- Words Notion Staff
Rated Reads this week takes a look at the potential indie sleaze revival, a history of the Mamma Mia! 2 ending and the controversies behind the new Pam & Tommy series.
Picture this. You wake up and you’re told that the last 14 years were just a dream. It’s 2008, and you have tickets to see The Fratellis tonight. Indie is cool again. Just kidding – what’s actually happening here is a possible revival of that potent 2000s indie scene that birthed so many just-okay bands into this world. For VICE, Jake Denton does the tough investigative work of heading onto the frontlines of mostly-gentrified north London to figure out whether it’s real. The verdict is ambiguous. The Horrors, The Horrors.
Hulu’s new biopic series about the 1990s relationship between Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee has been taking the world by storm the past few weeks, though it’s not without its controversies. For The Guardian, Adrian Horton discusses the elephant in the room – the fact that Anderson wasn’t consulted on her depiction in the series, despite how it covers her painful experience of unwanted public exposure in the 90s.
‘We Should Hate It, But It Works’
As it’s commonly known, the cinematic art form peaked in 2018 with the release of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the metafictional masterpiece jukebox musical. The best part of a perfect film comes in the hallucinogenic last 15 minutes, where Cher shows up, the cast re-enact Dunkirk with “Dancing Queen”, Meryl Streep becomes a ghost and finally the boundaries of space and time are broken entirely. Finally, Vulture sheds light on this artistic masterclass with a full oral history from everyone involved.
Love is Blind – but only if you’re slim and able-bodied
Netflix’s medium-bonkers reality show Love is Blind is back to again make the profoundly-unprofound assertion that physical attraction isn’t all there is to falling in love. As Nicole Vassell for The Independent points out, however, there are some (ahem) blind spots in the show’s casting of conventionally attractive able-bodied cast members picked right out of an ASOS catalogue.
What if we used science to hack our love lives?
“What if you could hack love?” sounds like a premise for a bad Black Mirror episode (so, a recent Black Mirror episode), but hey, there’s real science behind it. Dazed speaks to Tigris Li, the creative technologist seeking to crack the code of love through understanding the hormones and probabilities that guide those chemical reactions. It’s better than that Black Mirror episode, in that it’s plausible.