everything I've binge-watched in the last however long, part whatever
air-conditioning, amortization, and more things I'm very late to
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Here’s some stuff I’ve binge-watched lately. Not all of it is television, but all of it is binge-watching. (This is part of an ongoing series, some of the rest of which you can find here, here, here, here, and here.)
Bull Durham: God I love this deeply stupid movie so much. I understand that watching one normal-length movie not even in a theater or anything doesn’t count as binge-watching, but, and hear me out, sometimes it does. This was one of those times. I put Bull Durham on way too late at night, because we’d had dinner at my godmother’s house, and she’d said she loves this movie, and Thomas had said he’d never seen it. So when we got home, after midnight on a weeknight, I turned on the TV instead of going to bed, and hit play on the horniest baseball movie in the world.
I just love so much that there was this little corner of years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when the only movie it was legal to make was an erotic thriller. If you wanted to make a baseball movie, well, too bad, you were going to have to make it out of the parts for an erotic thriller, because those were the only parts we had for you. I love that Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have maybe the most high-key slapstick farcical sex scenes ever committed to film, and that while filming those scenes in this movie they got together in real life and stayed together for twenty-one years. Twenty-one years! I love that Susan Sarandon is forty-two in this movie and looks forty-two in this movie and is acknowledged without question by every character and also the film itself to be the hottest woman on the planet. I love that Kevin Costner clearly met the devil at a crossroads and asked to be fuckable in movies and the devil was like “Ok, do you want to be somewhat fuckable in a bunch of movies, or do you want to be the most fuckable person in the world in exactly one movie only?” Kevin Costner is unbelievably sexy in this movie, and was never within driving distance of sexy at any other time in his life or career ever again.
I love that I know nothing about how baseball works or how it is played and never will and yet have in my life cried at the end of a probably two-digit number of baseball movies. I love how this bizarre, creaky, horny movie and A League of Their Own and The Art of Fielding and Field of Dreams all have exactly nothing in common and all are the exact same thing. I love how sports is always romance, is always feelings, is always just an excuse to get into the warmest soapiest water available. I love how at a baseball game the stadium almost always looks out at some grand view behind the field, and the sun is setting and everybody is eating hot dogs, and ice cream out of a little hat, and greasy fries, and the game takes roughly fourteen hours, and at no point do I ever know who is winning, but I somehow always end up feeling all these big feelings about precisely nothing. I love how baseball is love, and sex, and America, and a new car, and the smell of a grill in somebody’s else’s backyard in late summer, and a rising three-chord progression in a pop song, and not a sport at all.
Hacks: When I was an unbearable teenager, all I wanted to be was a glamorous middle-aged woman. I annoyed any number of teachers and family friends who even vaguely fit this description by endlessly trying desperately to get close to them. What I mean here is that Hacks is very good, and very uneven, and made me miss someone I knew many years ago, and called up the memory of every older, ornery, glamorous woman I ever decided was going to be my mentor whether she liked it or not.
I write a lot—too much, honestly—about found family and chosen family. I think about it too much, too, and have spent too much of my life trying too hard to engineer this kind of love. Many of my experiences with it have been—to use a useless and facile shorthand—toxic, and that toxicity was as much on my part as anybody else’s. Chosen family can turn harmful as easily as any other relationship. Just like how all art is bad if you round up, all relationships are toxic if you round up; on its face, closeness with another person is a queasy proposition and a losing bet. We are all minefields for one another, the dangers inevitable, buried just under the surface, seeding the ground.
What I liked best about Hacks was when it leaned on this aspect of found family, the ickiness of it, the way the stories and the realities don’t quite line up.