I Have Watched “The Two Popes” Nine Times. It Should Win No Oscars on Sunday.
Peter Mountain/Netflix It was the fourth time I watched The Two Popes that I realized I could not stop. I first saw director Fernando Meirelles’s fake conversation between real popes Benedict and Francis with my Roman Catholic family over the holidays. My grandfather liked it. I liked it. And I thought it would end there…
I Want to Punch Baby Yoda and Science Backs Me Up
Mother Jones Illustration; Shutterstock, Disney+ Whenever I see Baby Yoda, I’m overcome with the urge to harm it. Every time a Baby Yoda meme pops up on Instagram or Twitter, I want to punch it. I want to throttle it. I want to dropkick it the way Kyle punts his brother in South Park. My…
The Best TV Show About Racism Was a Comic-Book Fantasia. Here’s How “Watchmen” Did It.
HBO On the day HBO’s Watchmen resurrected a race war, a producer brought a priest onto the set in Georgia to pray with cast members. This was going to be the show’s opening sequence, a depiction of the Tulsa massacre of 1921. White people in Klan attire, on horseback. Black folks getting gunned down indiscriminately.…
I Wish Clint Eastwood Would Do to Himself What Female Movie Journalists Are Always Doing to Their Sources
Clint Eastwood arrives at the AFI Fest 2019 – Richard Jewell premiere. Sthanlee B. Mirador/AP There are a lot of things that have really, truly sucked about being desperately addicted to journalism, of all things, while also being female, but if one more movie/TV show/porno/whatever comes out in which a female journalist exchanges sex for…
The Best and Worst of Abortion TV Since the 1970s
ABC Previously, on TV: the abortion-quandary plotline, featuring an uncertain pregnant woman agonizing over her decision. For years, this was how abortion was portrayed—a right-wing fantasy, essentially, present even in shows with broadly liberal politics. But as the medium flowered in the new century, so did abortion TV. Now abortions could be just another part…
Has TV Ever Gotten Abortion Right?
Melinda Beck In 1981, eight years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion and just a year before her breakout role as pregnant Stacy in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jennifer Jason Leigh played another apparently knocked-up high schooler, this time in a CBS after-school special called I Think I’m Having a Baby. Leigh is Laurie,…