i wrote these recommendations for you while i laid in bed in my hanukkah PJs… pretty good view from here, i must say!
sweet jeanette! it’s lovely to hear from you.
i too am a connoisseur of bad movies, though i have a deep sense of shame about it – i fear it’s the one thing everyone who loves me secretly wishes they could change about me. whenever i’m in the company of others and choose to put on a bad movie, i feel absolutely twisted. for the purposes of writing this, i’ll be shucking that shame. boy does that feel nice!
ok — my absolute favorite is the 2015 zac efron vehicle We Are Your Friends. this movie came out during my first year of college (or only year of college, you choose) and at some freshman recruitment event they were giving out the movie poster, so i obviously took one and put it up in my dorm before i even saw it.
the movie follows zac efron as Cole Carter (lol), a wannabe DJ living in LA. i know that in our minds eye the fall of 2015 seems like a time of total innocence (to jog your memory, this was when we were all having our fun with “just chilling in cedar rapids”), but even then, the idea of EDM seemed a bit dated, a few years too late to be totally relevant. that’s the movie’s original sin, but boy oh boy is it a gateway to others. some memorable elements: a bizarro b plot about the telemarketing of predatory loans, the casting of emrata and that guy who plays the creep in american beauty as a couple, a character named squirrel.
if i were to give a conservative estimate of how many times i’ve We Are Your Friends, i would say 7. needless to say, it’s a very rich text.
other recs: SPF-18 (name alone is absurd/senseless/feels like it’s making a point but ultimately amounts to nothing), private school (worth it for phoebe cates), the podcast How Did This Get Made in case you don’t know about it already
my darling chloe!
trying to imagine what it feels like to contain the amount of youth required to be ‘addicted’ to ‘twitch streams.’
in my head the ‘new’ and ‘cool’ shows are always the prestige ones which i either a) never come around to or b) take so long to come around to that at least one of those descriptors doesn’t suit it anymore. that being said, i’m going to tell you about the NEW shows i’ve been having my fun with.
dash & lily is a silly little YA romp that just came out on netflix. it’s essentially the movie serendipity if it were about teens in 2020. dash and, you guessed it, lily meet via a note she leaves in a book at the strand and of course they have a soul connection.
if you’re looking for something that will induce perhaps the exact opposite emotional response, try i hate suzie on HBO Max. it follows suzie, a woman who became famous on a singing competition show as a teen, picking up once she’s hit her mid-30s and has just discovered that her private photos have been leaked. my friend taylor described it as having “too many asshole” characters for her liking, but in my opinion it has the exact right amount of assholes. it’s incredibly stressful, but i swear it’s in a good way!
why not hit the above image and send me a recommendation request?