'Ironheart' Gives Black Girl Genius, 'F1' Gives Boomer Burnout: Here's Your Weekend Binge
Plus The Bear, Ginny & Georgia, The Gilded Age, Overcompensating
We’re back with a weekend edition of Your Weekly Binge, and let me tell you, SO much stuff has come out this week. Your girl has been busy watching all the new shows and movies—and even some ones that might’ve slipped under your radar. Here’s what to watch (or, honestly, skip) this weekend.
The Bear
The Bear is back! And I don’t just mean the new and final season is now streaming, though it is. I mean that—after tolerating an abysmal season three that was so far up its own artsy-fartsyness that it couldn’t be bothered to move the plot along—season 4 marks a return to the heart-warming/heart-wrenching show we loved in its first two seasons. Prepare to laugh (the usual, small amount, they did not take those complaints about Emmy category fraud and the show not being a comedy to heart!). Prepare to cry. Though everything isn’t tied up in a nice little bow, the ending does feel final and right. Godspeed, Berzattos!
F1
I went to an early screening of the race-car movie F1 to see Damson Idris. At least, I believed it was a two-hander that focused on his character, rookie Formula One driver Joshua Pearce, going toe-to-toe with Brad Pitt’s burnout never-was Sonny Hayes. That’s what the trailers want us to believe. The trailers, however, are a lie. This is firmly Brad Pitt’s world and everyone else is just living in it. Though both the plot and Hayes gesture at giving Idris’ Pearce the limelight, it’s all a facade to hoist Pitt even more into the heroic center. If anything, the race-car drama gives a peek into the minds of those who cling to power at the cost of everybody else.
Mild spoiler, but there’s a moment when an injured Pitt is revealed to be seeing double and continues to race anyway, because the racetrack is the only place where he can feel “free” for a few moments. If he crashes and blows up himself and anyone else nearby? Well, that’s a risk he’s willing to take. I immediately thought of Gerry Connolly, the recently deceased 77-year-old congressman who took a leadership position in the House earlier this year from a millennial while he was dying of cancer because he’d never gotten a chance to do it and it was his turn. Boomers gonna boom.
As for the rest—never mind that there aren’t even enough substantive women characters in the cast to even bother with the Bechdel Test. Never mind that the gorgeous Simone Ashley was cut out of the movie so we can see more of Brad whining and pining for the old days. Never mind that the 48-year-old Sarah Niles is inexplicably playing 33-year-old Damson Idris’ mom(!!!!). This is a Jerry Bruckheimer film, after all; if we’re expecting women characters to be full people and not just moms of sons or the twenty-years-younger love interest of the boomer lead (my deepest apologies, Kerry Condon, you deserved better) then, that’s kind of on us.
Still, I’m glad they let Idris be British in this one; major productions usually hate letting Black British people be British for reasons I find insulting to everyone. And the editing is fantastic. It’s a very pretty commercial for something called Expensify, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The Gilded Age
Season 3 of the NYC period drama premiered this week, and as a card-carrying member of the eat-the-rich coalition, I usually roll my eyes through most of it. But I must admit to gagging at the drama that this season has in store. Finally, the stakes are a bit higher than will social-climbing Bertha get her daughter to marry a duke? I still don’t believe that there is a Black make-up artist, hair stylist or cinematographer within 10 miles of that set, as Peggy (Denée Benton) and her mother (grande dame Audra McDonald) continue to be poorly lit, poorly beat, and poorly styled (get that tired wig off of Peggy’s head stat!), but at least there is a suitable love in the air for young Peggy this season. The show also delves into colorism and class within the privileged Black New York scene—themes I think are handled mostly well. Still, this is most consistently a story about the wealthy and the people who exist only to serve them or try to become them. It’s not quite the upstairs-downstairs drama it aims to be because it’s far more interesting to the creators to write about the rich than those who might eat them, let alone exist outside of them.
Watch The Gilded Age on HBOMax.
