This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
This week:
- Screaming about the best episode of TV.
- The one movie I want all of you to see.
- 2024 is off to a great, gay start.
- The Golden Globes telecast I’d actually want to watch.
- Stanning for Carey Mulligan.
Please Go See All of Us Strangers
Each award season, there’s a movie that becomes my child. I think about it constantly. I want to nurture it, and hope for the best for it. I talk exclusively about it to anyone who will listen, and especially those who don’t care. I cry when it comes to mind. (I dunno… this is what I assume people who have children do.)
This year, for me, that film is All of Us Strangers. That attachment is perhaps fitting, as the film explores what you hold onto from your childhood—what you wish you had gotten, what it would be like if you actually received it, and how both things shape your life.
The film is so simple, with such a direct line to the heart of the human experience. Yet when you describe the plot, it sounds ludicrous. It’s about a screenwriter named Adam, played by Andrew Scott, who gives the performance for which I have already planned my prayer circle for an Oscar nod come nomination morning. He lives in a mostly empty high rise, except for a neighbor named Harry (Paul Mescal), with whom he cautiously starts a romance.
As he gives into the splendor of a deep, intimate love with someone who seems to understand him in ways that opens him up to himself, Adam also starts revisiting his childhood home. There, he meets his mother and father (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who died in a car crash when he was 11.
They are and look exactly as they were then, not having seen Adam in 30 years. They get to know Adam as he is as the adult they were robbed of raising; he gets the pleasure (and discomfort) of revealing himself to the parents he always wished were around. He comes out to them. As this ghost experience—because that’s what it is—is happening, he and Harry find an even more intimate and sexual connection.
The film finds an unusual path to the rawest emotions: loss, love, yearning, and acceptance. There are three scenes between Adam and his parents that unfold so subtly, with such grounded beauty, that I wasn’t even aware I was crying until I tasted the salt of a tear. All of Us Strangers expands to wider release this week, after a limited debut before the new year. If you can, go see it.
2024 Is, at the Very Least, Bicurious
On Thursday of this week, I woke up to the Extremely Online equivalent of a fire alarm: Dozens of messages in group texts and everyone I follow on social media talking about the same two things.
First, it was announced that Nicole Scherzinger, lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls and the most underrated pop supernova of our lifetime (real ones know!), is bringing her take on Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard to Broadway.
Scherzinger’s wholly original take on the role Glenn Close won a Tony Award for (I’m always saying Nicole Scherzinger is the next Glenn Close) has left audiences in the U.K. stunned during the show’s West End run. I know several people who flew to London just to see it. (OK, I think they may have other things on their itineraries.) Now I get to make my entire personality going to see it on Broadway.
As even more of a treat, every post about that news was alternated with photos of The Bear and The Iron Claw star Jeremy Allen White in his sensational new Calvin Klein underwear campaign. Yaaas, chef.
I’m thrilled about this campaign because, first of all, it is hot. But also because Jeremy Allen White is the first rational person in show business: If a studio is paying for a trainer and nutritionist to get you in the shape he was in for The Iron Claw and the first call you make isn’t to your publicist saying, “Please find a way for me to take photos mostly naked,” what are you doing?
Apparently 2024 is the year of the dragon, according to the Chinese zodiac calendar. Now, I believe that everyone deserves their own time and journey to discover their sexuality. But between these two news items at the start of 2024, I’m not surprised the year’s animal is literally flaming. If that dragon isn’t quoting from Steel Magnolias, spending their nights watching videos of Best Supporting Actress Oscar speeches, and ranking Mama Roses in Gypsy by its teenage years, I’ll be shocked.
The Hottest Table in Hollywood
I’m going to need a microphone, Andy, and a camera at this table for the entirety of the Golden Globes. Forget the (corrupt, disgraced, yet somehow we’ve all forgiven that and are going along with a glamorous Hollywood charade anyway) award show. I just want live-cam of footage detailing every conversation at the Globes table that features: Barbie’s America Ferrera, Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, and Ryan Gosling; Killers of the Flower Moon’s Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone; and The Color Purple’s Oprah Winfrey, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.
Exquisite Campaigning
For her Hollywood Reporter roundtable of Best Actress contenders interview, Maestro star Carey Mulligan wore a blazer sized for The Iron Giant and then gave this answer to a (truly asinine, like, why are you asking this) question about Taylor Swift.
An icon.
What to see this week:
Night Swim: A haunted swimming pool? Sure, why not. (Now in theaters)
The Society of Snow: A horrific plane crash, cannibalism… and a true story. (Now on Netflix)
Pokémon Concierge: Sometimes you just want to watch something nice/Pikachu being adorable. (Now on Netflix)
What to skip this week:
Mayhem!: If you’re going to put an exclamation point on there, you better live up to it. (Now in theaters)
Good Grief: If you’re going to make that the title of your movie, it will be used against you. (Now on Netflix)
