or falls into traps like relying on the trauma of a coming-out narrative or being too chaste, a compromise often made to be more "palatable." Those are all valid issues to take with any project. I'm the first to admit that I tend to be overly excited in my cheerleading of these shows and movies, because I do see such value in their existence, even if they're imperfect. But the Bros trailer radicalized me. |
Billy Eichner's historic film, the first gay rom-com from a major studio, left me slack-jawed. It's not just that it's raunchy and frank about what gay dating life is like for a certain kind of man, but about the sex aspect as well. It's not just that it stars actual out gay actors; in fact, the entire principal cast, even those who are playing heterosexual characters, are actors who identify as LGBT. It's not just that the word "butt-fucked" is casually tossed off in a movie trailer. It's the shrewd meta deconstruction of everything I had been describing before that seems to drive the narrative. Eichner's character is asked to pen a movie script about two gay men falling in love, but is asked to make it, as he surmises, "something a straight guy might like." It's a film that is the product of years of bottled-up exasperation. Even if I probably won't be able to shake my insistence on screaming from the rafters how great any piece of gay content is, even if it might actually be a prime example of what Bros is exposing, I feel awake to it now. Or maybe this is just me doing the same thing again: Being overly effusive over a gay rom-com that seems like it could be exciting. Whatever. At the very least, it's a good trailer, y'all. Watch it here. |
What in the World Is Going on With Mindy Kaling's Velma? |
It is "upfronts" week, which in the TV industry means it's the time when networks and streamers make decisions about renewals and cancellations, and make splashy presentations to advertisers attempting to sell the new shows they're announcing. That's why there was a pile-up of news surrounding the cancellation of, well, just about everything on The CW and the announcement of a final season of Riverdale. It's also why there seemed to be an avalanche of press releases touting new projects that are being greenlit, like a CBS TV adaptation of True Lies, yet another Yellowstone spinoff (starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren?!?), and whatever in God's name this new Velma animated series is from Mindy Kaling, which through one photo alone has already become my favorite TV show of all time. The news itself is exciting, but not life-changing. Kaling, whose recent projects Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls are so freaking good, is going to executive produce and star as the voice of Velma in a spinoff animated series of the Scooby-Doo cartoons for HBO Max.
I'm into it! Then I saw the photo of Kaling presenting the series at upfronts, which included a massive still of a scene in which cartoon Velma walks in on what appears to be a woman with the top of her head chopped off bleeding out on the floor of a locker room while naked women gawk from behind her, soap bubbles in all the right places for (cartoon) modesty.
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"What in the world?" is a phrase that was crafted specifically for this. I haven't the slightest idea what's going on, but it's entirely unexpected and I cannot wait. |
The Most Delightful Thing You Will Ever Watch |
By some miracle—a blessing from God in return for a good deed I hadn't even known I'd committed—a video of Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey doing the final dance from Dirty Dancing was tweeted into my timeline this week. Instead of "(I've Had) The Time of My Life," the music is replaced with the theme song from The Muppet Show. Watch it here. |
I know we're not supposed to like Twitter anymore. While I was writing this newsletter, even more upsetting Elon Musk news broke. But…and hear me out…what if a site where a video in which the final dance from Dirty Dancing is posted but it's The Muppet Show theme song instead is actually the greatest place on earth and we should make sure it lasts forever? |
The Week's Most Incomprehensible News |
Shortly after writing that endorsement, I read a tweet that said, "Tom Cruise introduced a series of performances at the finale of a horse show that kicked off celebrations to mark the platinum jubilee celebrations of Britain's Queen Elizabeth," and changed my mind. |
I could have the combined brain trust of NASA, NATO, and every Nobel winner of the last 20 years, and I still wouldn't be able to comprehend or make sense of that tweet. Burn it all down. Not worth it. |
Downton Abbey: A New Era: A delightful time. Don't overthink it. (Fri. in theaters) Mexican Pizza: The Musical: The Dolly Parton Taco Bell Mexican Pizza TikTok musical is real. Can someone teach me how to use TikTok? (Thurs. on TikTok) RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars: Everyone's a winner! No really, that's the conceit—it's all past winners. (Fri. on Paramount+) Men: Nothing scarier than men. (Fri. in theaters) |
2000 Mules: D*n*sh D'S**z*'s new movie and let's not give it attention. (Fri. in theaters) |
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