June Media Recap

Materialists, Adults, new music, and that’s basically it I honestly got kinda lazy this month

Hello hello, I hope everyone had a lovely pride month :) This is going to be a short recap. I got a really bad cold the first week of June and anything I watched during that week sort of drifted into my haze of illness. Then I went on vacation and obviously wasn’t watching much during that. There was also my monstrous All Stars 10 review, which I sort of wrote in a fever and expended most of my attention on this past week. I was considering skipping June altogether, but there are a few timely items that I couldn’t not talk about, on top of some of huge new music that I really want to talk about. So, enjoy this little bite, and hopefully I’ll have more to say next month.

---

Movies

Materialists (2025)

dir. Celine Song

There’s been a lot of dunking on this movie and dunking on Celine Song in particular, which just feels a little cruel and unfair to me. I hate to contribute to the pile on of an up-and-coming, woman of color director, who is clearly talented and has a lot of insights to share. I found Past Lives to be a really fresh and mature take on the romance genre for the way it was able to cinematically render missed connections and the internet and the tension of those relationships you have with people who knew you at such a nascent stage of your life (on top of being a beautiful allegory for the immigrant experience and the feeling of losing/searching for connection to where you came from). Materialists attempts to do some of the same things; it’s an undeniably modern romance that tries to dramatize the experience of using dating apps and explores relationships/marriage as a business venture/a form of image construction. I like those ideas a lot. Dating is so weird and impersonal nowadays, and I welcome anyone trying to get to the bottom of it. Unfortunately, Materialists itself felt impersonal. The central “love triangle” felt passionless and empty, and the dialogue was painfully stiff in a way that was probably intentional but just kept me at such a distance.

A big critique I’ve seen is that this movie is quite tonally confused. To be fair, I kind of liked how offbeat it was. It was one of the few things about this movie that felt charming and earnest in a hokey sort of way. In fact, for a movie with such a simultaneously contentious and reverent relationship to the romcom genre, I found that tonal confusion to be a bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke in its own way. I just think my biggest issue with this romance was the palpable lack of, well, romance. Every character was so cynical and this world felt dreary, devoid of urgency and passion. When Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans finally end up together (sorry to spoil but also it’s pretty obvious) it’s supposed to feel like this rapturous moment where they choose true love. But again, their connection was portrayed with so little passion and their dialogue was so dry that I got none of that.

The other big talking point with this movie has been the second act “twist,” particularly how confounding and dark that twist is and how unequipped this movie seems to be to handle that subject matter. I think Song’s intentions were in the right place in wanting to explore some of the dangers of modern dating and how precarious it can be for women to put themselves out there in a sea of men who relentlessly commodify them. Still, for the sheer fact that this plotline only really exists to service Dakota Johnson’s character and her arc, I found it to be in pretty poor taste. That “reveal” just sucked all the air out of the theater, the subsequent scenes addressing it always felt self-conscious, and I don’t think the script ever granted it the gravity it deserved. 

But above all else, this film is just kind of weird. It never coheres, it’s never not awkward, it’s very demure in its presentation until someone will just say or do the most bonkers thing in the most offhand way. It feels like a prime example of “gas-leak cinema”—a phrase I first heard via Blank Check who got it from David Ehrlich who apparently got it from another critic—in that everyone involved in the making of this film seems to have been the victim of a non-lethal gas leak. And really that’s all I have to say about that. But for real though… be a little nicer to Celine Song like damn.

I also watched a few films that were long-stewing in my watchlist. I finally watched There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s impeccably crafted, obliterating American Epic that I probably would have gone nuts for under any other circumstances but unfortunately got lost in the gloom of my cold. I also watched Billy Wilder’s classic Some Like It Hot, which was just a delightful time all around. Surely I’ve seen Marilyn Monroe in movies before but you watch this movie and you just get it, why no one can ever let the image of this woman go and why she is one of the most naturally magnetic screen presences to ever live. 

