Stuff we like: The Good Place
I know I’m a little late to the party, but this clever sitcom set in the afterlife is as delightful as it is deep. Veronica Mars fans will find plenty to love in Kristen Bell’s lead performance as Eleanor, a terrible person who somehow ends up in a kind of quasi heaven, and Parks and Rec lovers will be happy to know that creator Michael Schur has brought the same warmth and wit to his latest project. It takes a lot of moving parts for such a high-concept show to work, but The Good Place pulls it off. Also, the season finale is killer.
Stuff we don’t like: J. Cole
Is there a rapper out there as cheesy as J. Cole? Okay, maybe Macklemore, but J. gives him a run for his money. His latest release, “High for Hours,” is as on-the-nose and maudlin as political hip-hop gets, and this is coming from the guy who once boasted (ridiculously) that he was better than Slick Rick, Rakim, and LL Cool J — on his first album. Cole’s rapping is boring, and lines where he compares himself to leftover lasagna and boasts “you can’t out-fart me” don’t exactly scream lyrical dexterity. His upcoming split LP with Kendrick Lamar is sure to make for the most one-sided pairing since Simon and Garfunkel.
Stuff we like: Chrissy Teigen’s Twitter feed
Chrissy Teigen is mostly famous at this point for being John Legend’s wife and having incredibly gif-able facial expressions, but she deserves extra credit for her fantastic Twitter feed. When she’s not flirting with her husband in a somehow-charming-and-not-disgusting way, she’s blasting white supremacists and fangirling over Beyoncé. Celebrities using Twitter tend to come up with mixed results (just ask Alec Baldwin), but Teigen has mastered the art, and her interactions with fans and fellow famous people are always a pleasure.
Stuff we don’t like: Coming-of-age movies
Dear The Space Between Us: did the world really need another bildungsroman starring Asa Butterfield? By this point, we’ve seen something like 100 million movies about precocious white boys stumbling into adulthood (see: Almost Famous, Boyhood, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, etc). I don’t know about you, but I am dead tired of hearing about how hard it is to be a suburban middle-class kid. That’s why movies like Moonlight and Blue is the Warmest Color are so refreshing: films need to tell more stories about POC and LGBT kids, and less about dinks like Asa Butterfield. Sorry, Asa.
