The Daily Beast Obsessed

It is incredibly exciting to watch Kathryn Hahn act. There’s a certain brashness to her full-throttle comedic performances that is as physical to watch as it is for her to perform. She charges at you with so much force you would duck for cover, were it not so entertaining to watch. (Think Bad Moms, Wanderlust, How Do You Know, or her guest work on Parks and Recreation.

Taika Waititi went through a swastika phase as a kid. Not proudly, but with the compulsive fascination of a half-Jewish schoolkid discovering how easily reproduced the world’s most potent symbol of hate is. He’d etch them in his notebook—then quickly scribble in extra lines, disguising them as four-paned windows. He’d then get nervous about all the windows on his pages and draw houses, or sometimes skyscrapers, entire cityscapes full of windows.

You won’t see the smiley-faced logo of The Comedian—a savage, cynical, cigar-chomping vigilante from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal Watchmen—in HBO’s new series of the same name. Yet his spirit hovers over the network’s superb latest, which views ideas about American nobility, altruism and gallantry—the very qualities that define classical superheroes, and their genre—as a sick joke.

In High Life, the Claire Denis astro-thriller released earlier this year, Robert Pattinson’s prisoner, in a remarkable display of restraint, abstains from wanking in “The Box,” a metallic masturbation room housed in the most fucked-up spaceship imaginable. Not so in The Lighthouse. In fact, the future Batman tugged himself off with such vigor, such frenzied commitment, it charmed his director.

In the opening moments of the new documentary The Cave, set in the bombed-out Syrian war zone of Eastern Ghouta, a missile lands. Then another. And another. Each detonates a cloud of rubble, dust, and, though the frame is thankfully not zoomed in enough to confirm, inevitably human life. The cumulus of debris eventually envelops the once-visible trajectory path of the rocket, the lingering smoke memory of eventual, catastrophic destruction.

A single woman gets pregnant and realizes that the most profound relationship in her life is the one she has with her doorman. A married couple nearing divorce finds an unexpected path to connection on the tennis court. A gay couple’s life is upended when their desire to adopt a child leads to a homeless pregnant woman living on their couch for her last trimester.

Love them or hate them, Kim Kardashian’s sartorial choices are nothing if not polarizing, from the oversized hoop earrings and bedazzled cocktail dresses of the late aughts to the head-to-toe lycra Yeezy ensembles. Arguably no Kardashian look, though, has generated more buzz than the custom Thierry Mugler dress she wore to the annual Met Gala in May.

Months spent in a concrete cell. Beaten, tortured, and humiliated by white supremacists. Forced to watch his own girlfriend’s murder, with her little boy’s life threatened next. All because the man he once respected as a mentor—and protected, believed in, and killed for—handed him over to die. The Jesse Pinkman we meet near the start of El Camino is not well. Minutes have passed since Jesse ripped out of a neo-Nazi compound in a black and red El Camino, howling.

Seth Meyers began his latest “A Closer Look” segment on Thursday night by noting that support for President Donald Trump’s impeachment has been steadily rising over the past few weeks.

I never really know what people are looking for when they tune into these cable made-for-TV movies on channels like Lifetime, based on recent, salacious media stories and scandals. But that audience does seem to have an appetite for something very specific when it comes to these things, which was certainly evident by the salivating all over social media for a movie like The College Admissions Scandal nearly immediately after the Operation Varsity Blues news broke.