What we'll be listening to, watching, and reading to sate our pop culture needs.
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This weekend we’ll be delving into history—U.K. suffrage as well as the American Revolution—along with a healthy dose of Divers, a trip to Stars Hollow, and an opportunity to see Sarah Silverman in a whole new light.
Troubling catchphrase aside, Suffragette, the movie stars Carey Mulligan as a laundry worker who becomes an instrumental player in the fight for the British women’s vote, Helena Bonham Carter as one of the movement’s most driving agitators, and Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragettes’ inciteful leader. The film is a dark look at the cost British women paid for the ability to vote, and a reminder of how recent so many of our rights were won.
Since 2002, Joanna Newsom has been spinning dense otherworldly yarns, stories as poetic as they are complicated, and singing them in her singular style. On Divers, her musical arrangements are no less impressive—harp, piano, and distorted guitar all find their place on this much more accessible follow-up to her last three-disc doozie.
No one makes history as palatable and hilarious as Sarah Vowell, and this time it’s the Marquis de Lafayette who gets her reverently irreverent treatment. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States chronicles the story of the French aristocrat who became George Washington’s best friend, and shows us the division—and humanness—of our burgeoning country’s leaders during the American Revolution.
Based on Amy Koppelman’s 2008 novel, I Smile Back stars Sarah Silverman as Laney, a New Jersey housewife who fortifies her days caring for her husband (Josh Charles) and their two kids with booze, coke, and sex. A somewhat predictable look at a depressed housewife gives Silverman, who had recently described her own struggles with depression, an opportunity to prove her acting chops—and will blow you away.
This week’s announcement that Netflix is in talks with Amy Sherman-Palladino to revisit our favorite mother-daughter pair from Stars Hollow pretty much blew our minds and our Facebook feed. So we figure it’s time to refresh our Gilmore Girls IQ and spend some quality time with Lorelai and Rory, it’s been too long and things have been much too quiet.