Ginny & Georgia
Season three of Ginny & Georgia picks up right where season two left off, with Georgia being hauled off to jail for murder on her wedding day to the mayor. But Georgia’s ex Zion is dating a Black woman attorney who assures Ginny that Georgia is a pretty, white woman, she’ll be fine. And LOL! Seriously, roll the credits. Yet, the writers do everything they can to pretend as if Georgia is really in trouble this time and might have to pay for all of her many, many crimes. Though I never believed she was in real danger of accountability for the multiple murders she’s committed over the years (I’m not opposed to all of them—child molesters should absolutely die immediately), I was as gagged as Georgia by the end when she does actually have to be accountable for one sin: being a horrible mother. The reality of what a terror she is to her children finally sets in and there’s no escape. It’s a delicious and kind of terrifying moment near the end and being pretty and white won’t get her out of it. God save those children, but it honestly might be too late.
The greatest scene was hearing through voiceover what goes on inside of the neurodivergent Maxine’s head as she becomes further isolated from her alcoholic twin brother Marcus and her “best friends”—including Ginny—who obviously hate her and find her ADHD brain and big personality a bit too much. The scene of the high schoolers reminded me of why I love YA so much; it helps to revisit and recontextualize my own young adulthood. As a Maxine myself, it’s fascinating to see from both sides how being big can make people feel small. Enthralling TV can be a good therapy session or a good, you need to go to therapy session, and I’m all for the feels and reflection this show brings out each season.
Watch Ginny & Georgia on Netflix.
Ironheart
You may know by now that shows and movies about grief are my jam. Now I can add Ironheart to the canon. In the first three episodes of the six-episode series, we see Wakanda Forever’s Dominique Thorne return as Riri Williams, bad gyal genius, whose drive to make an iron suit like Tony Stark’s comes from a place of deep loss. Unlike Stark, a white male billionaire war criminal who was also an Avenger before his timely death, Riri is a Black girl from Chicago who is decidedly not from a rich family. The show begins with her expulsion from MIT for “refusing” to be small—or, ya know, get a degree after 4 years. Her Black woman academic director scoffs at the idea that she’s trying to make Riri small by expecting her to graduate and not sell her homework to classmates for quick cash, but the reality is, a genius like Riri is too big to be contained by an institution like MIT, a school with IRL ties to weapons manufacturers and developing technology for the Zionist genocide in Palestine. Black girl genius has an acceptable form, and Riri won’t fit into it.
The action-packed series follows Riri tumbling back to earth in Chicago where she can no longer escape the loss of her best friend (an incredible Lyric Ross) and her step-father who were killed in front of her in a drive-by shooting in town, prior to the events in Wakanda Forever. Their specters shape Riri and raise major questions about the ethics of using technology and A.I. to heal. (More on this next Tuesday, when the final three episodes air! Stay tuned to BGW!) Grief drives the course of events that lead her to teaming up with a magical madman (a devilish Anthony Ramos), and his team of queer genius misfits (helloooo drag queen Shea Coulée in their debut role as a tech baddie!).
The series is brilliant and moody and fun, just like Riri, and, also, like the teen, sometimes frustrating. I don’t understand how this gang of Black and brown folks is committing crimes all over the city with no masks and no gloves—do they know people can see them? That their fingers leave PRINTS? Do they know an IRON SUIT is very famous and identifiable? How are they not getting so much as questioned by the cops? I know cops are incompetent but good lord.
Still, with stunning CGI, a talented cast, and a compelling story that is so Black girl, and so Chicago, and so full of, well, heart, Ironheart is up there with the best of the Marvel shows.
Overcompensating
I waited a long time to watch this show, as the premise of a closeted white gay freshman at college secretly using his latina bff as a beard seemed dated and unfunny. Surprise! I was correct. Though the show does have some LOL moments, and introduced me to what singer Charlie XCX looks and sounds like, the white gay lead and creator is committed to using and exploiting people of color on his self-discovery journey. Once he gets his heart broken by his British crush who is dating a woman and genuinely just wanted to be his friend, he literally tells his bff that he’s going to start doing “less” when it comes to love, and immediately goes after a Black openly queer person on campus. Try to tuck in your racism. Hard pass on this show!
Watch Overcompensating on Prime. Or, ya know, don’t!
Squid Game, Season 3
Netflix wouldn’t send me screeners for Squid Game season 3, so I’m not gonna break my neck watching it now that it’s out. But, it is out now, if you’ve been waiting on it!
Stay watchin’
Brooke