Content Consumed: The Bear, Dunkirk, Threads, Love Island, and Mattel movies

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Content Consumed

7 min readJul 6, 2023

Hey, hey! Welcome to another week of Content Consumed. In today’s edition, we’re chitchatting about:

🫒 The Bear and discovering your purpose
🎬 Revisiting Dunkirk with The Rewatchables and Quentin Tarantino
😴 Book review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation
🤖 Instagram’s Twitter alternative: Threads
🌴 Love Island’s season of twists
💭 Mattel’s movies will flop post-Barbie

Finding purpose and ‘The Bear’

If you know me IRL, you know I’ve been having a bit of a crisis of career. Do I still want to be a copywriter? Should I go freelance? Do I want to put my TEFL certificate into action and teach English? Do I want to go to grad school, get an MFA or a Strategic Comms degree?

Season 2 of The Bear follows exactly this theme: finding your purpose. Each individual does it: Carmy explores his personal life. Syd becomes a boss. Tina and Ebraheim go beyond the basics at culinary school. Marcus finds pastry magic in Copenhagen.

I can’t stop thinking about the first episode of the second season, despite being about halfway through the full season now. Specifically Richie and Carmy’s conversation in the basement.

Are you having fun? Are you happy? Is this what you want, what you really want?

‘Dunkirk’, Quentin Tarantino, and ‘The Rewatchables’

My lovely husband introduced me to The Rewatchables last week, a film podcast from The Ringer.

The episode I wanted to listen to right away: rewatching Dunkirk, with Quentin Tarantino as a guest host, who explains why Dunkirk was his #2 movie of the 2010s.

I’ve been halfway through Tarantino’s love letter to the movies, Cinema Speculation, for months now (as anyone who follows me on Goodreads might know). The best part about it—and about this podcast episode—is that fact that Tarantino’s brain is one of the most impressive film encyclopedias to ever exist.

He can draw comparisons between Dunkirk and about fifty other films, ranging from a silent black-and-white flick from the ’20s to every other Christopher Nolan movie made. He knows every technical detail, he admires every directing choice, he lives for the spectacle of it all. To hear him talk about Dunkirk, or any other movie, is a treat. Because you’re listening to one of the most passionate experts in the world.

After listening to (most of) the podcast yesterday on a road trip, my husband and I watched Dunkirk last night. Such an incredible movie, now paired fantastically with dramatic commentary.

That’s why I write this column, why I love scrolling Twitter and Reddit after a good HBO show, why I involve myself so deeply in the culture of entertainment: I love multimedia stitching itself together. A podcast and movie, like a perfect wine and cheese.

Book review: ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’

It’s a bizarre idea: spend one year in a drugged-out haze so intense that you barely remember it. Not just Ambien, my friends: Infermiterol and the like. Dozens of combinations of the most intense pills any amoral psychiatrist could script.

Could sleeping for a year fully reboot your life?

Meet the most depressed, gorgeous, bitchy narrator you can imagine—a typical Ottessa Moshfegh character. She’s stuck in domestic disturbia, loaded with an inheritance since her parents died, somewhat clinging to a disgustingly semi-codependent “friendship” (if you can call it that), obsessed with her abusive ex, and struggling to find the will to live.

Oh, and it ends on 9/11. Do with that information what you will.

Here are my thoughts on this very over-hyped book, which I’d give a solid 3 stars:

This is a classic case of a book trying to be disturbing through a selfish, reckless, and very depressed female character in her 20s. Like many of those works of literary fiction, this novel also struggles with having no plot. Seriously. Very, very little plot. Thank god the writing itself is so intriguing, or I’d never have finished My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
This is more of a book about the narrator’s “friendship” with Reva—who she constantly reminds us she actually hates—than basically anything else. The ending becomes that much more lackluster as a result.
Some people hate to see this word used for books, but I think it’s reasonable in the case of contemporary fiction: it’s unrealistic. The characters, the plot, everything. Come on. You can’t tell me our narrator could actually physically survive this. You can’t tell me that Ping Xi actually mattered in the end, that he was willing to devote 5 months to keeping our narrator alive (even for the ~art!~).
The pages slide by in a drugged haze, which was obviously purposeful. So I understand those who gave up halfway through. The monotony and lethargy steams off the pages. The writing is impressive, MFA-dense, high-lit work, but you gotta be willing to read a book without much plot.

Next on my reading list: Milk Fed by Melissa Broder. Also, I read Not a Happy Family last week. 2 stars. Not worth the read.

Instagram’s “Threads” app

Zuck made you a Twitter alternative, but will you use it?

After all, Elon Musk continues to drive Twitter into the ground. His most recent offense was instituting a 600-tweet-a-day viewing limit, outraging and shattering the hearts of Twitter addicts (hi! it’s me!) around the world.

Meet “Threads”. As the NYT reports:

Many tech companies have tried capitalizing on Twitter’s turmoil in recent months. But Threads has a leg up, backed by Meta’s deep pockets and Instagram’s enormous user base of more than two billion monthly active users around the world.

Here’s the main issue, however: Instagram has tied Threads closely to itself. Wanna sign up for Threads? You’re required to have an Instagram account for now. A user’s Instagram handle must also be their Threads user name.

And therein lies the problem.

Twitter was made to be more chaotic, more anonymous, wilder than its visual counterpart. I’m not about to retweet my usual things—Trisha Paytas’ Grimace trend vid, a Garfini (a Garfield bikini, can’t believe I had to explain that to you), or Barbie vs. Oppenheimer in modern geopolitical controversy—with high school friends and current coworkers who follow my very above-board Instagram account. Twitter is where I’m a fangirl, I’m looser with my online presence, and I don’t use my full damn name.

Threads will not work because of the vibes. It sounds stupid but it’s true.

Love Island’s got some actual good twists this year

They’ve always been afraid to kick off the stars. But not this year—season 2 runner-up and new bombshell Kady picked Zachariah and we said bye-bye to the Molly-Mae wannabe known as Molly Marsh.

Sure, she’s definitely coming back for Casa (the signs are there). That’ll be another good twist. Let’s keep these Islanders on their toes. Because I can’t fuckin’ stand the arrogance and the insecurity of these men. How do they get worse every year?! Thank God Medhi’s gone now too. The way he treated Whitney… the way Whitney let him treat her… oh man.

On we go.

P.S. If you’re interested in Molly Marsh snark, here’s a good article.

Mattel is a charicature of itself

Barbie will be / is a smash hit. No doubt about it.

But that doesn’t mean Mattel should do what it’s about to do.

Mattel, owner of the Barbie IP, is looking to capitalize on its success and make up to 45 more movies based on toys like Polly Pocket and Hot Wheels. It wants to make its own Mattel universe, a lá Marvel.

Tell me how the hell you’re going to make an UNO movie…?!

Don’t worry, they have a plan. Based on this New Yorker article, the UNO movie will be quite something:

The script she emerged with wasn’t quite what Mattel had had in mind. She’d set “UNO” in Atlanta’s hip-hop scene. “The first draft that I sent in was ‘fuck’-heavy,” she recalled, sheepishly. An executive flagged every instance of the obscenity in the screenplay. “It was something like fifty pages,” she said. “And then the next draft had one. I got my one, well-placed, PG-13 ‘fuck.’ ”

Yeah, okay, maybe this money-grab will work out.