A Culture Catchup

Thoughts on The Materialists, Sunset Boulevard, Miley Cyrus, and more.

Hi friends! I’m excited for our ice cream hang on Sunday—all the details here. Grab your ice cream first at Screen Door and then come meet us in McGolrick Park across the street. I’ll share my exact location day of! Also, keep voting in NYC, early voter turnout is super high so far so let’s keep it up! Don’t rank Cuomo and rank Lander and Mamdani 1 and 2.

It’s time for a culture catch up, inspired by Las Culturistas. I’ve gone to their Culture Awards for the past few years (this year they moved to LA) and identify as a reader and a publicist. Matt and Bowen have lots of great guests but some of my favorite episodes are just the two of them, doing a culture catch up, on the latest and greatest. Here’s the most recent one, where they talked about The Tonys.

Today, we’re catching up on a movie, a musical, a podcast, and a book. Seeing movies in theaters and actual theater is a great way to work on your attention span, which this article goes into more. I love an excuse to not look at my phone for a few hours and disappear to another world. Even if your mind wanders, at least you’re not on Instagram. And there’s good air conditioning usually.

The Movie: The Materialists

I saw this last Friday with Julia and Amy and have been thinking about it ever since. It’s much less of a romcom than the marketing suggests and talks about dating in a very pragmatic, market based way (Dakota Johnson’s character is a matchmaker). I love Celine Song’s visual style (she also did Past Lives and her husband wrote Challengers, they love trios) and the movie was beautiful. I loved this piece which went in depth about each male lead (Pedro Pascal as the rich guy and Chris Evans as the broke guy) and their apartments. Chris Evans’ gross apartment brought back some memories, for sure.

The most unbelievable part of this movie was Dakota Johnson making 80K a year!

Now, spoilers ahead.