In her new series, The Single Woman in Hollywood, Hayley examines the ways that single women are portrayed onscreen, plotting them on a highly scientific matrix of Horny/Sexless and Messy/Organized.

Who among us doesn’t love working on our night cheese from the comfort of a Slanket? Liz Lemon, the beloved and problematic protagonist of , is described as having “more sexual hangups than a phone sex line operated by Gilbert Gottfried.” She has worn a Duane Read bag as underwear. Her inability to find lasting sexual and romantic happiness is a constant discussion throughout .

Hayley: Keeping with our theme of revisiting movies from 2001, this week we are going to talk about the Internet's most beloved film, Shrek. If you haven't seen , my only guess is that you are maybe a small child or an alien pretending to pass as a human. In both cases, please watch  and then come back and finish reading this. 

Hi all -

The newsletter I sent out earlier today, “NBC: Stop Airing The Golden Globes!” contains a lazy and sloppy error. The family in Minari is Korean-American, not Chinese-American. I deeply regret the error. It has been updated on the Gold-Plated Girls webpage.

Every year, it happens like clockwork: The Golden Globes nominations are announced, and people get mad. Perhaps no year deserved that vitriol more than this one, which saw major snubs, primarily of TV shows and movies by and about black people (the Globes also classified Minari as a foreign film, when it is about people in America who speak Korean) [Edit: because I didn’t Google this I wrote Chinese first instead of Korean. I deeply regret this error]. The groundswell of rage about this was so large that one of the writers of Emily In Paris wrote this absolutely deranged essay about how sucks and doesn’t deserve it (I will not link to this because I think it is smug and weird).

Victoria: There is no bad way to eat a potato. None! Mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, fried potatoes, roasted potatoes: They are all beautiful delicacies that I would never, ever turn down. I think of the 2000s, the height of the Atkins, low-carb craze, and I feel so sad, thinking about all the poor, neglected potatoes. Thankfully, society is making up for it now, I think. Potatoes are gluten free! They're vegan! They're perfect.

In light of Valentine’s Day, I started thinking about all of the ways that single women are portrayed in movies and television. I realized quickly that there seem to be a lot of similar qualities that these women share. As I ran through my mental list, I realized that there are two basic lines along which most characters can be plotted: the first is Horny/Sexless, and the second is Messy/Organized. So, I came up with a matrix and started writing down characters that I think fit into each quadrant.

But before we dive in, a note on my methodology: this is barely methodology. Like, legally, I’m pretty sure I’m not even allowed to use that word for such a non-scientific project. This is highly subjective. I am going off of my pop culture knowledge base, which is obviously skewed towards my lived experience as a cisgender, straight white woman. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and in fact, I look forward to continuing to adjust and update this as I watch new movies and television shows. 

Hayley: So, we recently watched The Wedding Planner with one of our friends. This movie came out in 2001, a year that we are going to spend some time exploring in this newsletter, because for every there is, unfortunately, a . 

The other day, I logged on to Instagram, and saw that two of my favorite authors had posted about the same thing: Reese Witherspoon’s book club had launched its own app. Because I am endlessly fascinated by the celeb book club phenomenon, I downloaded it.

The app is fine. It’s basically goodreads if you could only talk about books that Reese had picked for her book club (which is technically two book clubs, having recently decided to pick a YA book a month, too). Honestly, I wish goodreads was more like this app; it’s quite pretty. But I figured this was a good excuse to talk about celeb book clubs, a phenomenon I am always thinking about.

Victoria: Hello, dear readers!!!

In last week's big look at the films of 2001, we didn't go particularly deep on any one movie, so throughout the year, you can expect a handful of deep dives into some of our absolute favorites. Today, we're going to look at Amélie!

When I was a college admissions counselor, I had a little trick that I shared with prospective students to figure out which of the many, many colleges they were visiting was actually their favorite. I would ask so every time you leave a new school do you start to reflect on the pros and cons of that school? They would chuckle and say yes, of course. Then I would ask do you compare your campus visit experience to the other schools you visited? They would again say yes, duh (they wouldn’t say “duh” out loud but I knew they were thinking it). Then I would ask do you keep comparing every school against one school in particular? Then I would watch it dawn on them in real time that they were not quite as confused as they previously thought, and that there was a much more obvious front-runner in their seemingly endless search. 

Victoria: Earlier this month, I was putting together the Gold-Plated Girls editorial calendar. I decided to Google around and see if any movies were having big anniversaries this year so we could cover them.

What I quickly learned is that a lot of iconic movies are turning 20 this year, because apparently 2001 was an amazing year for popular cinema. Movies that were released that year include , , , , , , ,  and . 

The new season of The Bachelor is fine. The lead is boring and the girls are blandly pretty, but they did film at a stunning resort in Pennsylvania, so it’s nice to look at. The best part is talking to all my friends when an episode airs.

The worst part is a contestant named Victoria, or, as she had styled herself, Queen Victoria. On the very first night, she wore a plastic tiara and crowned the lead as her king. Her “job” is listed everywhere as “queen.” She is deeply insufferable, honestly a little unhinged, and comes off like someone the producers hired to stir drama.

