Let'th Talk About 'May Dethember'

The Frotcast reviews Todd Haynes' new Mary-Kay Letourneau movie about how actors are whores and lisps are funny.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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Netflix

Greetings, #Content lovers, it’s new Frotcast time! This one is strictly for the Patreon subscribers, but in the interests of trying to wave my cheese in front of all available ratholes, I feel duty-bound to notify you of its existence.

This week, Pod Yourself producer Brent Flyberg joins Matt and I to talk about some current events and my Bell’s Palsy, but mostly about May December. That’s director Todd Haynes’ currently-streaming-on-Netflix film starring Julianne Moore as a Mary-Kay Letourneau-type figure (ie, a woman married with kids to a guy she started dating when he was in middle school) and Natalie Portman as the actress sent to play her (with an awards-buzz-generating performance by Charles Melton as that seventh-grader-in-a-man’s-body).

You can listen to the entire pod here, which I’d highly recommend you do (not that I’m biased or anything), but my TL;DR take on May December is that it feels like Haynes and company wanted to make a Mary-Kay Letourneau movie, but ended up reflecting on whether the impulse to want to dramatize a famous statutory rape story was actually any less creepy than the statutory rape itself. Seems like a bit of a classic journalistic dodge dressed up in artistic pretensions to me (on the one hand… on the other hand…) but all that being said, the story about actors being whores and storytellers being glorified con-men was my favorite part of the movie. I wouldn’t call it a great movie, but there are definitely some scenes in there that really slap. Did I mention Julianne Moore does an uncanny valley lisp the entire time? Whatever, she was in Boogie Nights, she’s earned it.

Elsewhere, the season four finale of Pod Yourself The Wire, with Bryan Quinby aka Murder Bryan from the Guys podcast talking to us about The Wire 413, “Final Grades,” is now available for free. Oh, and Matt also started a spinoff pod called Bad Hasbara. Not sure what that one is about, hopefully nothing controversial.

Okay, I think that concludes today’s plugs. Stay safe out there.