What I'm Watching: Asteroid City, Polite Society, Paul T. Goldman, and More

Scarlett Johansson, Asteroid City, Focus Features

Here’s the rundown on everything I watched, read, and wrote about this week:

The shows:

• I realized this week that I was in desperate need of a new comfort watch, and I found a great one in the 1987 Cosby Show spinoff A Different World, which I’d been meaning to check out for ages. I’m burning through season 1 quickly, and loving both the super-charming cast (Lisa Bonet, Marisa Tomei, and Dawnn Lewis are such an endearing teen dream team) and the college setting. It’s not difficult to make me miss my college days, but I do a little bit extra when I turn on this show. Also, I love that Denise is a kind of crummy student but the show is never too hard on her about it!
• The only other non-embargoed show I watched this week was Paul T. Goldman, a wacky meta-docuseries from one of the directors of Nathan For You. The schtick is this: the show’s eponymous subject claims to have a stranger-than-fiction story that he’s obsessed with telling, and while actors are bringing it to life in an adaptation we see being made, we’re also learning about just how deeply unreliable a narrator this guy is. Personally, I found Goldman’s actions and attitudes too troubling from the start to be very entertained by him. I’ve been totally enchanted by similar project in the past, but I think I’ve found my meta-doc limit. That being said, if you do watch it (it’s on Peacock), definitely check out this interesting in-depth interview the filmmaker did with David Farrier, a journalist who’s made some great documentaries with similarly odd protagonists.

The movies:

• I’ve been in documentary short heaven this week! I’ve watched 11 short docs and loved pretty much all of them. At first I was confused about how they could have such a high hit rate, but then I realized that these days, shorts are perhaps more likely than features to be passion projects — since the latter often end up shot and packaged in the typical Netflix style or similar in order to land distribution. At any rate, I won’t list all 11 here, but if you’re into shorts hit me up and I’ll share titles! I’ll be watching more in the next week or so, but my favorites so far are the quirky (and amazing!) ecologist spotlight Between Earth & Sky (which will air with the upcoming season of PBS’ POV), a show-don’t-tell observation of Ukrainian refugee teens in Hungary called Away (you can watch that one here), and How We Get Free, a galvanizing look at one woman’s fight to end America’s predatory cash bail system (more on that here).

• Wes Anderson’s latest movie, Asteroid City, somehow felt (to me) both slighter and deeper than most of his stuff. That being said, I dug it more than his past two films and I adored the color palette and several casting choices. A bit Darjeeling Limited by way of pandemic lockdown, maybe? At any rate, it’s on Peacock now!
• I caught Missing, the unrelated sequel to 2018’s screen life thriller Searching, on a flight this week and had a lot of fun with it. I love that these movies take the “season-long detective show” approach to twists and turns, doling out new clues or red herrings at a breakneck pace and making sure that audiences know we don’t know anything. The story about a girl (Storm Reid, always great) investigating the mysterious disappearance of her mom is unbelievable, but it’s enjoyable too – especially when our hero puts her Gen Z tech savvy to work.
• I also thought Nida Manzoor’s feature directorial debut Polite Society was pretty fun, although I might have fallen victim to Sundance overhype on this one. The movie follows a teen girl with stuntwoman aspirations who ends up trying to save her older sister from what she believes is an evil marriage plot. It’s funny and fast, though your mileage may vary on the third-act reveal, which felt a bit out of tune with the rest of the film for me.

The reads:

• I’m happy to report that my daily horror comics challenge is in full swing (thanks largely to the habit tracker Everyday, which has been keeping my brain in order lately). Everything I read this week rocked, but my favorite discovery might have been Kate Leth’s Spell on Wheels, a witchy road trip graphic novel that I’d love to see as a TV show. At one point a member of the central trio drops a Practical Magic reference, and that feels fitting because there’s a lot of that movie’s spirit here – in a good way!
• I’m also positively chomping at the bit for more Afterlife With Archie after finally finishing Vol. 2 (the last volume?!) of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s famous apocalyptic spin on Archie comics. Vampire Josie and the Pussycats! Lovecraftian Sabrina! Psychopath Reggie! There’s so much to love here, I’m going to have to chase down the spinoff comics stat.
• For something creepy and deep, I recommend Skottie Young’s The Me You Love in the Dark, a self-contained (as far as I know) story about an artist living in a haunted house. I’ll have to stop myself from pointing out just how cinematic all these graphic novels are as I read them, but this one is certainly vivid and evocative!

Odds and ends:

• I went down a wild research rabbit hole this week while writing about Star Trek: Lower Decks’ reference to Harlan Ellison. Only like 5% of the stuff I learned about Ellison ended up in here, but I could lose a whole day reading about that asshole.
• My unofficial mini Buffy the Vampire Slayer /Film series continues: this time we’re talking Buffy and Rocky Horror Picture Show!
• I’ve been giving the 5-4 podcast a go, with mixed results so far. Sometimes the central trio’s commentary on the Supreme Court (which is what the pod is about, by the way) leans too close to punditry for my liking, but other times the show is wildly informative. I definitely recommend the episode about anti-trans legislature with Erin Reed, which is succinct and fact-filled enough that you could probably even recommend it to relatives who aren’t exactly the strongest LGBTQ+ allies.
• Finally, I’m tentatively recommending this Vulture piece on the evolution (devolution?) of Rotten Tomatoes, which as it explains is a lot less straightforward for filmmakers, execs, and critics than a simple rotten or fresh score. I say “tentatively” here because the more I sit with some of the article’s conclusions (particularly its bad-faith reading of the strides RT has made towards inclusion, something very few institutions in this industry even try to do), the less I’m convinced I follow their logic. Still, a mostly informative read for folks who might not know what’s up with RT.

Thanks to everyone who opens this email after you just got another one from me a few days ago! Things should be back on a more regular Sunday release schedule from here on out, at least until I move in January. Speaking of which – I have a lot of books I’ll have to put in storage and I’m hoping to either give or lend some of them to friends. If you’re a friend of the newsletter and live somewhere on the U.S. West Coast, let me know and I’ll shoot you a link to my library so you can see if anything catches your eye! This thing got long, so I’ll stop now. Chime in below if you’ve got thoughts to add!