Int’l_Womens_Day_Anthem_(I_Choose_You).mp3

'The Thing About Pam' is another misstep in her journey to prestige TV

Two years ago, Renée Zellweger was onstage receiving an Academy Award for her role as Judy Garland in Judy. It was her grand reentry into the Hollywood elite, after spending over a decade either not making movies or making movies that didn’t exactly capture the zeitgeist (apologies to fans of Bridget Jones’s Baby). With her second Oscar under her belt, surely Zellweger could have her pick of roles, or at least her pick of what Reese Witherspoon didn’t want.

Unfortunately, she chose to do The Thing About Pam, an NBC mini-series based on a podcast based on the reallife crimes of Pam Hupp. Hupp is currently awaiting trial for killing her friend Betsy and has been convicted of killing a stranger in an attempt to make it look like Betsy’s wrongfully accused husband wanted her dead. Hupp was also the last person to see her mother before she fell off her apartment balcony to her death, but the manner of death has been ruled “undetermined.” Prestige it is not, but it’s unclear whether or not that’s what it’s going for.

When we meet Pam, her hair isn’t done and it’s gone a little gray. “You know when people want you to admit to something you didn’t do? I can’t do that. I’m not that person. I don’t know who I am,” she says with a laugh and a thick Missouri accent. In the next scene, Pam does seem to know who she is, or who she wants to be. Her hair is now perfectly blonde and she wears an all-white outfit as she introduces herself directly to the camera in a sing-songy voice. She’s a businesswoman, she’s successful, she’s a pillar of the community. This is, I think, supposed to be funny, because we all know that she is a murderer. Instead it falls flat, only drawing attention to the show’s tonal unevenness.

This is a compliment

It’s probably safe to call The Batman the best superhero movie in many years, and the best Batman in even longer. This is a low bar. Directed by Planet of the Apes fauxteur Matt Reeves, The Batman is a dark, gothic movie that also happens to be almost three hours long. For a good stretch of that time it gets by on audio-visual flair alone. Reeves searches for unexpected camera angles, and unique ways to shoot fist fights and car changes. The set design crumbles grandly, and the skyline of Gotham City is a new achievement in subtle CGI, creating a sprawling cityscape with the density of London and the scope of Shanghai. It’s about as interesting as big-budget Hollywood action filmmaking gets nowadays.

For a while, anyway. In its long final stretch, the story’s many threads fail to cohere, and the ideas it has spent two-plus hours exploring suddenly fall away. The whole thing would probably run a full hour shorter if everyone just spoke in a normal cadence. And after so many patient minutes, the film’s slow pace and human scale are so rapidly inflated that the film’s climax is all hot air.

I wish I could say that Batman himself carries the film to its finish. The casting of hot weirdo Robert Pattinson in the role had been the first thing to interest me in the movie. After a decade spent making independent films, this was to mark Pattinson’s return to the mainstream, and whenever I wondered why we needed another Batman movie, he seemed like reason enough.

But Robert Pattinson seems ill-cast in the role. He fumbles his few purely dramatic scenes as Bruce Wayne, turning the billionaire playboy into a muted, sullen void, without the kookiness of Keaton or Bale’s Bateman-slick facade. He’s better when he puts on the suit, and is the first actor to seem actually comfortable moving about in the armor. But it doesn’t get much deeper. His charisma is nothing beyond the cowl, and eventually the costume overwhelms him.

Texas forever, y'all

Soooooo-eeeee, all y’all brokeback lil’ bitches! That British feller Harry wore a hat, if the city folk at that glossy Page Six magazine are to believed. Well me? I don’t trust the media – I get all the learnin’ I need from whispers on the wind, the whinny of my horse Nacho, and occasionally, an episode of The Pioneer Woman I’ll leave on in the background while going about my administrative work for the ranch. We just transferred to a digital filing system, ya hear, and this old dog is having a touch of difficulty when it comes to learning iPad.

