#50 (for real this time): Vampires and zombies and Jax Taylor, oh my
Death By Consumption
4/15/25 - 4/21/25
(Last week's email was accidentally labeled #50, but it was actually #49. I just love round numbers, and I'm very impatient! Someday, perhaps, I will have an editor.)
Ladies, how have you enjoyed the first week of true equality, now that women are allowed to go to space?! Feminists, we can put down our weapons and rest; the great work is done. In their monumental accomplishment of going up really high for a couple minutes and then coming back down, Katy Perry and Lauren Sanchez didn't just touch the atmosphere — they touched us all.
This week it was Halloween in April, as I consumed a lot of monster media: the big new vampire movie by Ryan Coogler, a classic 2000s zombie film, and the return of the most twisted creatures of all: the cast of The Valley. I also welcomed back that lovable monster known as Nathan Fielder, and I got tricked into reading a very dumb book that has gotten a lot of praise.
Sinners (2025) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
Goddamn, this was a movie. I enjoyed how much time we spent with the characters before any of the major vampire shit started, which made it feel like there were some real stakes, though Ryan Coogler has definitely been Marvel-brained — the first half of the film is very “Avengers assemble,” except the people assembling are, like, bartenders. But a Black vampire movie set in the 1930s, with this level of emotion and style, was always guaranteed to be a good time, and for what this film is, Ryan Coogler knocks it out of the park. This is a big, splashy, fun movie (also, a sneaky musical?), and the fact that I happened to see it on the first 80-degree day of the year? Summer’s here early!
28 Days Later (2002) — on Apple
Watched with a friend in anticipation of 28 Years Later, and we were pleasantly surprised how well this holds up. Though we did completely forget Cillian goes full frontal in this, which made us all gasp. Danny Boyle makes so many wild choices — the car driving through a field of flowers that’s a painting! — that keep you on the edge of your seat even in the moments when he’s not building plot suspense. It's just so lovely to see a movie with style, from the time before Netflix killed all of that. Although, I don’t want to dunk on a child, but I have to say: the teen girl in this is one of the worst actors of all time. Between her and the girl in The Last of Us, I think we should start banning teen actors from zombie movies and TV.
The Valley, season 2 episode 1 — on Peacock
This is the best reality show on TV right now. I watch a lot of reality, a lot of it trash, most of which I would never try to sell anyone on, lest they become as mush-brained as I am. But The Valley should be mandatory viewing for all Americans from the age of, say, 34-48. It’s an early-midlife crisis spectacle, a portrait of the festering of the American dream, a twisted masterpiece of insecurity, aggression, drug addiction, and egomania. The Valley holds a mirror up to our society, and then puts that mirror down and does a couple lines off it.
The show was, just like its precursor Vanderpump Rules, built on the tireless backs of Jax Taylor and Kristen Doute, two beautiful and monstrous creatures, twin children of Satan, sent up to Earth to suffer and inflict suffering. Kristen has become a cultlike Mother God figure, all heaving bosoms and dirty bare feet, cursed to walk the Earth spewing radical truths behind her, leaving nothing but destruction in her wake, only to be believed as a truth-teller once it’s too late, like a chain-smoking, whiskey-slamming Cassandra. Jax, on the other hand, is Beelzebub himself, a sinister trickster god who weaves an elaborate fantasy world around naive young women until they’re entrapped, abandoned by their family and friends, forced to undergo sadistic plastic surgery journeys on national television, uttering cursed sentences like: “Jax and I are still separated, still doing our podcast together.”
But the beauty of the show is in the rest of the cast, a grotesque collection of 40-something lesser demons, with no clear purpose in life beyond inflicting the maximum psychic damage on everyone around them. There's new mother Janet, who spent last season accusing cast members of posting mean things about her on Instagram in order to force her to miscarry, and is now falling into one of my favorite tropes found on the second season of a reality show: realizing all of America hated you last season, and desperately trying to immediately change your entire personality. There are Michelle and Jesse, the breakout stars of season one, two fascinating dead-eyed narcissists who are absolutely willing to destroy their child’s life if it means making their ex a little bit upset. There's Kristen’s boyfriend, who shows what adulthood might be like for an aspiring school shooter who never got his hands on a gun. There are Danny and Nia, two freaky, fake-nice space cadets with an addiction to breeding. And I'm so happy Jasmine is now a full cast member; it’s a truly inspired idea to take a cast of white lunatics and to throw a completely sane Black lesbian into the mix — every day of Jasmine's life with these people is a Jordan Peele movie. As Justin perfectly summed it up: “This show has so many people who were never meant to be on TV.”
