Kaiju trauma 🍿 & what if there was a weird guy? [Like You Know Whatever]

Hi friends!

How’s it going? How has 2024 been for you so far? I can’t really complain. On the day this goes out, I will be flying out to New York City to attend a lovely winter wedding in Brooklyn and catch up with some friends. I’ll be staying with some buds who have a wiggly little pug puppy (!!), so obviously, I’m very excited about that. I’m also very excited for this wedding. It’s for a couple who are both award-winning producers, so you know shit’s going to be tight. The bride has been a dear friend of mine since we were both in the same film program in college, and her sense of style is playful, colorful, and impeccable, so I can’t wait to see what she wears! They are both immensely talented and cool people, and I’m very happy for them. Also? They shared a Pinterest board of inspiration for wedding guest outfits, and wow, do I wish more people would do that! You know I made sure to have a really good outfit for this wedding!

The beginning of this year has been pretty productive so far. We called maintenance to come fix something in one of our bathrooms that has literally been broken since we moved in. We just got used to it and learned to work around it and that’s just the way it was. Well, maintenance finally came out and took a look at it, and they fixed the problem in less than 10 minutes. Not to get all metaphorical on you, but it makes me consider what else in my life I’ve gotten used to that could be fixed with about 10 minutes of effort.

Creatively, I have been feeling like I want to start a new project, even though there are a couple of other ones I’d like to finish first. Isn’t that always the way, though? The brainstorming stage at the beginning of a project is my favorite part, and what I most imagined being a writer would look like: staring out the window, dreaming up a story to tell. Jazz plays on the record player while steam drifts from my mug of black coffee (pourover, of course). A bird lands on a branch outside, the fluttering of its wings sparking a new wave of inspiration, and I type furiously, the keys of my vintage typewriter making a satisfying, mechanical clackety-clack! I sit back and admire my work. I have done it: I have written the Great American Screenplay.

But the truth is that I don’t even own a single jazz record. I almost always write on my smudgey laptop now, hunched over, in old sweatpants and no bra, sometimes with my cat happily drooling in my lap. It’s never quite as picturesque as my fantasies.

Before we get into some things, let’s address the shitty, Nazi-platforming elephant in the room: Substack. I sure do NOT love their hands-off content moderation strategy, my dudes!!! I have also had issues with some other clunky and limiting things on the backend. I moved to Substack in March of 2022 from TinyLetter (which is being shut down; way to buy that one out just to run it into the ground, Mailchimp!), so I wasn’t really looking to hop to another platform so soon, but I also don’t want to feel icky and gross about the platform hosting my writing. That’s not my style (hence, why I am no longer on Twitter/X/Muskville, USA).

So, for the time being, I am actively shopping for a new newsletter platform, and I have paused billing on paid subscriptions until I can figure out what the fuck is going on. Here’s what I can promise you:

• If/when I move to a new platform, you will not have to do anything in order to stay subscribed. I’ll just import my subscriber list and keep on keepin’ on.

• While billing is paused, no one will be charged, and no annual paid subscriptions will be renewed.

• Likewise, while billing is paused, all new content will be free (yay!).

• If there are any major changes to paid subscriptions (like, say you just paid for a year’s premium subscription in December and I decide to move to a platform that doesn’t do paywalled content), I will refund any difference, prorated, to the appropriate parties, including the percentage Substack took.

Thank you for bearing with me during this period of uncertainty and, frankly, ickiness. This newsletter is going to hit 10 years (!!) of existence in some form or another in May, and I do not want to go into our tenth year together with these kinds of questions lingering. Nor do I want to jump over to another platform just to have a bunch of issues with that one pop up five minutes later. Honestly, I wish I didn’t NEED a platform at all in order to send out this newsletter, but there are too many of you, and it would break my Gmail, which is ultimately a wonderful problem to have. ❤️ Thank you again for sticking around.

If you’re a Substack writer interested in reading more about this subject, Caitlin Kunkel recently shared some thoughts on Substack and the issues with their supposed “best practices” in her newsletter Input/Output that I thought were great, very thought-provoking. I also liked this post from Tom Pendergast that Caitlin shared about issues with Substack’s paid subscription model. And way back in April, Adam Cecil wrote about why a Substack exit strategy is a good idea to have in his newsletter Night Water. (All of these newsletters are currently hosted on Substack.)

Alright, now let’s get into some things:

- Last weekend, my husband Ross and I went to see the Luna Luna art exhibition in downtown Los Angeles. Luna Luna is an “art amusement park” that was first created by Austrian artist André Heller and originally exhibited in Hamburg, Germany in the summer of 1987. It featured carnival rides and installations from artists like David Hockney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, and even Salvador Dalí (one of his final works before he died). However, after the summer of 1987, it was all disassembled and confined to a bunch of shipping containers which were lost over time and never exhibited again… until now!

