No Good Deed, A Complete Unknown, and Babygirl.
Weeks 215 and 216.
Hello hello! Happy New Year! Lot’s to discuss this week as I spent the last two weeks being a vegetable on my couch. Here’s a recap of the last two weeks:
Things I Read
Books
If you’re looking for a book to read, try this list of contemporary romance recs, this list of other fiction recs, or this list of non-fiction recs. I also track everything I read on Goodreads.
Lovelight Farms by B.K. Borison: Every December I read a Christmas romance novel and this year I picked this one. This is about Stella, a woman who owns a Christmas tree farm (lol). She enters an online contest to try to win money for the farm, and in the application she lies and says that she owns the farm with her boyfriend. So then obviously she has to ask her best friend, Luka, to pretend to be her boyfriend, and then you’ll never guess what happens. I liked this fine enough, but the whole thing is from Stella’s POV and she is DUMB. A lot of Christmas romance novels are too cheesy and this one was not. This is the first in a series and I’ve heard the rest are better so I will keep going.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan: I’ve wanted to read a Claire Keegan novel for a while, and this one is only around 100 pages, takes place at Christmastime, and the movie adaptation just came out, so I went for it. This is really good. It’s a short story about a man who is a coal merchant in a small Irish town in the 1980s. One morning he makes a delivery to a convent and discovers something that he then spends the rest of the story confronting. This is beautifully written and it does so much in so few pages. I really liked it and definitely want to read more of Claire Keegan’s writing.
Articles
Who Can You Kill?: Really liked this essay by Alex Peter, who I’ve followed online in various places for years and used to be a public defender in New York. I like to follow people who also work in public defense because it makes me feel less crazy about it all. This essay is about Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely and Luigi Mangione, and who is allowed to kill people and how. It’s also about how we as a society hate poor people. “Our society teaches us to hate the poor. We learn that to be rich is a virtue and to be poor is a sign of great sin. It is a personal failure. We collectively fail to recognize that the spectacular wealth of a small group of people in a society with such rampant poverty is the real failure, and it is a failure on all of our accounts.”
Things I Watched
TV
If you’re looking for a show to watch, try this list.
Shrinking (AppleTV+): I thought the first season of this show was just fine, but I LOVED the second one so, so much. This is about several people who all work at the same therapy practice and their intertwined family lives. The second season of this show was just so good. I’m so invested in these characters, it’s funny and heartwarming and sad and endearing without being too cheesy. These people are all dealing with a lot of heavy stuff but this show is not at all depressing. The perfect balance. Brett Goldstein (of Roy Kent fame) showed up this season and I thought he was so amazing and I really loved his whole story line. This was just GOOD. I cried a lot. I hope they make more! AppleTV+ is free for everyone all weekend so now is the perfect time to get into this.
No Good Deed (Netflix): I was very excited about this because it has an incredible cast and was made by the same woman who made Dead to Me, a show I loved. Everyone in this is really good and there are parts of it that I liked, but overall I’m netting out pretty medium on this. This story centers around a couple who has put their house on the market, and then also follows a few of the couples interested in buying it. I think it tried to do too much in too few episodes, so it felt very rushed to me. The vibes are very similar to Dead to Me, so if you liked that you might like this too, but I didn’t think it was nearly as good.
Movies
Carry-On (Netflix): This is an extremely mid airport thriller, about a TSA agent who gets caught up in a bad guy scheme to get something bad onto an airplane. This is well paced but its also very dumb. The best part is Jason Bateman playing a Bad Guy. Very skippable in my opinion.
Juror #2 (Max): Was very excited about this because it’s directed by Clint Eastwood and has an incredible cast, and I do love a courtroom drama, but again I’m netting out medium here! This is about a man who gets chosen to be on a jury, and then during the trial he realizes that he might actually be the one who did the crime. I love this premise but I thought this really had pacing issues, it felt super long and the big reveals were not placed well within the story. And then the ending was unsatisfying, ugh. The main guy is played by Nicholas Hoult who I do really like (and has also been in SO many movies this year, the man is booked and busy) and Toni Collette is also here which is never anything but good. In the end I wished this was better than it was, though.
A Complete Unknown (theaters): My family saw Wicked and this in theaters over the holiday break, and I’ll let you guess which one my dad liked more (Scott’s Wicked review: “I had no business seeing that movie”). This is a Bob Dylan biopic that covers the first five years of his career, and is on track to be Timothe Chalamet’s second Oscar nom (and honestly, maybe his win). I liked that this only covered a short amount of time rather than his whole life, and I mostly liked this, but I do think it has some of the same problems that most biopics about men have. I would watch a whole movie about Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro who was SO good), and I would love to know more about the real woman that Elle Fanning’s character was based on. But whatever, we are watching a MAN movie, a movie about DUDES, so I guess I got what I signed up for. I think Timmy is very, very good in this and I basically knew nothing about Bob Dylan so this was interesting enough. Perfect Dad movie.
Babygirl (theaters): This is the most “Not For Everyone” movie ever but I (mostly) liked it! Nicole Kidman stars as a CEO of a tech company who strikes up an affair with an intern (Harris Dickinson…hot!) and their relationship explores BDSM (emphasis on the D/s part). This was written and directly by Halina Reijn, who also made Bodies Bodies Bodies last year, and I’m pretty on board for whatever she does next. I didn’t think this was a perfect movie but I was locked in the whole time. My biggest complaint is that a lot of the things that move the plot forward happen off screen and we just hear about them after, and I felt like I was missing so many important moments! This has so many good needle drops and so many moments that had me laughing/gasping/jaw on the floor. I never say this but this is maybe a movie you want to watch at home instead of in the theater. It genuinely rules that Nicole Kidman is still doing stuff like this decades into her career. She’s so good.
Things I Bought
You can read about my full skincare routine and favorite products here. If you need a sunscreen recommendation, try this list.
Avene Cicalfate+ Restorative Protective Cream: MVP of winter!! I spent 10 days in Denver and my skin really felt it, I came home SO DRY. Two nights of slathering this all over my face before bed and I’m back to normal. I bought this in Paris where its way, way cheaper but when I run out I’m buying more at full price here. I need it.
One Last Thing…
I wrote up all my favorite things from this year!
That’s it for me! I hope you all had a good holiday break.
TTYL,
Emily