Hello Partygoers, 

Another week begins, hurtling us toward the day our government honors us for our labor. It’s nice that we get the one day, and then otherwise the current government (and governments prior to it) work tirelessly and ruthlessly to dismantle the unionization that the holiday was established to commemorate. But I’m getting ahead of myself; Labor Day isn’t for a few weeks. 

Before then, we have to finish the summer, getting a few more uses out of our Quince European linen shorts (they are not a sponsor of this newsletter, but if they wanted to be they could!), taking a last stroll or two down to the junebug-buzzing crick where Billy finally kissed us, years ago. I’ve been clenched by a little end-of-summer melancholy for the past few days, but that’s mostly because I’ve been listening to the new Phoebe Bridgers album, yet another of her poetic, technically assured, beautifully sung ruminations on love and time and place. Man is she good, but man does her music maybe too often push me past wistful and into outright sad. I guess it’s a good kind of sad, though. The sort that feels quite fitting as the sun dips below the horizon earlier and earlier with each passing day. Sigh. 

I went to a friend’s birthday party on Sunday night, walking to DUMBO in a light drizzle, listening to Bridgers murmur (in her elegant way) about Bo Burnham and the Liberty Tree Mall and other odd things. Then I got to DUMBO and it was full of the usual madness: throngs of tourists all posing for the same photo, on the cobbled street that has a view of the Manhattan Bridge and, past that, the Empire State Building. It’s become one of the most photographed places in the city, which the locals hate, and I I understand why. The neighborhood is an utter zoo on the weekends, clogged with people rotely going through the motions demanded of them by the gods of Instagram. That kinda broke my Bridgers-y mood. Which was, actually, a little bit of a relief. I didn’t want to walk into a birthday party in a pensive funk, even if the birthday boy is like a decade younger than me and that made me feel impossibly old. 

A quiet few days await us, I’m afraid, at least on the film and TV front. Later on this week, I’ll have a writeup of a really good horror movie (though, it’s not that scary) called It Ends, a film that I have seen twice and have wept at both times. Yep, crying at the end of a horror picture! What a thing. I’ll explain why that movie makes me sob in a few days. Today, we’ve got some ephemera to discuss: thoughts on a new streaming show and a new streaming movie, and then we must address the sad news that came out on Sunday. Let’s get into it. 

So, I've made an audience survey. I know that might sound a little ~corporate~, but I will actually read your responses, and they will influence what’s to come in Premiere Party’s future. Please give me your input! The survey takes just three minutes, but will earn you my gratitude until the end of time. Seems like a fair trade to me.

Even though I wasn’t that interested in the show, I decided to watch the premiere episode of Lanterns anyway, because it was the big TV release of the weekend and I guess it’s my job to watch such things. It’s sort of a spinoff of James Gunn’s Superman movie, although it is very different in tone and texture than that bright, gregarious film. The show is instead a murkier thing, a small-town detective drama in which the suspects are aliens. Kyle Chandler plays a grizzled old Green Lantern, tasked with training a new recruit, played by Aaron Pierre. The two men are wary of each other, but are duty bound to be a mentor-mentee duo. A new case—a mass shooting, sort of—brings them to rural Nebraska, where they meet the local sheriff, played by Kelly Macdonald, and the shadowy richest-guy-in-town, played by Garret Dillahunt. 

It’s a novel setting for a superhero story—though, I guess, a lot of the first Thor movie took place in a dusty corner of New Mexico. It’s more the rural cowboy murder mystery aspect that feels original, and it’s a milieu in which Chandler works quite well. It’s a little strange hearing a drunken, depressed Coach Taylor talk about magic rings and intergalactic defense forces and whatnot, but for the most part the show keeps things impressively grounded. Pierre has a complementary magnetism; his quietness and stillness smartly offset Chandler’s more voluble hang-dog comedy. 

The performance I’m most invested in, though, is Macdonald’s. She does a good enough job of masking her Scottish burr behind a sorta twangy accent, and she plays her character—who is deeply skeptical of the whole Green Lantern thing—with a weary naturalness that helps further root the show (which, again, is about aliens) in the realm of the real. They’re quite different roles, but her work here reminds me a little of her turn in No Country for Old Men. I found myself imagining that maybe her character in NCFOM didn’t get killed by Javier Bardem in the end, and instead she moved to Nebraska and became a sheriff. That would be a happy enough outcome. 

Maybe bigger things are in store for Macdonald’s character, but for now I like her function as a lo-fi foil for the boys and their super powers. I’m also intrigued by the mystery established in the pilot; I won’t spoil the big question of the series, but the ending of the first episode is surprising enough to make me eager for next Sunday. Goddamnit, this is how they get you, isn’t it? All of a sudden I’m watching yet another fucking superhero show! I’m sure things will go off the rails eventually, because that’s what happens with these programs, but for now I am mildly invested. Oh well. I guess I like small-town mysteries enough that I can get over the comic book stuff. 