I really enjoyed this exhibition, because it combined several things I love: pop art, whimsy, large scale installations, and the rescue of something previously thought lost to history. I mean, who doesn’t want to see a ferris wheel made by Jean-Michel Basquiat, or a Keith Haring carousel? Some of the installations also had original music composed by people like Miles Davis and Philip Glass. One major thing to note is that sadly, you cannot ride the rides there, even though people could ride them at the original park. I am totally in favor of preserving these pieces as much as possible, but sometimes it was a bummer to feel like we didn’t get the full experience that visitors got in 1987. For example, Roy Lichtenstein created a “hall of mirrors” that no one was allowed to walk through, we could only look at it from the outside. That was a disappointment, because it felt like we didn’t get the full impact of that piece. But overall, it was a very cool place to visit.

If you want to go, they just added tickets extending the exhibition through the first weekend in March, but I have no idea if it will be extended beyond that, so act quickly! You can get tickets on their website here.

- Cooking! I made a strata for New Year’s Day with pancetta, mushrooms, and gruyere based on this recipe, and it was so nice on America’s Biggest Hangover Day to just wake up, pop something in the oven, and have a delicious hot, cheesy, carby breakfast 45 minutes later. The hardest part was waiting for it to be done! Later that week, I also made rigatoni with Claire Saffitz’s (of Bon Appetit) easy vodka sauce recipe, and damn, what a great recipe! It’s the kind of dish that you make once and then don’t even need the recipe anymore, it’s so intuitive. I threw in some chopped up chicken breast that I’d made in the air fryer for some protein. I’m trying to use my air fryer more this year. I’m pretty sure I didn’t use it once all last year, and it’s too big of an appliance to sit neglected on the shelf.

Then, last Sunday, I made panang curry, which is probably my household’s go-to Thai curry order. We used to live in Thai Town and have access to the most incredible Thai food in L.A., but in our new neighborhood, we have yet to find a satisfactory replacement. That recipe was actually very easy to make, because it made use of a store-bought curry paste (I got mine on Amazon—warning: it’s a bit spicy). The only change I made was using chicken thighs instead of breasts, because I think they hold up better in braises and stews. I served the curry over white rice made in our rice cooker and the whole thing was surprisingly quick and easy, which is great, because now I have a ton of panang curry paste in my fridge that I’ll have to use up by making this a lot!

And then, on Wednesday, I made the Serious Eats version of pasta e ceci, or pasta and chickpeas. I wanted to try this because I saw someone refer to it on another recipe as “double carbs,” a rare phenomenon in cooking that I am always down for (potato and egg subs, here’s lookin’ at you, kid). This is the ultimate cheap, vegetarian, clean-out-your-refrigerator meal, because it mostly uses pantry staples, and you can easily throw in some greens you have laying around, some canned tomatoes, or maybe even some sausage from your freezer. It’s super tasty and easy, and I can’t help but think it would be a terrific winter hangover cure: pasta, olive oil, cheese, protein, a salty broth… am I way off base here? Someone try it and let me know, please!

- This reel by Elaine Carroll (of Very Mary-Kate) so perfectly captures what it feels like to try to make comedy while the world is on fire, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

- I recently became the last pop culture writer on Earth to join the movie review site Letterboxd! You can follow me here. I have been watching a lot of movies lately, and it’s fun to see what friends and acquaintances think of them.

- Godzilla Minus One (in theaters). Holy shit! I went into this movie expecting a fun popcorn monster movie, and that is definitely NOT what I got, although I loved what it turned out to be instead, which is a meditation on trauma in post-WWII Japan. Y’all, it’s like… a REAL movie. This was also the first time that Godzilla was actually scary to me. Normally, you’re kind of rooting for him to go smashy-smashy, stompy-stompy, roar like a rooster, and shoot his little laser beam thingy. In this movie, all of that was made genuinely horrifying, and especially tragic in the wake of Tokyo rebuilding after WWII. It was definitely the best kaiju movie I’ve ever seen, and I’m excited for the potential impact this could have on the future of monster movies. It’s truly raised the bar. (Also: it was made for less than $15 million? How?! It looks so good!)

- The Holdovers (Peacock). Watching this movie was like reading a novel, to the extent that I was shocked when I found out it was not based on a book. Sideways is one of my favorite movies of all time, so I was pretty pumped for the reunion of Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti. I love Paul Giamatti. I used to see him all the time when I lived in Brooklyn, and then he did The Chris Gethard Show, and I loved him even more. I would love to see him win an Oscar for this role as a curmudgeonly private school teacher put in charge of the “holdover” students staying over the school’s winter break, but I fear that smaller, quieter stories like this one are usually overlooked for ones like Oppenheimer, which is quite literally louder and flashier. I liked this movie a lot, but like so many of Payne’s films, it had a real melancholiness to it. Sometimes he is able to balance that melancholy out with humor (Sideways, Election), but sometimes not, and I felt that this movie was in the “not” category. Still, Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s performance as a grieving mother was one of the best of the year, and she has been turning out LOOKS on the red carpet. I look forward to seeing more of her awards season ‘fits.

