Hello Party folks,

I hope you enjoyed whatever it is you did this weekend. Did you go swimming in the ocean? Did you finally drive your car to the top of Mount Washington so you could get that bumper sticker? (They still make those bumper stickers, right?) Did you pick up your kid from extended-session summer camp and notice that they have a new swagger about them, and now you’re wondering if they maybe made out with someone the night of the talent show, as is tradition? Or maybe you did what I did, which was mostly sit around like a lump and watch screeners of a pretty kooky Netflix competition show that I’m not allowed to talk about yet. But stay tuned! Because next month I will have a few things to say about a pretty kooky Netflix competition show. 

If you’re Spider-Man, you spent your weekend beating your own record. Meaning, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has now surpassed Spider-Man: No Way Home to become the third-highest grossing movie in North America, ever. Of all time! I mean, if you adjust for inflation, I think Gone with the Wind has made like $9 billion or something, but in terms of the literal number, Brand New Day has just achieved third place, behind only Avengers: Endgame and Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. Worldwide, Brand New Day sits at number six, having already grossed over $2 billion and sailing past the Back the Blue police documentary The Force Awakens. It might eventually even beat Titanic, though I’m sure James Cameron will (rightly) point out that he was dealing with 1998 bucks, not today money.

This all probably means that we’re gonna get more Tom Holland Spider-Man movies. Spider-Man: Growing Back, about a 30-something Peter Parker traveling to Istanbul to tend to a few cosmetic issues. Spider-Man: No Plans, about Peter and MJ realizing they’ve kind of let most of their friendships atrophy as they’ve approached 40. And then finally Spider-Man: Brand New Place, about Peter renting an apartment across the river during a trial separation. Really, the possibilities are endless. 

On the matter of variation, we’ll be doing things a bit differently here this week. My recommendations column will arrive on Wednesday, rather than Friday, as on Thursday evening I am climbing aboard an aerojet bound for Italia and want to continue my blockbuster franchise in which I review what I watched on the plane. Isn’t that exciting? After that, the next couple weeks will be devoted to covering festival matters, but if something really pertinent is happening back in regular theaters or on regular TVs, I will try to attend to that as well. But I do hope you’ll enjoy the dispatches from Venice and Toronto, and if any of you happen to be at those events and see me slouching toward a screening room at any point, fire your pistol into the air and call my name and I’ll come over and say hello. There’s no reason the party has to stay online. Let’s do it IRL! 

Also, I would love to run another mailbag post as the fall season kicks into gear, so please send me questions! [email protected]. Your questions don’t have to be about fall stuff, necessarily, but that could be a useful focus as August tips into September and then before we know it it’s Oscar nominations time. 

Oh! And, there’s one other small bit of correspondence I ask of you…

What I don't know

The newsletter reader is an inscrutable creature. Where do you come from? Why are you here? What would make you stay with me forever and ever? Please let me know in survey form, by clicking the link below. 

All right, let’s get into some tidbits. 

Did you hear that Meghan Markle—aka Meghan, Duchess of Sussex—is moving back to the UK with her layabout husband, Harry, and that she kind of wants to get back into acting? Or, not “kind of,” but is actually really pursuing it, to the point that she was reported to be in late-stage talks to appear in season three of Netflix’s The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s hit action show starring the hideous Theo James. But over the weekend, celebrity editor Tina Brown, who once did this, claimed that the pushback in the UK was so fierce that Netflix decided to scuttle the idea.

Who knows how much of that is real, but if it is, it’s certainly a hindrance for Markle’s plans to return to the career she abandoned in order to marry into a family of welfare queens. And it’s a disappointment for those of us who suddenly got excited at the idea of an actual Duchess appearing in one of Ritchie’s increasingly homoerotic shoot-‘em-up escapades. Her presence would have only added to his universe’s campy sensibility, like John Waters casting Patty Hearst in his movies. 

I mean, I don’t want to give Guy Ritchie too much credit on that front. He’s not out there making a dragged up Hugh Grant eat dog shit or anything. But in his more comedic-touch movies, there has at least been an uptick in gay innuendo, usually delivered by actors—Alan Ritchson, Henry Cavill, etc.—who might have once been in Finland and met a guy named Tom. It’s to the point that I wonder if maybe Ritchie has something he wants to tell us, though perhaps marrying Madonna already told us everything. 

It could have been something to see Meghan Markle be a part of that, though I don’t want to give her too much credit there either. She’s not exactly a funny person, as far as I’m aware, and doesn’t seem to be terribly interesting in any other ways. What she suffered at the hands of her inbred in-laws—to say nothing of a portion of the British media and citizenry—was terrible, and maybe that’s enough to make her a compelling figure. But she’s not achieved camp icon status, certainly. Maybe some dumb role on The Gentlemen could have begun that process, though: launching her into a new, more playful phase of her celebrity. And now it’s all ruined, allegedly.

Oh well, I’m sure other offers will come. They’d have to, right? There must be some producer or network out there brash and cynical enough to want the flurry of attention that Markle would bring to a project. That’s a lot of earned media right there: she and her shiftless, dilettante husband striding down red carpets, long lens photos of Meghan on set, etc. And think of the junket stuff! The Duchess of Sussex bombing a Vanity Fair lie detector test, or barfing up hot wings onto Keke Palmer’s maybe-boyfriend’s head. What a dream. For a certain kind of show, anyway. 