Lanterns arrives at a good time, as I’ve grown tired of the other sci-fi small-town mystery I’ve been watching, From. I began that series with some excitement. But as season two has dragged into season three, the writing (and, honestly, acting) on the show has gotten really bad. Boring and repetitive arguments shouted blandly, twists that get un-twisted too easily, etc. Fans have insisted to me that the show really gets cooking toward the end of season three, but I don’t know if I have the patience to stick it out. I mean, I already have lost most patience: I’ve started fast forwarding through the tedious interpersonal melodrama so I can get to the mythology parts. That’s a bad sign. I am probably only a few weeks away from saying fuck it and spoiling myself by skimming a few recaps. Lanterns might eventually suffer the same fate as From, but for now I am cautiously optimistic. Stupid me, probably.

Adam Sandler has had such a fruitful relationship with Netflix—he’s starred in and/or produced a number of popular comedies for the streamer (Murder Mystery, Hubie Halloween, Emilia Pérez [okay not that one])—that he can now use the platform to get his kids started in the industry. He and his wife and his two daughters all starred in the winsome family movie You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. Then his daughter Sadie got her own vehicle, Roommates. And now her sister Sunny has Don’t Say Good Luck, a drama about a high school girl who gets cast as the lead in the musical Waitress just as her mother’s cancer comes roaring back. 

So, it’s a very nepotistic thing happening between the Sandlers and Netflix, but the movies that have sprung from that favor-trading have actually been pretty respectable, Don’t Say Good Luck included. Julia Hart was hired to direct the movie, which was a smart choice. Hart knows the milieu of high school performance quite well, having directed the early Timothée Chalamet launchpad Miss Stevens. (Which you should watch, if you haven’t yet seen it. It’s wild to behold Chalamet, playing a brilliant young actor, and see the unignorable signs of his impending stardom.) Hart did some lesser YA (and one bad grownup movie starring Rachel Brosnahan) after that, but Don’t Say Good Luck is something of a return to form. The film doesn’t hold together quite as well as Miss Stevens, but it has plenty of affecting moments. 

What the movie does most admirably is keep things at a reasonable scale. There are no histrionics, no carefully engineered misunderstandings leading to canned conflict. A romantic plot plays out as it might in real life, without outsized complications. Melanie Lynskey, as the ailing mom, finds credible ways to depict a woman trying to shield her family from an approaching tragedy. Sunny Sandler is maybe not the next Sarah Bernhardt, but her performance is sweet. It’s nice to watch a movie about a good kid trying to be, well, good. 

And of course I am a sucker for anything involving high school theater, auditions and rehearsals and the rest. Don’t Say Good Luck breezes through it all a bit too quickly for my taste, but one at least gets a sense of the heady nerves and anticipation of putting on a show. This movie maybe did lead me back down the path of watching video after video of various singers covering “She Used to Be Mine,” the big 11 o’clock number from Waitress, but there are worse ways to spend an afternoon. And there are worse things you could watch with your tween- or teenage kid than Don’t Say Good Luck. It’s about death, so fair warning about that, but it’s mostly a kindhearted story about a kid learning the tricky dance of balancing family duty with the beginnings of one’s own personal life. All from producer Adam Sandler! Who woulda thought. 

How horrible to read that Hayden Panettiere has died at the bogglingly young age of 36, after what appeared, from a distance, to be a turbulent few years. We don’t really know how she died, so I won’t speculate on that. And I could go on a rant about how maybe we really shouldn’t be putting children in movies and TV shows (Panettiere first appeared on screen as an infant), but maybe that would be hypocritical given that I just praised a movie Adam Sandler gave to his daughter as a present. 

So instead I’ll just say that when Panettiere popped, she really popped. I’m thinking primarily of her fan-favorite turn in Scream 4, as the wonderfully coiffed Kirby Reed, the sardonic best friend of the film’s protagonist (who is also the villain, it turns out). Panettiere’s presence in that movie is utterly electric; she’s intimidatingly cool but also at least a little relatable. She was brought back for Scream VI, which didn’t work quite as well, but the Kirby of Scream 4 will live on forever as one of the great turns in modern horror movies. 

There is also her work on Nashville and Heroes to be appreciated. One gets the sad sense that had Panettiere not been waylaid by personal woes, more interesting roles would have come her way eventually. But I’m grateful that we have what we have, reminders of Panettiere’s savvy appeal, of the light she gave off when she was doing what I hope, at least sometimes, she loved to do.

I don’t want to end on that note, so here is Broadway hottie Jeremy Jordan singing “She Used to Be Mine” at Miscast in 2018. Which, to not at all humbly brag, I witnessed in person.

Oh, and while we’re talking about theater, did you hear about the 10 Things I Hate About You musical, with a score by Carly Rae Jepsen and a book by Lena Dunham? Well, it’s a thing, and it’s arriving in New York next year.

Okay, that’s it. See you back here on Wednesday.