This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
This week:
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Emma Thompson is so freaking good in her new movie.
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Yes, I thirsted over that Ryan Gosling photo. I’m only human.
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Time to cancel that Netflix subscription!
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A photo that might save us all
Give Emma Thompson an Oscar!
Emma Thompson is never not good.
She’ll do something that seems like a total lark—doing the kids’ movie thing in Nanny McPhee and Cruella, writing a Christmas movie based on a cheesy Wham! song, playing a late-night talk show host in a Mindy Kaling movie—and be utterly brilliant. In the monstrous turd of a film Dolittle, she voiced a wise macaw named Polynesia, and she still, in spite of everything offensively atrocious about that movie, managed to be pretty damn great.
And when she’s in things that are supposed to be good, of course, she’s reliably phenomenal. I mean, just the sheer number of times she’s moved me to shed a single tear that I must wipe with the stretched palm of one hand, as if I had just received a Joni Mitchell CD for Christmas from my husband who was having an affair…
The point of this is to say that it shouldn’t come as a surprise when Thompson delivers an award-worthy performance in a new film. But it’s a testament to her talent that what she accomplishes in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande manages to somehow present her anew, with that aforementioned brilliance showcased in a novel, refreshing light.
It’s not just that you may not expect Emma Thompson to be the star of what is the best sex movie of the year, and perhaps even the best one in a very long time. It’s that she finds a kind of humanity and vulnerability in a sex movie that explores the insecurity and shame that is associated with intimacy and pleasure—aspects that Hollywood so often ignores.
She plays a widow cautiously attempting to experience all the sexual activity her long, boring, and chaste marriage never afforded her. She hires a young escort (the titular Leo, played by Daryl McCormack) to help through a checklist of sexual acts she hopes to explore, perhaps even achieving the orgasm that she has never experienced in her life.
What she learns is that sex and intimacy is about more than checking off boxes. The more that becomes apparent, the more that frightens her. It’s empowering to want to feel sexually vibrant, but it’s also not something that can just be turned on, so to speak. It’s a difficult journey, one that Thompson chronicles with her signature charm but also extreme vulnerability. The final sequence alone will have anyone who watches in awe for a long time after the credits roll.
It’s a small movie, but one that deserves a lot of attention. Go see it!
My Crushes Really Delivered This Week
I am a brand new person. In an instant, I have been transformed on a molecular level, my soul refreshed—an entire worldview refreshed and radicalized. I had one existence, and it changed in an instant. I saw the photo of Ryan Gosling as Ken in the Barbie movie, and will never be the same.
When I close my eyes, it is not the darkness of my lids that I see, it is tan Ryan Gosling looking like the hot guy at the Brooklyn gay…
Read More: Emma Thompson Made the Best Sex Movie of the Year