- Poor Things (in theaters). I was asked to review this movie for BUST Magazine’s winter issue, which means I was fortunate enough to get to see it early in a press screening way back in September. I know this is not very cinephile of me, but my usual preference is to stream movies at home, but I am so glad that I got to see these visuals on a big screen. Emma Stone’s costumes alone are so stunning, and the sets are insane! I loved the movie and gave it a five-star review (out of five). I thought it was hilarious, weird, whimsical, creative, and unique, with outstanding performances, especially from Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo (did we know he could be that funny?). But when I sent it off to my editor, there still was a big question in my mind of how this film would be received by the majority of people. SPOILERS to follow, so please be warned!

The fact that Bella finds liberation through sex–SO much sex, shot with so much frank nudity–could definitely be seen as the male gaze masquerading as third wave feminism. Or, putting aside any intellectual ideas, people could just be offended and disgusted by the amount of sex and sex work and female pleasure in this movie. (Though, if you’ve seen The Favourite, I don’t think that should be all too surprising.) The movie currently has a 93% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, so it turns out that most critics loved it, but I do understand why it wouldn’t be someone’s cup of tea. If you saw the movie, what did you think?

- Saltburn (Prime Video). This movie is a perfect example of “what if there was a weird guy” cinema. My husband saw this in theaters way before I did and warned me about all the gross scenes in it, but I love stories about rich, fucked up families and was curious about Emerald Fennell’s follow up to Promising Young Woman, so I streamed it last Sunday. I feel like it’s not cool to like Promising Young Woman, but I loved it. I reread the screenplay this week, and I think it’s wonderful. She nails such a difficult tone to achieve, a darkness without heaviness. Anyway, I thought Saltburn was nowhere near as fully realized or well executed of a concept as PYW. I also don’t know why all her films have to have “gotcha” endings–Saltburn had the least surprising “twist” of the year, that’s for sure. At the same time, and not to sound like a mom at a sketch comedy show, but it certainly was…  different. And I can appreciate that. Once again I would love to know: what did you think?

- Killers of the Flower Moon (for rent on Prime Video, other places). This movie was fine, Lily Gladstone was wonderful. Can I just say one thing? I find it so dumb that Martin Scorsese refuses to just make a goddamn TV mini-series already. It’s total snobbery, is what it is. You can’t tell me that this story wouldn’t have been better told as a limited series. It’s based on a 352-page book with a lot of moving parts. As an artist, I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t want your story to be told in the best possible format. I’m so tired of stubborn old men in this industry and their pride. UGH!

- The Devil’s Plan (Netflix). I decided to check out this Korean reality competition show because comedy writer Seth Rubin named it their favorite show of the year in their best of 2023 newsletter (subscribe to Flannel!). They said, “Every contest had so many rules,” which made me laugh once I actually started watching the show, because: exactly. I don’t often feel dumb when watching reality TV, but this show pushed me there, because every challenge would start with like 20 minutes of rules-explaining, during which my eyes would glaze over and I would start to question how much of my brain matter that was supposed to have math in it actually contains quotes from ancillary Housewives characters (“Did you know? $25,000” lives in my head rent-free). I love games, of the board and non-board variety alike, but I never really grasp the rules 100% until people actually start playing and I see them in action.

Anyway, The Devil’s Plan is a lot of fun if you like strategy-based games, cliffhangers, and moral questions about whether it is more righteous to save the weaker players or let them fail, is an alliance still an alliance when it makes up 85% of the group, and did Seok-jin and See-won have a thing going?? (Okay, the last one is less of a moral question and more just me being nosey for gossip.) Thought-provoking, for sure!

- The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, season four (Peacock). What a rich tapestry of traumas and betrayals this show has woven! This season was excellent, one of, if not THE, best Housewives seasons of all time, and that was even before the bombshell finale. Prestige dramas could never!!! I’m not going to give away any spoilers, although I think it’s been very hard to avoid them. I’m just going to say that if you have any interest in middle aged women wrestling with secrets, narcissistic mothers, religious trauma, and being deceived by morally repugnant former friends, this is the show for you! I would advise you to start from the beginning so you can see how deep these threads go, but if that’s too much homework for you, just watch this last season. It’s one for the history books.

And that’s it for this week!

Don’t forget to like, comment, and share this newsletter if you’d like–you can use the buttons at the bottom or the top.

Until next time—give the cast of RHOSLC all the awards.

Love,LizXOXO

P.S.If you happen to have any advice on a new newsletter platform, please reach out! I am currently testing Ghost and beehiiv, but am open to anything a) unproblematic and b) affordable, in that order.