Good Re-Reads, Bad Parodies, and GREAT Drone Shots
Also, Heather has a Smell. Happy Tuesday!
My city’s library requires that you renew your card every three years, like the DMV. I assume there is a good reason for this, but I always discover mine has expired when I’m trying to check out an e-book at like 11 p.m., and then Going to the Library to Renew My Card turns into one of my Toasters in the Basement. (Technically, I can call them, but I always feel like calling a librarian is annoying to them because they’re busy with Library Stuff. I’m sure we have a LOT of librarians in our readership so please let me know if I’m off base here.) Anyway, I took care of this errand a couple of weeks ago, and I know I am preaching to the choir but, man, the library is great. Mine is in an old house and it has a fireplace and a garden and you can “check out” seeds for your own garden! Every time I leave clutching a new book, I am delighted anew that I have a functional library card again.
This delight, of course, reminded me of how much time I used to spend at the library as a kid. My parents were very hands-off about my reading — as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m sure they would have intervened if they saw me with Mein Kampf or something truly alarming, but in general, I got to check out whatever I wanted and we went once a week or so. Like a lot of kids, I would go through long periods of checking out the same book multiple times. (My feeling is that checking out a favorite from the library versus buying it is comparable to the thrill you get hearing your favorite song on the radio as opposed to intentionally playing it. It’s exciting to have it suddenly available to you!) The one I remember most might not have even been a children’s book, although my obsession with it does date from elementary school. It was a history of clothing throughout time, and the page with which I was most obsessed was just drawings of the evolution of women’s headwear in the Middle Ages, eventually culminating in the big pointy classic Medieval Headgear. MY GOD, this book was compelling! Was it a textbook? Was it a reference item for costume designers? I have no idea! It was mostly all drawings and I would spend what seemed like hours just looking at all the outfits.
I guess this proved to be, ultimately, in keeping with my general interests. But I had other Library Book Obsessions. As I think I’ve mentioned previously, I also was REALLY into books about people who survived a bear attack, and, related, books about people who got bitten by sharks. I was extremely interested in the Bubonic Plague, and also reincarnation. Psychic phenomenon, obviously. Anything Guinness World Records-related, though my parents eventually did buy the Guinness Book of World Records and I spent a LOT of time reading about, like, the guy with the world’s longest fingernails. This leads me to the question you all knew was coming: What was the book you checked out of the library a million times as a kid? Did you have any weird niche obsessions? Why was I, a child from a distinctly non-camping family, convinced that I needed to know how to fight off a bear? (I was only a Girl Scout for like a year, but I guess I do believe in being prepared.) Please share.
— Jessica
Aw, Fackham
I love a parody movie— I was not joking when I said The Naked Gun might’ve been my favorite film of 2025 — and I enjoy the heck out of a posh costume drama, so Saturday night I sat down with Kevin and a friend to watch Fackham Hall, which fuses the genres. “Catch it on the right night in the right mood, and this will be more fun than it has any right to be,” one lukewarm review said, and it felt like the right night and we certainly were in the right mood, and yet somehow it was less fun than it had a right to be?!? It’s at 74% on Rotten Tomatoes, and that is baffling to me. And that’s WITH reviews that read, “It’s deliciously silly, stupid and hilarious, and I guarantee you’ll leave the cinema with a smile on your face,” but then only give it a 3.5 out of 5. Also, that guarantee is LIES.
Fackham Hall stars Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Thomasin McKenzie, Tom Felton, and other folks whose faces are vaguely familiar. It dares to ask the question, “Can a movie’s first two jokes be about incest and masturbation?” (They come in the form of Fackham Hall’s motto on the gate — Incestus ad Infinitum — and the downstairs servants’ bell ringing faster and faster and faster from a place labeled Masturbatorium.) The promo wants you to think it’s a murder mystery as well as a play on Upper Crust society from that era, but it takes forever for anyone to die — so long, in fact, that neither Kevin nor our friend Carrie believed me about the murder and I even started to question myself — and first we have to sit through surprisingly boring scenes about one daughter being forced to marry her cousin in order to keep her family at the estate, and then jilting said cousin, and then lots of panicking. By the time the murder happens, the best they can do to parody that genre is a weak Who’s On First replica with the name of the cop. There are, inexplicably, two songs, one of which is a bunch of penile witticisms being performed on the pianoforte, and the other of which is supposed to poke fun at cockney sing-a-longs, which do not feel particularly germane to the genre of movie or TV show that this one is parodying.
