Content Consumed: Weekend watches, Love Island UK finale, Strip Tees, and more

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Content Consumed

7 min readAug 14, 2023

Hey, hey! I really can’t believe we’re halfway through August. So let’s get down to business. In today’s edition of Content Consumed:

🎬 Weekend Content Report: Movies, TV, podcasts, music and more
🌴 And the winners of Love Island UK are…
🌹 Megan Fox’s book of poems
🛼 Book review: Strip Tees
🎯 Book review: Mobility

Weekend Content Report

Let’s get into it.

☄️ Asteroid City
Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. But… was there a plot? Did I miss it altogether? Pretty visuals. Interesting actors. And that’s it. I can see why it didn’t perform well in theaters.

🏈 Hard Knocks
Football is BACK, baby. This season of HBO’s Hard Knocks, we’re riding with the Jets and their new(ish) superstar Aaron Rodgers. As expected, ARodg is sliding right in as a team leader and spiritual guide. He’s not only the star of the team but certainly the star of the show. Even Knocks narrator Liev Schreiber flew in to say hi.

🎤 Celebrity Memoir Book Club: Jason Derulo
You know I’m a CMBC ride-or-die. This podcast episode had me, as per usual, laughing out loud. The delusions that Jason Derulo has… oh my god. It’s just so funny. No one should be able to get away with comparing a TikTok they made to the legacy of Whitney Houston. Come on. It’s just so funny.

🎭 The Great, season 3 episode 7
I was worried. Really, really worried. A major character died (and that’s an understatement) in episode 6 and I wasn’t sure where the show would go from there. But it’s worth continuing to see the fallout. To see the rage.

🎮 Super Mario Bros
Yep, finally watched it. And it was better than I thought!!! Entertaining all the way through, even on a hungover Sunday morning. The worst part — which may shock you — was Anya Taylor-Joy as Peach. The dialogue was so poorly written and the delivery of the lines was worse. You’d think that’d be hard to do in an animated movie… you know there’s a problem when I think Chris Pratt’s voice acting was better.

🧨 The Wolf of Wall Street
A classic rewatch. Not much to say here.

🎼 UK Drill
My music genre of choice right now. Great for the gym, great for meaningless work tasks.

Honestly… they deserve the win

In a chaotic season where I don’t believe any of the remaining couples will last more than 6 months… why wouldn’t it be Sammy and Jess who take home the £50,000?

Let’s review the other options:

Ty and Ella had a blow-up fight on the last day of the series, literally the one thing you’re NOT supposed to do before the finale.
Whitney and Lochan are smug and are definitely too dull to be winners. Neither of them will pull in the brand deals that Sammy and Jess will; they just weren’t as entertaining as a couple either. Both of them—but especially Whitney—annoy the hell out of me. She’d be shocked to hear this, but not everyone needs her opinion all the time.
I think Molly and Zac could’ve won. But they didn’t have the ~journey~ that Jess and Sammy did, and honestly… kind of cheated by bringing Molly in as a Casa girl. I know there was some audience feedback about the couple being “set up” to win and folks think Molly was a producer plant. I think they’ll find just as much success in the outside world, career-wise, as Jess and Sammy.

And that was Love Island UK, all wrapped up! The best bits: Kady, some great shock dumpings, the Grafties. Good season, plenty of drama, a wild time.

The worst: I’ll hate Messy Mitch forever. I wonder if anyone’s ever told him that he’s a knobhead…

Megan Fox’s upcoming poetry book

Here is one thing I know to be true: Megan Fox has been repeatedly used and abused by powerful men in Hollywood. So really, I can’t think of a better person to write a collection of poems, titled Pretty Boys Are Poisonous, with the following premise:

“These poems were written in an attempt to excise the illness that had taken root in me because of my silence. I’ve spent my entire life keeping the secrets of men, my body aches from carrying the weight of their sins. My freedom lives in these pages, and I hope that my words can inspire others to take back their happiness and their identity by using their voice to illuminate what’s been buried, but not forgotten, in the darkness.”

Is Machine Gun Kelly one of those poisonous pretty boys? I wouldn’t say pretty, but poisonous for sure. I have no doubt these poems, described also as having “wicked humor” (we’ll see), will also address experiences with men like Michael Bay and Shia LaBeouf.

Will the poems be good though? We’ll see.

Book review: Strip Tees by Kate Flannery

Thought American Apparel was a skeevy company? It’s so much worse than you thought.

This memoir is a fascinating confession with very little payoff. Please, go into this book accepting that the villain never gets what he deserves… because if you don’t realize that, it’s just misery.

You want to keep screaming at the author, Kate Flannery, to GET OUT. After every instance of misogynistic abuse, sexual harassment, and even near-rape — GET OUT! But she set us up early to understand the cult-like pull of working at American Apparel in the mid-2000s. She puts us in that mindset. I’m the same age now that she was then, and I understand how she could get sucked into the dreamland of it all, even with such a horrific boss (Dov Charney, who will ideally rot in hell sooner rather than later).

It’s a sad, true story. It’s a story that Flannery is very brave to tell. She doesn’t come out of it looking great. The entire book only details the first nine months of her three-year career with American Apparel, which was only cut short after layoffs in 2008. It’s shocking that she didn’t quit earlier, especially after a horrific business trip to Miami. So the epilogue is speedy, telling you everything you need to know. Flannery admits all of her own fuck-ups, like hiring thousands of women, many of whom were underage and preyed on by Dov. But you leave the book with empathy for Flannery because she went through things no woman should have to go through.

Book review: Mobility by Lydia Kiesling

This was my #1 book that I wanted to read this August… so maybe my expectations were a little high.

I kept waiting for a climax. Any climax. I think I know what it was supposed to be, which I won’t say here because it’s definitely a spoiler, but it wasn’t all that crazy and unexpected.

It didn’t seem like anything really happened in Mobility. We watch Bunny/Elizabeth grow up, move into the oil industry, and pretty much stay there until a slightly apocalyptic wrap-up chapter in the end. Did her views on things change? I don’t know, because I felt really disconnected from the main character. Maybe it was the third-person POV, maybe it was that we only saw her life in short vignettes. It felt like this with the other characters too — like we were supposed to connect more with Maryellen, with Charlie. But there wasn’t much depth to explore.

Part of this problem also likely came from the way the discussion was led in terms of geopolitical oil history and movement. It wasn’t subtly woven into the story, which I believe is what the author intended to do. Instead, it was braggadocious characters like Charlie or academic characters like Ted Senior talking at Bunny/Elizabeth in long monologues.

I read the full book because I expected something to happen, specifically a moral crisis from Bunny/Elizabeth. If that happened… I must’ve missed it.