I also saw Wes Anderson’s newest film The Phoenician Scheme. I actually enjoyed this more than I expected, but ultimately I’m just not really a Wes girl. I struggle to access the emotional core of his films, and while this one wears its emotional core on its sleeve, the mannered style of everything still keeps me at arm’s length. But there were some really great bits in this as well as a generational (and generationally sexy?) Michael Cera performance. 

---

TV

Adults (and also Overcompensating)

Adults and Overcompensating have been getting compared to each other a lot, but these comparisons seem to be pretty surface level; I think they’re only there because both shows are about and created by Gen-Z, they’re both queer, they came out within a few weeks of each other, and they both star Owen Thiele. Despite quite a bit of snark coming from gay twitter, I was looking forward to Overcompensating. I liked the cast, I think Benito Skinner is very funny, and I’m basically the target audience for this kind of show. But honestly, I had to tap out after three episodes. It wasn’t atrocious by any means, it was just sort of… awkward? The show never found the right rhythm. I thought the humor was pretty cringeworthy in that the “jokes” usually weren’t actual jokes and were more just characters swearing or saying something in a goofy way. I also never really bought into the emotional stakes of the story, mainly because of how old everyone is. Don’t get me wrong I love a grown-adults-playing-teenagers comedy, but only when it leans into the absurdity of it. I just felt like Overcompensating was biting off a little bit more than it could chew and stumbling over itself in the execution.

Now comparing that show to Adults isn’t really fair because they’re doing totally different things. Overcompensating is about teenagers arriving at adulthood for the first time in college, and sets out to tell a more linear story, whereas Adults is about, well, young adults trudging through adulthood, and has the vibe of a more episodic, hangout style sitcom. The structures and theses of these shows are very different. And yet, I think the shortcomings of Overcompensating helped me understand what I loved about Adults so much and why I think it has longevity. I was worried that Adults would do that thing of leaning into Gen-Z humor too much, whipping out buzzy internet references, playing up whatever the current Gen-Z trends and archetypes are, and trying to appeal to Gen-Z’s infinitesimal attention spans with fast and easy humor, all of which would date the show almost immediately. And to be fair to Overcompensating, it’s not like it’s trying to be a definitive treatise on Gen-Z and in fact it makes the smart choice of existing in a sort of timeless alternate universe where decades and references are all a mishmash. Still, I identified a lot of the kind of brainrotted internet humor that has come to define our generation in Overcompensating, which just isn’t compelling comedy writing.

What makes Adults so good is that it has a genuine understanding of Gen-Z’s quirks and the anxieties so many of us have entering adult life at this particular moment in history while still honoring classic sitcom structure and classic joke structure. It hits the same pleasure centers as Abbott Elementary– there’s just something undeniably satisfying about watching a well-written, well-thought out network (adjacent) sitcom. I never felt pandered to or condescended to. It feels like the first time I’ve really seen my generation represented in this genre of the classic sitcom that I grew up watching. Every episode has an easily identifiable A-B-C plot structure, all the characters are clearly defined so that each permutation and splintering of the group will yield its own interesting dynamic, and the sitcom antics are so perfectly realized. There’s the dinner party episode, the hospital episode, the episode where they have a brush with a local stabber. It’s classic, tried-and-true sitcom stuff, and at the end of the day that’s all I want. In a just world, this show would run for five or six more seasons with 22 episodes each. I wanna see holiday episodes, I wanna see a two part vacation episode, I wanna see a meta episode where one of the characters writes a screenplay about a group of five friends living in New York. This show is just begging for that kind of treatment. Of course not every joke is completely cogent, and not every episode is a knockout. The pilot is easily the weakest of the bunch, and if you were going into this show worried that it would play too much into Gen-Z microtrends, I don’t think the pilot would deter you of that notion. But when the humor hits it really hits, and it has that warm feeling of coming home and being taken care of that all the best sitcoms about friends just hanging out can make you feel. 