It’s the kind of movie that thinks it’s revolutionary to have an older woman in the 1930s using modern raunchy slang; to have a tiny gramophone radio in the car through which we hear a DJ calling classical music “a real banger”; and to have a girl write a letter and then cover her XOXOXOXO in pink glitter before accidentally dropping it in a chamber pot with a real floater of a loaf in it, and then sending it anyway. It triples down on the cracks about marrying your cousin and throws in a few more about masturbation and penises for good measure — this is the second movie I have written about lately with a prosthetic boner, which is two more than I wanted. Frankly it might even be three more. And just in case you didn’t get that “Fackham Hall” sounds like “fuck ‘em all,” they will repeat it like four times. Nothing says confidence in your humor like hanging eighty five bells on it and then hitting them all with a cricket bat.
I’m grateful for the murder because it gave me one real laugh — “Who was the last person to see him alive?” “The MURDERER!” “ Precisely!” — but that was spoiled in the preview. We almost should have turned it into a game, to see which gag we thought worked the least. It may have been when they wondered if “Cyri” — a.k.a. Cyril the butler — was listening to them talk, and noting that this is why they fired Alexa (this only works out loud when you hear that Cyri rhymes with Siri, and even then, I actually missed it the first time somehow). Or, perhaps it was when a guy runs into a rapid alterations place that turned out to be named Tailor Swift. It may have been when the twins fawning over A Man and yearning to someday marry A Man are introduced as The Bechdel Sisters, or perhaps that would have worked if they’d never gone back to it after that, but of course they did, because this is also the sort of movie that is enchanted by its own running gags. None of the cockney running gags were very good. I liked the idea of the dude who would talk of his harrowing war stories and then flash back to them and they’d turn out to be benign — like, saying someone saved his life, and it turned out to be just by saying, “You should get that mole looked at” — but that running gag began with a memory about how he hurt his leg during combat because he was in bed wanking to a photograph of a lady when something knocked him out of his bunk, and I feel like jerk-off jokes are pretty lazy.
Same with scatological humor, of which there is of course plenty, like a scene where J.R.R. Tolkien — yes — is stuck in a bathroom farting while two lovebirds have a secret conversation. Tolkien is, I guess, the stand-in for when shows and movies like to include a real-life famous creative type, as when Gosford Park brings in Ivor Novello.1 The Tolkien stuff never lands except for MAYBE one Gollum gag where he writes down the unexpected catchphrase in his notes, but gamely the film keeps trying anyway. It also loved having the priest at the various weddings incorrectly punctuate his readings from the Bible and then correct himself, so that he would say something SHOCKING and INAPPROPRIATE and it’d turn out to be that he should have turned the page. Confidentially, I was hoping that I’d rehash some of these and start laughing and realize maybe it was better than I thought, but… no. A lot of them feel a bit too much like poor recreations of things they saw in other movies. That bit with the war memories being misrepresented reminds me of the opening of Hot Shots, when Topper Harley’s war-hero father crash-lands… but survives, and is then shot because he had branches in his hair and was mistaken for a deer.
In fact, the nice thing about Fackham Hall is that it makes me appreciate movies like both the old and new Naked Gun2 that do stupid really, really well. There is an ART to Big Dumb Fun. Like, as noted, I tend to think poop and fart jokes are also extremely lazy and I’m not a fan, but I could not help myself from giggling at the chili dog sequence in the most recent Naked Gun. Maybe I gave myself over to it because the rest of the humor was very well-executed, so it earned my faith. Airplane is a classic for a reason, and hits right out of the gate. Fackham Hall started out weak and just stayed there; by contrast, Top Secret opens with the Beach Boys parody “Skeet Surfing” (and features Jim “Mr. Carson” Carter as Déjà Vu, a fun sighting that obviously did not mean anything to me until I watched it again in a post-Downton world). So if the night and the mood are both right, I’d suggest that you say their beloved “fack ‘em all” to Fackham Hall and stream one of those instead.