Victoria: Like many of our readers, we spent a considerable portion (about eight and a half hours) of our holiday break watching the new Netflix show, Bridgerton. I think it's fair to say we both enjoyed it, with some caveats.

The show is the first from Shonda Rhimes' Netflix deal, and this show is very Shonda. Based on a series of eight romance novels from the early 2000s, it's about a family of eight kids (named alphabetically by age for convenience) as they fall in love in Regency London. Many people on Twitter said it was period Gossip Girl, which is true. There is a lot of sex.

Once the show was announced, I read the first and second Bridgerton books (you might remember I referenced them in our issue about historical accuracy).  I enjoyed, but did not love them. The thing that was frustrating about them for me was that the men were so sexist. Like I get that sexism is "accurate," but it's such a bummer in a romantic lead!

The sexism of the show was equally frustrating, at times, though the cast of men, especially Regé-Jean Page, who plays the Duke of Hastings, does make up for it by being ridiculously hot. Some of the casting did remind me of this iconic tweet, though:

I have always loved movies, and I have always loved journaling. When you put the two of them together, you get an incredibly entertaining ride through all the movies I consumed between the ages of 12 and 16. Some of them were old, some of them new. Some of them left an indelible impression on me and some of them only merited being mentioned in passing. I looked through my teen journals and found all the times I referenced or reviewed a movie and compiled them here for you. It certainly begs the question, “Should all movies be subjected to a two-sentence review by a teenager?”

The answer is of course…

Victoria: It's our last issue of 2020 (we're giving ourselves a little break for the holidays). And what a year it's been! 

Dear readers, originally we had scheduled this issue as some sort of 2020 best-of issue, but the last 12 months were so confusing and overwhelming we found it hard to tease out what we wanted to talk about in a fun and kooky way. So now you get this!

At the end of the year there's a lot of pressure to focus on the good, and only the good. I am sure that many people I know will be posting IG captions on December 31 along the lines of "This year threw so many challenges at us, but I'm so glad I had you by my side for it all, babe." And I'm describing that in a kind of nasty way, but probably I'm just jealous that 2020 isn't like a weird, quirky year for me — or at least that I can't pretend it was. I can't even do an Instagram #topnine because too many of the posts will be about my dad dying, and I don't think anyone wants to relive that. I feel sad and down and depressed. I have a hard time feeling hope for 2021, and all the years after that.

In 1999, two of the decade’s biggest stars came together to create an iconic Christmas bop I listen to every holiday season.

The two people in question are, of course, Rosie O’Donnell and Elmo. The song is “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

Victoria: Last month, Netflix released the long-awaited sequel to The Princess Switch — The Princess Switch: Switched Again. Both of us watched it this week, and it sure is a film!

If you haven't seen the first one, or, like me, don't remember it at all, the first few minutes of this film recap that one in a very cute and inventive animation sequence (almost nothing that follows is cute or inventive). Basically, Vanessa Hudgens plays Chicago baker Stacey, who competes in a baking contest in a small, fake European country. There she meets Margaret, a royal — duchess? unsure — who's supposed to marry the prince and who  to look just like Stacey. They switch places because of reasons, and Stacey falls for the prince and Margaret falls for Stacey's BFF Kevin. Everyone is happy, the end.

New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday. I will argue that it is the best holiday. 

I’m not trolling you. This is genuinely how I feel. But the shock, awe, disgust, anger, and confusion I am always met with when I make this proclamation made me realize that culturally, we are doing New Year’s Eve a huge disservice by not celebrating it in its most ideal way. Which, coincidentally is my way. 

If New Year’s Eve isn’t your favorite holiday, you’re doing it wrong. But in order to grow past what no longer serves us, first we must evaluate why it’s not working.  

Hayley: Let's talk about one of the most wonderful genres of film: the Christmas movie. I feel like there really isn't another genre that people have such divisive opinions on (maybe horror?) and I love it. There are so many incredible Christmas movies and then there's also a large swath of Very O.K. movies which for some reason I find charming? They're not bad per se, but they're being held to this impossible standard that they never quite meet. All of our standards are very high surrounding anything to do with Christmas. 

If I had to pick a favorite Christmas movie, it would be Elf. I love the cast, the soundtrack, the story, the pacing, and the ending ALWAYS makes me cry. It hits all the Christmas-y notes in the right way. Every year I get excited to watch 

Light spoilers for the most recent episode of The Baby Yoda Show, aka The Mandolorian, follow:

I am, for better or worse, a Star Wars person. I don’t remember the first time I watched the original trilogy; they were just part of my life! My dad took us to see Phantom Menace the weekend it came out (yike), and I went to early showings of all the sequel trilogy movies. I have seen every episode of The Baby Yoda Show. I go here.

And Jedi are the worst!

One of the best things about The Baby Yoda Show is that until now it hasn’t been about Jedi and Sith. It’s about a hot guy who always wears a mask and is good at killing, but is very soft for a tiny puppet baby who makes cute noises. I love them and their little adventures. And yes, viewers knew the tiny puppet baby would probably try to be a Jedi at some point, but that wasn’t the basis of the show’s appeal.