---

Music

I don’t talk about music on here that often because I’m honestly so bad about keeping up with new releases and I hardly ever listen to new stuff anymore. But this just so happened to be a huge music month with some of my most anticipated releases of the year, so let’s get into it, shall we?

Addison - Addison Rae

I was an Addison Rae denier for the longest time. I thought her downtown it-girl image was so fake and pandering, and in general I’m allergic to whenever the powers at be try to convince me that a TikTok star has the juice to be an actual star. Well, in this case it wasn’t her juice that convinced me, it was Diet Pepsi. Diet Pepsi is a rallying cry, a song I would sincerely describe as generational. That song just activated something in me upon its release, and completely turned around my opinion of her. I don’t think it’s fake anymore, I think she’s the real deal! 

Diet Pepsi is ultimately my favorite song on the album, which kind of sucks because it always feels a little lame when the lead single of an album blows all the other songs out of the water. But there’s still some great stuff in here. High Fashion is killer and campy. Summer Forever is a very fitting Lana tribute. Fame is a Gun is CUNTY. Times Like These is surprisingly introspective. But the other major highlight is Headphones On, a gorgeous song that coalesces a lot of the obvious early Björk and 90s Madonna influences. Not to mention it’s kind of the platonic ideal of songs you can put over random pictures on your Instagram story and it’s funny no matter what. Brava, Addison!

I quit - HAIM

I’ve never been a Haim devotee, but I was so enamored with their single Relationships, and all the subsequent singles but especially Down to be wrong, that I was really anticipating this album. And it didn’t let me down! Not to sound like an idiot but this album is such a vibe. I love the blissed out, nostalgic feeling on songs like Take me back and Lucky stars, and then my breath is taken away by the really emotional and tender songs like Love you right and Everybody’s trying to figure me out. Right now I think my favorite, though, is Spinning. Alana sings lead on this one and I find her voice to be so youthful and charming, a fun contrast to how funky this song is (maybe my favorite baseline of the year). My take on Haim has always been that they make perfect driving-around-in-California music, so that’s the curve I usually judge them on, and I think this album passes with flying colors.

Virgin - Lorde

I have admittedly not spent as much time with this album yet. Everything about this album, from the cover art to the production style to the subject matter, felt very gritty and grimy, yet very pared-back and also a little antiseptic. That’s certainly the vibe that she’s going for, and Lorde has always been so good at combining that hollowed-out feeling with undeniable pop hooks and dance beats, but I don’t know if it’s what I’m vibing with right now. Neither of the first two singles really captured me. There’s a lot I like about What Was That, specifically Lorde’s vocal performance which is so soulful and fragile it feels like it could shatter, yet it’s not a song I’ve felt inclined to revisit much. But so far the songs I like most on the album are Hammer (despite the fact that I hope to never have to hear the word “ovulation” said in earnest ever again), Shapeshifter, Broken Glass, and If She Could See Me Now. These feel like the songs that best utilize the sound she’s going for on this album. All that being said, despite Lorde being one of my favorites of all time, it usually takes me a little time to warm up to all of her albums (yes, even my 10th grade self didn’t *love* Melodrama on first listen, which seems insane in retrospect), so I look forward to this album growing on me.

Ethel Cain’s new singles

Staying on the subject of esoteric alt-pop girlies, I’ve also been loving the new Ethel Cain songs. She is one of my mothers, indubitably, and if the new songs are any indication then this album is going to be spectacular. I can’t think of any current artist whose storytelling prowess matches hers, and Nettles is a perfect example of that. I also couldn’t believe what I was hearing on Fuck Me Eyes the first time I listened to it. The big 80’s synth moment was so unexpected, but feels like a totally natural evolution and iteration of her larger storytelling project. Her new album will be the perfect early birthday present for me (yes August is coming up which means I’m gonna start making everything about my birthday).

---

Okay that’s June for ya. See you next month <3