— Heather
I Just Need To Vent About This
As of Saturday, we have a MYSTERY SMELL in our fridge. And it is not often that a smell remains a mystery in my house, because I am very good at rooting them out, but I am BEDEVILED currently.
I will spare you the long version of the story, but: The Smell is not chemical in nature. Rather, it’s like when you open your garbage to toss something and realize something in there has turned and you need to take it out to the cans. Still, we did some Googling, because it’s a new fridge, about two weeks old; we ran through all the possible causes and this does not seem to be any of them, including off-gassing from any of the interior parts. Just to be safe, we wiped the whole thing out with the recommended 50-50 water and vinegar solution, and left it overnight. As part of that process, we emptied the contents — there aren’t a ton, given how new it is — into the smaller fridge in our garage/den, and as we pulled each thing out, we gave every one of them a good sniff. They all smelled totally normal. You can probably see where this is going: Monday morning, the main fridge was totally normal and Smell had MIGRATED into the other fridge. So now we’re on the equivalent of an elimination diet, moving things over one piece at a time to see which one brings back Smell so that we can toss it without eighty-sixing every single condiment we own. I thought I had it just now, when I moved over a plastic basket of strawberries from the store and detected traces of Smell after an hour, but when stuck my nose in and took a big whiff of the berries, they just smelled… like berries. WHENCE COMETH THE ODOR???
For now, the strawbs are back in the other fridge to see if Smell dissipates again. Meanwhile, the little fridge is suffering, so I had to rescue my Diet Cokes. I don’t want them in pain. But I DO NOT LIKE being defeated by this. WHAT. IS. THE SMELL.
Thank you for your time. That helped. But I will feel better when I catch the bastard.
— Heather
Is That Terrace Like the Balcony Version of a Glass Bottom Boat?
Thanks to the Broad who sent in the listing for this pretty spectacular villa in Cap d’Antibes, which has a great view; an amazing pool; a private beach, which I’ve just decided needs to be a requirement; a wine cellar; a glass elevator in which you could pretend to be a Bond villain; a weird water feature that is either a fountain or a hot tub; a lot of leopard print furniture; and, crucially, video footage of the property that includes a hint of a perfectly reasonable bathroom:
This is what drones are meant for: letting me see the view on the $17 million dollar estate I’m pretending I might buy. More of this!
— Jessica
ICYMI
Last Call
— You are probably aware that the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale kicked off this weekend; we put together what I’m calling The Boring Edit for Go Fug Yourself, e.g., bras, undies, socks. The practical stuff you might want to stock up on while it’s marked down! Let me do the legwork here. — J
— My Spice Girls-loving heart is pleased to read that Victoria Beckham designed Mel C’s wedding dress for her recent (as in, this past Saturday) wedding, which was attended by Spices Baby, Scary, and Ginger. (Posh had to go to the World Cup with Becks.) Page Six also reports that “guests reportedly called the weekend ceremony ‘perfect’ — despite a herd of cows reportedly running toward the venue as the couple stood at the altar at the ‘intimate’ celebration.” Listen, these things happen. — J
Or Gran Hotel introduces Agatha Christie! - J
In addition to the others mentioned, I’d also put Johnny Dangerously in that category, maybe?
So so off base! Call us! Please. LAPL may have a 24 hour chat service too.
The every three years is to help update addresses since many people move and accurate records make Circ Managers happy. If you haven't moved, it takes 5 seconds on the phone.
I think this is fairly common among young girls, but I read every horse book my local library possessed, even the ones about horse maintenance (I did not then and never will own a horse).