However it shakes out, I wish Meghan well on her journey back to TV. I mean, I guess she already did have that Netflix lifestyle show that everyone ruthlessly mocked. But, like, acting stuff. That’s what I wish her well about. Basically what I’m saying is, wouldn’t it be dumb if Mike White didn’t cast her in season five of The White Lotus?

Meanwhile, other reports are suggesting that Meghan was actually nowhere near a deal to appear on The Gentlemen, but that Ritchie is now leveraging all this attention to get the show actually renewed for a third season. (What did I say about earned media??) And if that’s the case, then hasn’t Meghan earned a role on the show? It’s practically her series now! If we can’t see the Duchess of Sussex fire a gun at town freak Theo James, then what is Netflix even offering us at this point?

Speaking of Netflix, the streamer has a new three-part true crime docuseries premiering on August 26, a grim and frustrating look at a toxic marriage called Death of the Pastor’s Wife. It chronicles the sad fate of Mica Miller, who died under shadowy circumstances (still considered a suicide) after years of alleged abuse from her husband, a supposedly charismatic Christian preacher who tried to be the hip, with-it type of religious guy. He instead comes across as an utter creep, and quite possibly a psychopath. 

So it’s dark viewing, but also morbidly engaging, laying out in detail how a bright and ambitious person like Miller could be subsumed by someone like her husband (who met her when she was a teenager, of course) and, in a way, by the broader patriarchal project of the Christian church. Miller’s story has its unique facets, but much of it reflects what I’m sure many women have experienced in these environments, which project love and warmth and welcoming but of course are largely built upon an insatiable appetite for control, dogma used to endorse or explain away the same old base, cruel, selfish stuff men have been doing to women since time immemorial. It’s an effective portrait of a disgusting tradition, basically. 

One must approach true crime, perhaps especially Netflix true crime, with a healthy skepticism. Not always about the facts of the case, but certainly about the quality of the storytelling. There’s a wide range of that on Netflix, from the slapdash and lurid to the almost elegant. The latter stuff is rarer these days, but Death of the Pastor’s Wife falls closer to that end of the spectrum. It’s sensitive where it counts (particularly gnarly details about the marriage are referred to but not completely delineated in sensational fashion) and is rather unflinching in its critique of this kind of appalling hypocrisy. 

Though, an even more inquisitive series might have zoomed out to give us a picture of where the Miller story stands in the broader right-wing Christian ecosystem. That might have been more of an HBO thing, though. That network does things a bit better. Hell, they produced the true crime series that maybe should have put the kibosh on this whole recent obsession: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, a moving and harrowing story not just of the hunt for a murderer, but of the ruin it brought to one of the hunters. 

Still, Death of the Pastor’s Wife is not trash, so if you simply need to scratch the true crime itch (as I did when I decided to watch the screeners), you could absolutely do worse. It is an infuriating sit, though, and I did not finish the series feeling any sort of satisfaction about where the case stands now. Maybe the producers could have waited until a few pertinent court cases were concluded. But, it’s possible Netflix figures they can do a followup at some point, if this original run of episodes is a hit and interest remains piqued. Perhaps therein lies the cynicism.

At long last (?) we have a trailer for Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut Club Kid, the movie everyone was dreading at Cannes but that turned out to be surprisingly (annoyingly?) good. It is indeed a sweet, thoughtful, well-put-together film, a riff on a very familiar format—a reckless person must learn and grow after being saddled with a kid—that finds ways to distinguish itself with both nuance and gregarious energy. 

That said, I don’t think this is a very good trailer. For one, my Hollywood Reporter review is NOT quoted, which is absolutely outrageous. For two, the trailer jumps too quickly into Firstman’s character having a child. Shouldn’t the setup be similar to that of the actual film, which begins with a hedonistic party vibe before that vibe is rudely (or blessedly) interrupted by the arrival of the kid of the film’s title? I assumed that’s how the trailer would go, but no. The boy is introduced right away, sort of spoiling the surprise. 

I also think that whoever cut this together only used moments when Firstman’s performance appears grating. Or, maybe all of it seems grating out of context. Whatever the case, the trailer doesn’t really indicate the disarming warmth of Firstman’s work in the film. To be clear, he’s plenty aggravating in the movie. But that’s intentional, and eventually he softens into someone we might actually want to spend time with. This trailer, though, makes him seem irksome throughout. Which I’m not sure is a great selling point. 

Many in my circle are bullish on this film’s awards chances, though I remain skeptical—perhaps more so now that this trailer has dropped. I think there’s a sizable chance that Firstman’s whole deal alienates too many potential voters, those who prove allergic to the performer’s acquired-taste energy. I was won eventually over, so it’s possible that plenty of other viewers will be, too. But I have a hard time imagining Firstman sustaining an entire campaign without turning off a critical mass of voting-body members along the way.

Maybe that’s overly pessimistic, but there is evidence-based reason to doubt that unapologetically gay subject matter—and personality—will find much traction with mainstream awards. Fucking Carol didn’t even get a best picture nomination, but we expect this to somehow? Yes, times have changed in the last 11 years, and the Academy has been meaningfully altered. But I still don’t see this movie getting that far. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, though. 

Okay, that’s it. I’ll see you back here on Wednesday with a writeup of Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars and probably a few other things. Until then!