July Recap
What I’ve been watching, a new book club, and one very urgent trip to Costco
July continues to be disgustingly hot and rainy, and I continue to hide indoors, watching television, reading books, and waiting for some semblance of autumn to save me from this hell.
What I watched
I only watched a small handful of movies this month, but all three delivered pretty much exactly what I expected.
Backrooms: Yes, I finally watched Backrooms, and it lived up to the hype. It’s still crazy to me that watching people walk down empty hallways with subpar fluorescent lighting can be so scary, but here we are. Liminal space horror fascinates me, and I think the film does a really good job of translating Kane Parsons’s web series into a feature-length movie. I was also impressed by the caliber of the cast and their performances.
Parsons has said there’s more story to tell, but they haven’t announced an official sequel yet. The situation has become a little complicated since A24 entered into an AI research partnership with Google, something Parsons has spoken out against. It’s unclear whether he’d be willing to continue working with A24, but I hope they work it out or another studio picks it up because I would love a sequel.
Companion: I don’t know why it took me so long to watch this, but I loved it! It’s fun, gory, and actually made me laugh out loud a few times. I expected its take on AI and toxic relationships to be a little obvious, but it had a lot to say about control, entitlement, and the way men reduce their partners to desirable traits while wanting to eliminate everything that makes them fully human.
It also explores some of the same themes as my favorite movie of the year so far, Obsession—namely how easily controlling behavior can be disguised as love when the person doing the controlling has convinced himself that he’s the injured party. Plus, Sophie Thatcher rules.
Deep Water: Anyone who knows me knows that I love a terrible shark movie, and boy, was this a terrible shark movie. Pretty much nothing in it was good, and I enjoyed it immensely. Fans of bad shark movies will have a great time. Fans of good movies will be deeply disappointed.
TV roundup
House of the Dragon: We’re nearly done with this season, and it’s kind of…boring? The episodes are too long, and everyone spends a lot of time standing in dark rooms complaining about things we all know are going to happen anyway. Still, I can’t bring myself to give it up.
I think my weird crush on Aemond might be carrying the whole show for me at this point. Maybe it’s the eye patch. Every time he appears, I suddenly care more about what’s happening. Unfortunately, he has barely been onscreen this season, which may explain my disappointment.
This hasn’t stopped me from making silly posts about the characters on Instagram, because this is apparently where my energy is going lately.
Cape Fear: Remember when I wrote about how excited I was for this show and thought it had promise?
I was so young and innocent then.
The series has gone completely off the rails. Jumped the shark. Taken a hard left into full-blown nonsense.
It’s beautifully shot, and the actors are doing their best, but there’s only so much anyone can do with this writing. Every decision the characters make feels designed solely to push the plot into an even more ludicrous position, and things get more baffling every week.
I have no idea how Amy Adams wound up here, and I truly hope this never happens to her again. I’m fully hate-watching now, but I’m in too deep to leave before I see how it ends.
You: I’m still working my way slowly through the final season. No spoilers, please, but I’m very curious to see how they wrap up Joe Goldberg’s story. The only logical ending seems to be Joe finally getting caught for his crimes.
At the same time, the show (and a large part of its audience) has always seemed unusually invested in letting him get away with everything, so I genuinely have no idea where this is going, but I’m having a good time seeing where it leads.
The Esprit situation
I usually pride myself on avoiding silly TikTok trends (I’m not even on TikTok), but then I saw that Costco had released Esprit sweatshirts, and my little ’80s child heart exploded with nostalgia and lost all judgment.
Apparently, they were going viral and selling out everywhere, so I called my mother—the one with the Costco membership—and made her take me before they disappeared. I approached this with the urgency of someone trying to secure the last helicopter off an island before the volcano erupted.
I bought two because once you’ve crossed that line, restraint feels beside the point. They are currently folded in my closet, waiting for me to become the coolest kid in 1988.
A non-book club book club
I used to belong to several book clubs, but they’ve all gradually disappeared from my life. Some disbanded because of internal conflict or a lack of interest. I stopped attending others because the selections started leaning heavily toward romance or romantasy, genres that I’m usually not interested in reading.
Now I’m down to one virtual book club, which is a group of former coworkers getting together every few months. It’s great, but I’ve been missing meeting people in actual real life and talking about books. So when a friend suggested that a small group of us start our own non-book club book club, I was totally on board.
We pick a book, meet somewhere for dinner, and talk about it. There are four of us. That’s the entire structure.
We had our first meeting this month at a cute Italian restaurant, where we ate far too much bruschetta and discussed Writers & Lovers by Lily King.
I enjoyed the book, though years of enthusiastic recommendations may have pushed my expectations a little too high. I love Lily King’s writing, but I preferred Euphoria, which had a more compelling plot and stronger characters, in my opinion. I’ll have more to say in my monthly reading recap, which is coming soon.
I’d also love to find another good virtual book club. If you know of any that read across genres, give me a holler.
Two trailers I’m excited about
The trailer for Other Mommy, the adaptation of Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, dropped this month, and I have high hopes. If you remember, I really did not like the book. I didn’t find it nearly as scary as promised, but the trailer gave me more creeps than all 300-plus pages, so I’m optimistic that the movie will finally deliver the scares I wanted from that story.
I’m also pretty psyched about Yaga, an upcoming series on AMC+ / Crave. I’ve always found Baba Yaga folklore to be fascinating, and this seems like a unique take that involves Carrie-Anne Moss and Hudson Williams being sexy and creepy, so I’m all in.
A little housekeeping
For at least the rest of the summer, I’m shifting to one post a week on Mondays instead of publishing on both Mondays and Thursdays. I have a lot going on right now, and this schedule feels more manageable for me.
I’ve also decided to permanently move my monthly reading roundups into their own posts rather than trying to smush them in here. I just read too damn much. What can I say?
If this post made you think, laugh, or want to text a friend, I’d love a heart. Or share it with someone you think would love it. It helps grow this weird, wonderful thing we’ve got going here 💕
And you can always…
💬 Leave a comment—I’d love your thoughts!
✍🏻 Check out my most popular posts
✨ Follow me on Instagram or Threads
📚 Become my friend on Goodreads
☕ Buy me a coffee here
I know we talked about it, but I still laughed seeing your Deep Water recap. Truly the movie that keeps giving! I just watched Devil's Mouth or whatever it's called and it is somehow even worse!
Also loved Companion so much!
My husband is not a horror person, but I did discover this past year that he will enthusiastically crush a creature feature - the worse the better - and am going to lobby for a viewing of Deep Water this week.