Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, River Page reviews Louis Theroux’s futile attempt to expose the manosphere. Once (and future?) presidential candidate Andrew Yang tells us mass AI unemployment could end in brutal revolution. America’s forgotten founding mother. And more!
But first: It’s Oscars weekend!
The votes are cast. The predictions made. The dresses fitted. It’s almost time for the lights, the camera, the action of the 98th Academy Awards. The ceremony starts at 7 p.m. ET on Sunday, and to get you ready, we have a fresh piece on each of the three front-runners for Best Picture. You won’t read these takes anywhere else.
First up: Liel Leibovitz takes aim at One Battle After Another, which, according to Polymarket, has a 75 percent chance of bagging the top prize. And yet, according to Liel, Paul Thomas Anderson’s blockbuster is an ugly action movie about some progressives going to war against a version of ICE, and deserves none of the accolades it has scooped up.
He writes: “It feels like the sort of thing written by a committee of socialist college sophomores cracking each other up by casting the rapper Junglepussy—she plays a character by the same name—whose sole purpose is to deliver some silly speech about black power before disappearing from the action altogether 20 minutes in.”
Bishop Robert Barron was himself disappointed by Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which is One Battle’s closest competitor. A vampire movie set in the Jim Crow South, it had the ingredients to be great: epic acting, beautiful cinematography. But, the bishop writes, the underlying morality of the movie—that it’s possible to “divide the world into the easy binary of oppressor and oppressed, good guys and bad guys”—troubled him.
“This sort of moral reductionism obscures the dramatic tension between good and evil that all of us find in ourselves,” he writes.
And finally, a celebration: of Marty Supreme, a film that turns a ping-pong tournament into the fight of one man’s life. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, who is amoral, gifted, reckless—and a breath of fresh air for Rich Cohen, author of Tough Jews.
“I went through my 20s with a beef,” writes Cohen. “I didn’t like how Jews were portrayed in pop culture, or in the minds of my friends”—that is, as suitable husbands and good math students. That’s why he enjoyed watching this corrupt, womanizing protagonist—a Jew who shockingly says, of an upcoming match against a Holocaust survivor named Béla Kletzki, “I’m basically gonna do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t.”
“At a time when there is an attempt to redefine what it means to be Jewish, to characterize us en masse, to turn us into villains, Marty Supreme is a gift,” writes Cohen. “Not because it tries to defend Jews or depict them as do-gooders. But because it doesn’t.”
In the 2020 Democratic primary, a relatively unknown New York businessman started yelling about how AI was going to take Americans’ jobs at a massive scale—and how if he were president, he’d introduce a $1,000-a-month universal basic income. He lost. But every day, Andrew Yang seems more prescient. So last week, the once-skeptical River Page ate crow—and also calamari—with Yang in Manhattan. They talked about the failures of the Democrats, his new memoir (“Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?”), and whether he’ll run for the top job again.
Is it possible to actually uncover a deep truth about misogynistic influencers who spend eight hours a day sharing their every passing thought? When he’s not drinking with ex-Democrats, River Page is The Free Press’s brain rot correspondent, and in this week’s Second Thought, he reviews Louis Theroux’s buzzy but bad new Netflix documentary about the manosphere—which tells us nothing new. He also observes a strange phenomenon: All over the internet, the online right is “transvestigating” members of its own tribe. Anons are calling Laura Loomer “Larry.” What’s going on?
At the very bottom of a 1777 version of the Declaration of Independence appears a small but extraordinary line: “Printed by Mary Katharine Goddard.” Goddard, the country’s first female postmaster, didn’t have to include her name; indeed, it meant taking on tremendous risk. But it also meant that hers became the only woman’s name ever to appear on our nation’s founding document. In this week’s installment of Things Worth Remembering, Norah O’Donnell tells the story of our forgotten founding mother, as excerpted from her new book, “We the Women.”
Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!
Looking for love? Over at Free Press Cupid, we bring you a new batch of single Free Pressers each week! Click here to meet a “semiretired” geologist who now spends his summers in Alaska; a soon-to-be therapist who’s true to her middle school AIM handle, “Bookworm4Eyes”; or even a Canadian film producer who speaks not just English and French, but also Italian.
Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to throw your hat in the ring, write up a paragraph about who you are and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.
This week, Kat Rosenfield wrote a biting review of a bleak polyamory memoir, Suzy Weiss spoke to the good people in Silicon Valley who are busy trying to make our navy great again, a former opera singer confirmed Timothée Chalamet’s suspicions that nobody cares about the art form—and more! Catch up:
How should you spend your weekend? The editor of The Weekend Press, Freya Sanders, has some recommendations. . .
📖 Read . . . Our very own Kat Rosenfield published a novel this week! It’s called How to Survive in the Woods, it’s a thriller, and it’s amazing. As an editor, I hate the word unputdownable (Kat would never use such an absurd adjective), but I will say that when I was reading this book last year on a Greek island, I had to tell my best friend I could not go to the beach with her because I could not move until I’d gotten to the end. If you want a taste, read the excerpt we published!
📺 Watch . . . I liked Sinners and absolutely hated Marty Supreme, but the Best Picture nominee that affected me the most is Sentimental Value. The story of a quietly broken relationship between a father and daughter, a filmmaker and an actress, it’s an ode to the people who’ll never really leave you. I adored it. It’s a shame the lead actress, Renate Reinsve, who’s so good she makes you forget that what you’re watching isn’t real life, is up against Jessie Buckley in the Best Actress category; the latter is a shoe-in for her guttural performance in Hamnet—which I admittedly also loved. Watch that, too. But definitely watch Sentimental Value.
🎵 Listen . . . Okay, I know I just said I like quiet stories and lifelike performances, but to live is to contradict oneself, so let it be known: I cannot stop listening to the soundtrack of Wuthering Heights. It’s so over-the-top, it’s ridiculous. The tracks, by Charli xcx, have names like “Dying for You” and “Chains of Love.” But like the film, it takes seriously that feeling we all get once in a blue moon, if we’re lucky—where you’re so passionately obsessed that it feels like something is going to burst out of your chest. It makes me feel like I’m a teenage girl again, but somehow in a good way.
🍳 Cook . . . As the editor of The Weekend Press (which means being glued to a laptop screen until at least eight o’clock on a Friday night), it is not easy for me to host let-the-weekend-begin dinner parties—but host them, I do. Thanks to a very easy but somehow impressive salmon recipe. It’s based on this one, from BBC Good Food—but I ignore the fussy Step 1 with the fennel. The key is: Buy a really big fish. Like, a kilo of salmon. Cover it with as much harissa paste and honey as feels decent. Shove it in the oven while you’re waiting for a writer to finish their final edits. Then make lots of couscous—at least double what the recipe calls for: 600 grams of the stuff—plus 100 grams of currants, a lot of stock powder and lemon juice and olive oil, a couple cans of chickpeas, and a liter of boiling water, all in a big bowl. When you hear the doorbell go, a few minutes after you’re done working, throw some mint and parsley in the bowl, and put the big fish on a nice platter. People will be impressed by its majesty and not realize it took you all of five minutes to prepare. (Vegans can just eat the couscous and be thankful.)
Last but not least, when we asked our art director Clara Grusq, “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve seen this week?” she replied: “Sorry, Chalamet, opera is very much not dead: If you have the chance, go see ‘Tristan und Isolde’ at the Metropolitan Opera; it was devastatingly beautiful and changed my life.” Behold:
Have a great weekend!
The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.
Saw Oscar Shorts yesterday — good — but the Muslim The Butcher’s Stain had all the worn cliches about Jews — they’re cheap, they falsely accuse Muslims, they only care about their people. It struck me that Dems like James Carville have the same irrational hatred of Trump. Their prejudice of a coarse but patriotic president should not be tolerated when they root for our enemies that have targeted us since the lame Carter Administration.
For the most part, the films coming out of Hollywood these days are total dreck. Any good ones rarely get Oscar nominations. Woke killed the golden goose.