So, I urge you: watch The Valley, and behold the rot at the core of our society. If nothing else, once you look beyond the screaming and trauma being inflicted on young children, this show can be soothing, if you let it. No matter how bad your life is right now, at least you’re not suing your coke-addicted husband for full custody of your child on camera! The cast of The Valley live at rock bottom, so we don't have to.
The Rehearsal, season 2 episode 1 — on HBO/MAX
Thankfully, season 2 is just as funny and brilliant as season 1 already, though the constant references to plane crashes are going to stress me the fuck out. I am desperate for a behind-the-scenes look at Nathan Fielder's method to the madness. How did he find the perfect sweet, naive, and willing pilot to play along with this whole thing? And how much of this is truly planned ahead? Did he really just start talking to this kid about his girlfriend and then, hearing him express a concern that she might fall in love with a customer at Starbucks, he ran with that and built a whole episode around it? Did he already know that the girlfriend had a fucking anklet gifted to her by a Starbucks customer, or was that just a happy accident?! On that note, how did Nathan Fielder know that 2025 would be the year of plane crashes?! This show is one long magic trick, and it remains the funniest, most brilliant, most terrifying spectacle.
Margo's Got Money Troubles, by Rufi Thorpe (2024) — library ebook
I really should have judged a book by its cover. This book got a lot of praise last year, so I threw it on my library list, but had second thoughts when I saw the airport romcom-looking cover. But I didn't want to be a snob, so I pushed through, only to once again hit a wall 10 pages in, when I found myself absolutely horrified by the writing style. The narration is childish as hell, and I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, but even if it's an intentional choice, it's extremely annoying. Like:
"And I don't even deserve my shitty life," he said. "I'm a horrible person."
"You are not," I said. "You're an amazing teacher! You've spent all this time with me, helping me."
"Every second of which I was desperately wanting to kiss you."
I did not know what to say to that. I mean, in a way I had a schoolgirl crush on him, but I'd never thought about kissing him. I just felt glow-y and good whenever he praised me.
What in the Colleen Hoover is this shit?! I once again almost gave up, but then I saw that it's being turned into a series starring my absolute GIRLS Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman, which pushed me to continue. And I will say, I found myself somewhat intrigued by the plot — in short, a college student is manipulated and impregnated by her much older and married professor, resulting in a baby that causes the titular money troubles — as well as the stylistic choice to alternate first- and third-person narration. The narrator frequently alludes to the fact that fiction is full of lies, and that it should never be trusted, so I flew through the book, eager to find out what the twist would be, what sort of lies the narrator was telling me.
Spoiler alert: there's no twist. Instead, we simply follow along as Margo opens an OnlyFans account which, basically, solves her money troubles. This book is great if you enjoy long, endless depictions of the business side of running an OnlyFans account, or pages of descriptions of TikTok videos. At times, I genuinely wondered if this book was sponsored by OnlyFans. On the surface, the author is grappling with class issues and gender dynamics and porn and fiction and other heavy subjects, but it never goes much deeper than the surface. In fact, it feels very one-note: Margo never feels that conflicted about sex work; the only issue she has with it is that everyone else has an issue with it. And the world of sex workers presented in the book feels extremely stereotypical, a world of cute, quirky white girls making tens of thousands of dollars on OnlyFans while creating silly TikToks to gain more followers.
I suppose this book would feel groundbreaking to a certain type of person, one who previously had no sympathy for sex workers or poor people, but are those people reading novels in 2025? Margo's Got Money Troubles feels like a book that got big mostly because it takes the online world seriously, which, I guess, is still a new concept for a certain group of book-readers. Not me, though! I guess I am a snob after all. I'm okay with that!