Content Consumed: Barbenheimer weekend, Ripe, Molly-Mae, The League, and more

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Content Consumed

6 min readJul 20, 2023

Happy Barbenheimer weekend!!!! I’ve got Barbie tonight at 6:30 and Oppenheimer tomorrow night in IMAX!!! It’s the main thing getting me through this week!!!

Anyways, in today’s edition of Content Consumed:
🎬 Expectations for Barbie and Oppenheimer
🍇 Book review: Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
🌴 Molly-Mae’s back on reality TV with the Furys
🍴 Richie’s journey on The Bear
🏈 Annual rewatch of The League
🌹 Read of the week: “Peak Girl”

It’s Barbenheimer time

Tonight’s Barbie, tomorrow night’s Oppenheimer. What are my expectations? Well, the bar is pretty damn high now.

🌸 Barbie

Ryan Gosling will have the performance of a lifetime. Move over, Drive, La La Land and The Notebook. It’s Ken’s time to shine (but he’d say it’s Barbie’s. His GQ video interview is essential watching).
It will transcend genre—this is about to be a lot more dramatic and serious than we expect (considering the comedic angles of the trailers and the marketing).
The attention to detail will be shockingly impressive. We’ve already seen it in a lot of the marketing, but I’m stoked to get better looks at the sets and the costumes. Just Margot’s press tour fits got me.
It’ll be very rewatchable. One of those movies with lots of hints and foreshadowing in the beginning that we’ll all miss the first time around.
Simu Liu will annoy the hell out of me. I don’t like him as an actor or as a person. Praying he’s not in too many scenes.

💥 Oppenheimer

Succession vibes: a lot of intense boardroom discussions.
Too many white middle-aged men for me to keep track of.
Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh will be incredible.
Obviously, Cillian Murphy will be up for an Oscar after this. It’s inevitable.
I’m seeing it in IMAX and I’m genuinely worried for my eardrums.

As you can see, I have a lot more expectations for Barbie—and I blame the marketing machine for that! I’m a bit worried we’ve been oversaturated with Barbie content and I’m praying it lives up to the hype.

Speaking of hype… ‘Ripe’ flopped for me

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter was billed as one of the most anticipated works of literary fiction of the summer.

But for me… ’twas a flop.

The premise excited me:

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. In addition to the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty…
Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever-closer as the world around her unravels.
When her CEO’s demands cross an illegal threshold and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it. Sharp but vulnerable, funny yet unsettling, Ripe portrays one millennial woman’s journey through a late-capitalist hellscape and offers an incisive look at the absurdities of modern life.

But the reality was: a depressing, repetitive slog with no payoff and very little overarching plot.

Some of my issues:

Characters were almost cartoonish, without real depth and very exaggerated. The dialogue is forced and unnatural. No one acts like this! I kept telling myself. No one speaks like this!
The metaphors became obnoxious, both the pomegranate and the black hole. It really feels like a first draft.
The book itself is very lazily structured and stylized, with each chapter starting with the dictionary definition of a very basic word.
The author tried and failed to make COVID relevant towards the end of the story.
There’s very little nuance given to the Silicon Valley tech workers vs. San Francisco homeless people battle that Etter set up.

Like I said, felt like a first draft. Pretty writing in some places, so I read the whole thing, and that’s it. 2 stars for me.

Molly-Mae, Tommy Fury, and Netflix

Introducing At Home with the Furys, a new Netflix reality TV show following boxing champ Tyson Fury (and his family). Here’s the trailer.

Who’s in his family? None other than Molly-Mae, Love Island UK superstar and girlfriend of Tyson’s lil bro Tommy Fury.

The clip we got of Molly-Mae and Tommy is exactly what we’d expect: they’re talking about having their baby and Tommy asks if he “can cut the placenta”. If you’re a Love Island fan who watched Tommy and Molly-Mae’s season, this will not shock you. Tommy… has a way with words. And Molly-Mae? Will make it all about herself.

And so continues Molly-Mae’s quest to Kardashianify herself and her life. She’s a beauty product mogul, a reality TV legend, and never too far away from the British press news cycle.

I know, I can’t stop talking about ‘The Bear’

It’s just SO GOOD. This sounds cringe, but I really do just want to applaud every time the credits roll after each episode. Because each episode is a goddamn work of art. (My only beef with this season is the character of Claire—too manic pixie dream girl!) There’s just a new level of excellence with each episode.

This time, I want to talk about Richie’s journey. He’s finally found his purpose—and it took a week in the kitchen of the best restaurant in Chicago to do it. He now understands the complex humanity of the dining experience and what running a restaurant really means. He has respect for the details, and he’s gonna blast some Taylor Swift about this love, this passion, and this newfound purpose.

I’m just happy for him, okay?!

Also, I can’t talk about this episode without talking about Olivia Coleman’s singular scene. Tears streaming down my face. Impactful, memorable, and impressive.

Time for a ‘The League’ rewatch

Not much to say besides… we’re getting close to football season. So, it must be done: watch The League on Hulu/FXX. Get your head in the game. Sit back and let yourself giggle a little at Nick Kroll’s late-aughts bits that would certainly not fly today.

Some recommended literature…

Have we reached peak Girl?

Delia Cai asks, for Vanity Fair: “An eons-long Barbie promotional extravaganza ties up our latest nostalgia craze in a perfect bow. But what’s behind this particular fixation on girlhood?”

Ride along with Cai as she discusses…

Gossip Girl, New Girl, Derry Girls, Gilmore Girls, and Girls
Coquettecore, Barbiecore, and ozempic
“Hot girl summer”, “that girl”, “lucky girl syndrome”—which for the record, I believe I have this—and “girl dinner” trends
The fetishization of girlhood via the patriarchy
Tradwifes and bimbos

Read it here.