Don’t worry. It’s still me, Gawker’s occasional royals correspondent. That was me adopting an American vernacular known in the field (the Fort Worth stockyards) as “rodeo speak.” Usually when I write updates about the royal family, I stiffen my upper lip, crack open a pudding, and employ Britishism like “Oi!” But today, I’m all country, buttercup, because Prince Harry took yet another mosey away from his unrecorded podcast and “got into the spirit of things by wearing a cowboy hat to the Fort Worth stockyards, making him look like an Indiana Jones knockoff.”

Allow me to drop into the voice again? We were having fun with it.

Now, here’s where the trouble begins when it comes to findin’ proof of this “cowboy hat.” It seems some high-falutin, pinkie-raisin’soldiers of the Queen are crackin’ the lasso on us rodeo folk, as the Page Six article reports two different Instagram photos of Prince Harry in Texas last night have since been deleted (my nephew who taught me about iPads and podcasts also taught me about Instagram; he’s primed to take over the ranch one day, but he’s got a modern way of doin’ things. Though I suppose that’s a different story for a different campfire…). Even though cowboys like me live outside the law, for legal reasons, I can’t show it to you.

(A room for her dishes.)

Dishes — they live a sad existence, wouldn’t you say? Hidden away in a cabinet until they become “useful.” Living a life of shame. Forced to hold whatever disgusting slop their owners prepare, their dish bodies literally used as dishes. Gruesome. Made to bathe either in darkness or with a moldy sponge in front of God and everyone. And then back into their degrading cabinet they go, left to weep in loneliness and the desire to feel the warmth of love and appreciation, if even for just a moment. Yes, it is a sad life for dishes.

Unless they’re Kris Jenner’s dishes.

Where does Kris Jenner keep her dishes? Not in her sleevies, if that’s what you’re thinking, ha! No, Kris Jenner keeps her dishes in a place deserving of all dishes do for us. Kris Jenner keeps her dishes in a place of honor. Kris Jenner keeps her dishes in a dishes-specific room.

“The room is impeccably organized and perfectly displays her impressive collection of designer dinnerware sets,” says a write-up of the dish room on Poosh. (Poosh, if it’s not your browser’s homepage already, is Kourtney Kardashian’s lifestyle website.) Poosh continues:

“The walk-in closet (if you will) includes a range of timeless and rare table sets (we’re talking several sets of printed plates, teacups, and matching saucers, custom coffee mugs, serving platters, the whole nine yards) that Kris has collected over the years. It’s like a mini museum with excellent lighting surrounding each set and not a teacup or plate out of place. Truly a work of art.”

Truly a work of art. And I believe it. In the bleakest of times, I feel it’s important to find goodness; to find artistic inspiration; to find the will to live. And we have certainly found it here in Kris Jenner’s dish room.

Accept that you will never truly finish them

Don’t all clap at once, but I recently finished reading The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil’s much-vaunted, little-read novel of ideas. If you don’t know it, it’s a work which parodies the political and intellectual milieu of the pre-WW1 Vienna in which Musil came of age, while also putting forward something of the author’s own uncompromisingly modern ideas about knowledge, morality, and the self; ideas which chime with those of contemporaries such as Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Walter Benjamin, while also anticipating the likes of Deleuze & Guattari.

In addition to the fun facts listed above, The Man Without Qualities is also huge. The version I read comprises 1130 pages – pages which kept falling out as I read it, impossible to contain within the physical laws of the paperback book. When I started reading it, I thought: there is absolutely no way I’ll ever finish this. My original aim was to get to the end of Volume 1, around the page 700 mark. As it happened, I found it a lot more compelling than I’d expected. I also started reading it around the same time as I resolved to delete the Twitter app from my phone, which for some mysterious reason has left me able to concentrate on things for much longer stretches of time. I kept reading, past the start of Volume 2 – which luckily happens to be the most obviously, viscerally enchanting section of the book, right when you’re probably starting to flag – and onwards, persisting to the very last page.

I finished my copy of The Man Without Qualities. And yet – my original instinct was still correct. There was never any way that I was going to finish The Man Without Qualities. Because the thing is, nobody can ever finish a Really Long Book like this.