July is over already. July! I know time gets faster as you get older because of like, relativity, but SHEESH, 2019 is just blasting by. I’m not ready for 2020. I didn’t even like typing that. Yikes.
Spider-Man: Far From Home was SO MUCH more fun than I expected it to be and also had a decent plot and satisfying emotional payoff and also Jake Gyllenhaal is… so beautiful. It’s UPSETTING, honestly. Gosh. The teenaged characters in this are also just really charming across the board and I like that they act like idiots and talk like idiots because that’s what being a teenager is like! (But you know, like if human speech had an editor, right? So it’s never TOO real because that would be… unbelievably boring. Same as adults, obviously.) The adult presence is also great (Marissa Tomei and Martin Starr in particular. And JB Smoove popping into scenes to be hilarious was also great.) and I got very emotional during Happy and Peter’s conversation on the jet. Every time I watch a Marvel movie, I assume it’ll be the one that finally makes me lose interest, but they keep being fun and easy to watch, so I just keep coming back.
Stranger Things (SPOILERS!) season three was so, so fun and satisfying and I cried,,, so much, Jesus. I cried. SO MUCH!! I cried… more than I could have ever anticipated!!! I cried at Alexei! I cried at Billy! I cried at Hopper! I cried at the entire three months later sequence!!!!!!! I just cried! I CRIED SO MUCH!!!!!!!!! It was so fun and so stressful and so funny and charming and I wanted Robin to be a lesbian SO BAD and then SHE FUCKIN’ WAS!!!!!!!!!!! And watching Joe Keery’s beautiful, talented face work through the emotions of that admission fuckin’ ruled!!!!! All of these kids are just, so much better at acting than I will ever be at… literally anything. It was also really exciting and gory and gross, which is great, and just. “It’s not my fault you don’t like girls.” !!!! MAN!! What a freakin’ EXPERIENCE!! We loved this so much that we started re-watching the series from the beginning and we almost never do that! (Sorry for all the exclamation marks and incoherency, but it’s not like you didn’t know who you were dealing with here.)
I had no freaking idea that I was going to L-O-V-E Tuca & Bertie so much. I love the theme song; I love the characters; I love the animation; I love the fucking weird-ass parameters of the universe; I love the theme song; I love the phenomenal interstitials between scenes; I love Birdie; I love Tuca; I love Speckle; I love that it’s gross and that it feels effortlessly weird; I love the theme song!! It is so fun and so funny and so wonderfully reflective of ride-or-die friendship. Also, I did NOT expect my marriage to be extremely represented on tv by heterosexual bird people, but 2019 is truly wild that way. (That argument about Speckle needing it to be his turn to freak out… HOO BOY.) This’ll be one I revisit for sure and Netflix is dumb as hell for not ordering a second season.
I absolutely loved Claire North’s, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Like I 
I’ve been listening to Phantom Planet’s “BALISONG” and Big Data’s “Put Me to Work” on repeat a LOT all month long. “BALISONG” has this great chugging rhythm and Alex Greenwald’s hypnotic voice rising and falling in all kinds of interesting ways and it’s got me extremely hyped for a full-scale comeback. “Put Me to Work” is fucking great, extremely dance-y and perfectly current while also feeling a little flashback-y like all good synth music. Also, who doesn’t love a shout-y sing-a-long chorus?
I waited a long time to watch Call Me By Your Name because despite my Genuine! Best! Efforts! I am a jerk who sometimes ends up turned off of things because the hype has overwhelmed me! I don’t think it was necessary this time, but man, was it worth the wait anyway. What a lovely piece of moviemaking and storytelling. I’ve been trying to articulate a lot of things about it both as a movie I liked and as a Piece of Queer Media (especially a compare and contrast with Brokeback Mountain, oh man. There are even shirt parallels!) but mostly I keep being grateful (which says something really fucking shameful about pop culture) that this felt like a movie about a gay relationship that I was just able to enjoy as a romance because no one died a horrible death and the heartbreak was just nice regular heartbreak. Progress!?!??! Also, what a lovely story about family, too. (Shoutout to Reid, the tattoo artist I saw a couple of weeks ago who said it “really fucked him up” because I hadn’t seen it yet and couldn’t have a conversation about it, but you know what? Fucking same, dude.)
I thought Unicorn Store was incredibly sweet and charming and also it made me cry a little bit, but in a nice, moved way, which is always great. Brie Larson is a national treasure who I already love a lot and Mamoudou Athie is a wonderful new addition to my list of People to Be Obsessed With. I liked that this just leaned into its premise and let it play out as weird as it wanted to without sacrificing any of its characters’ humanity. Samuel L. Jackson was also great as always and man, what a wardrobe! 
I didn’t actually know anything about Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive when I finally started reading it 10,000 years after the hype died down and though 
Lizzo is a babe, a talent, a hero, an idol, an inspiration and Cuz I Love You is joyful and fun and energetic and beautiful and I am so glad I’m alive on earth at the same time as her. I can’t imagine telling a young version of myself about Lizzo’s entire existence and I am so envious of and happy for young people right now. Favorites: “Cuz I Love You” & “Like a Girl” & “Jerome” & “Better In Color”
I L-O-V-E-D The Umbrella Academy! It was really fun and engaging and a little dumb, which is generally what I’m looking for in all my media about people with superpowers. I like the characters a lot, even when I don’t — looking at you, Luther — and I thought it looked really good, bright and lively with really fun set and costume design. I liked that it never hit a point where I felt like it was taking itself too seriously, which is really important for me with most things I watch and read, but especially stuff with an inherently goofy premise. It hit some really nice emotional moments, gave me a bunch of characters to care about, and left me looking forward to the possibility of a second season!
These 
I really liked the third season of One Day at a Time! As a show, it really fills a hole in my heart made by 90s sitcoms that wanted me to learn and feel things and I like that I get to have that experience again, but with some issues that would have never made the cut in my youth. I love these characters very much and I like that the stories are tightly contained and solved relatively simply, but never without a pretty satisfying emotional payoff. Even the cheesy sitcom dialogue works in the show’s favor because the acting shines against the constraints of the words and helps diffuse some of the preachier bits. I’m sad it won’t be coming back, but it’ll be fun to have three solid seasons to rewatch when I’m feeling bad about the world, which is basically always.
