A Return to Form
RHOT (Real Housewives of Tatooine) finale, awards-ish, Pattinson for GQ, and more.
Welcome to Hyperfixate! This is a weekly newsletter that is trying its best. Subscribe for free here. My ko-fi is here. Muchas gracias.
Hello, this has been a hard week for me. But it’s been a really decent week for things that I like. If I slide into oblivion before my time and end up just an amalgamation of pieces of media I quickly obsess over, I think I’d be okay with that.
The Academy Award for Best Three Bags of Tostitos Scoops
The nominations for the Academy Awards are out and I could not be more regular about it. I’m very excited for Kristen Stewart, I’ve loved her for a long time. I am ecstatic for Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst, I am a huge fan of their whole deal, The Power of the Dog has probably been one of my favourite films in the last decade. Plemons is one of my favorite performers ever. He is the first Like Mike cast member to be nominated for an Academy Award. Slay. Everything else? I did not pay much attention, nor do I have a reaction. I haven’t seen enough. I’ve seen Dune. I love Dune. I have also seen King Richard, joining the ranks of Oscar-nominated movies that feature five minutes or less of Jon Bernthal (my personal niche).
Awards season can be super fun, just for the jokes and for the laughs. I don’t like taking it seriously. I think accolades are weird. They’re so bizarre, aren’t they?
They Got A Slut In The Bacta Tank
Spoilers for The Real Housewives of Tatooine—it’s government name: The Book of Boba Fett—but really, does anyone care? It’s the Boba Fett show, nothing is new.
The finale for The Real Housewives of Tatooine, my personal euphoria, came out today and I had a silly little time. Of course, I only tuned in to find out the fate of my fruity little Marshal (he’s fine, sort of) and whether or not my son dropped out of Jedi School because of his flop of a teacher (he did). But it took a while for us to get there.
Fett prepares for a gang war against the Pyke Syndicate and awaits reinforcement from Din Djarin’s last excursion to his boyfriend’s hometown, Freetown neé Mos Pelgo. The rest of his people: the bipedal Angry Bird Villians, Krrsantan the Salt and Pepper Wookie, and the girl from Yellowjackets and her gang of space Vespa riders have all been assigned their quarters to make sure they’re covered.
Meanwhile, Yung Grogu pays Amy Sedaris a visit with the help of R2-D2. He wears his beskar chainmail t-shirt underneath his cute potato sack dress, making his choice not to take Yoda’s old lightsaber. The irony is not lost on that kid that this Jedi Master preaching letting go of one’s attachments holding on to his dead mentor’s special sword. Skywalker, you weren’t even in the episode and you still managed to FLOP!
House Fett discovers they’ve been betrayed by the other crime families in Mos Espa and they fight to the bitter end and manage to overcome the Pyke forces! Or so they think… The equivalent to the drug dealer with the Kardashian inflection from euphoria on this show, Cad Bane, served cunt, and then this time he died. As fans of The Clone Wars will know, Cad Bane is a tough son of a bitch. But alas, he is defeated. I feel like The Book of Boba Fett is just a collaborative fix-it fic by Favreau, Filoni, and Robert Rodriguez. The protagonist operating on the relativity of “good” finally—after seven episodes—defeats a bigger evil. Fennec Shand being the absolute slay queen that she is massacres the Pyke bosses and the crime families. Amy Sedaris shows up in a droid becak (or rickshaw, as you lot call it) and pitches in during the fight and flirts with the weird Vice Mayor at the same time. Father and Son are reunited, all is well in Mos Espa.
The last frame of the show is Thundercat in Fett’s fortress, outside of his presumably HAIM-circulated mod workshop, showing off his cool scalpel arm over a submerged Cobb Vanth. That’s right, our marshal is alive! They did NOT bury my gay! What a time to be alive. Slutting it up in that bacta tank with an Elizabeth Holmes tank top. What a time to be alive indeed.
This show was a hot mess but they did one thing right: they realised the value of Space Cowboy Timothy Olyphant. Cobb Vanth should return. I don’t care in what, he just should.
Yep!
The trailer for Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated follow-up to Us, Nope, will premiere this Sunday during the Super Bowl. I never know when the Super Bowl is on, I always feel like the Super Bowl is happening all the time and we’re getting silly commercials and exclusive trailers all the time.
Peele is a huge advocate of a cause close to my heart: putting hot people in movies. Nope will star Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Steven Yeun. I read something ridiculous on Twitter earlier this week about someone dunking on television when their job is to make television and it reminded me that if television is going to do anything? It’s putting hot people on the small screen before the big screen. Skins, True Jackson VP, The Walking Dead joint slay. Thank you Jordan Peele!
Steven Yeun in this yeehaw aesthetic reminiscent of his GQ photoshoot is everything to me. The bolo tie is excellent.
Get With The Winning Team (Team Edward)
It has been a great week to be a Twihard, reformed or otherwise. Kristen Stewart’s Academy Award nomination around the same time Robert Pattinson graces the cover of GQ Magazine is just the stars aligning in Forks, Washington. Look at how good he looks. I’m obsessed with everything in this shoot; the production design, the couture selections, the bleached hair, the semen-looking font on the cover. Chef’s kiss. Werk, slay, et al.
Every Pattinson profile is filled with gems of feral, almost Jackass-like abstraction and insanity. Be it a microwave pasta recipe or how he came to his accent in The King, reading the edited ins and outs of his mind has always been a treat. There’s a section in the profile where he and the writer talk a bit about film as a medium not being able to keep up with the culture around it, no longer generating the zeitgeist, and it’s actually kind of fun. To be able to articulate a thought like that—neither new nor revolutionary—without the threat of reactionary drivel, attacks, or general internet cynicism. Maybe that’s just me in my Pattinson enjoyer bubble. There’s also a bit towards the end about all the different hats Pattinson has worn in his life leading up to how he feels about his life now. It’s a decent read, you can read it here.
Men Do Be Menning
The trailer for Alex Garland’s upcoming film starring the illustrious and Academy Award-nominated Jessie Buckley, Men, came out today. It is eerie. It is weird. There’s a weird guy lurking. I am trying to figure her accent out. I am at peace. New Alex Garland means I am about to become exponentially more annoying than I already am. You didn’t see me when Devs first came out. I was insufferable.
Doodle Bug
I decided to crudely draw the opening image to today’s newsletter because I’ve been feeling a little sorry for myself. I’ve been feeling like nothing I do is enough nor is it valid, artistically or otherwise. I’m getting over it though. It’s just a case of something my best friend calls “Little Bitch Syndrome” which is very embarrassing but it happens.
I decided to draw because I haven’t done it in a while and I’m not very good at it. Like most things I do now, I taught myself how to do them, or have absorbed it during formal schooling under an entirely different context—so I haven’t entirely mastered those skills. Which is cool because I still get to learn new things about them.
I’m not very good at drawing, and I’m okay with that. I need to be that way about everything else. Just making something because I want to or need to instead of worrying about how it will look, how it will be perceived, and all that stuff we get into our heads when we’re no longer children but not yet inching closer to death, if experience were linear.
This newsletter, like most of my creative pursuits, is all over the place. It’s finding its shape as it goes along. I need to be okay with that instead of expecting myself to be fully formed immediately right now in this exact moment. Sorry for ending this in a super corny way.
I read a quote today (from the Gublerland Cemetery Quote Rat) that said: “I find it perfectly acceptable and rather admirable to be mildly delusional.” I like that a lot. Here’s to mild delusion. Thanks for reading!