Victoria: Ten years ago this month, Bridesmaids came out, and boy did it rule. Before we get into the nitty gritty details of the movie and why it remains a bona fide classic, I want to journey back to this time in American life. When Bridesmaids was released, the movie was given the monumental task of proving that women could be funny. And we, as women, were charged with seeing it to prove that women wanted to see other women be funny.

I just did a search on Google News of stories from that time. In December 2010, Slash Films published an article with the incredible title "Paul Feig’s ‘Bridesmaids’ “Might Be The First Genuine ‘Female’ Comedy.”" Melissa McCarthy was not even MENTIONED in it. The Vanity Fair set visit article was titled "With Bridesmaids, Can Judd Apatow’s Dude-Friendly Formula Go Girly?" (Melissa is mentioned once in this one). Nevermind that Kristen Wiig wrote the movie and Feig directed, the narrative was somehow about Judd? God. Newsday called it "'The Hangover' for women." The Hangover wishes. I will just link to the NPR review, and pray that I will never be as wrong about anything as this person is.

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

Hi friends!

I know we said you wouldn’t get a new GPG issue until next Tuesday, but I, Victoria, felt fiesty about this topic, so I decided to do a special edition! As promised, we’ve moved the whole newsletter over to Buttondown. You can still access our archives here, and you can send your friends to sign up.

Hayley: In our conversation about the , you mentioned that James Marsden is one of Hollywood's most underutilized hot guys. I agree, and I think that we need to have a bigger discussion on this important topic. 

Last week, when the Oscar nominations came out, the Academy celebrated because for the first time two women had been nominated for Best Director. Of course, this landmark is wicked depressing; only five other women have ever been nominated, and only one has won.

But this year they are two. Chloé Zhao wrote and directed Nomadland (six Oscar nominations in total), which I liked, and Emerald Fennell wrote and directed Promising Young Woman (five Oscar nominations in total), which I really, really did not like. I only learned today that Fennell is also an actress, and plays Camilla on . That’s not relevant, but it’s fun context. Fennell was also the head writer for the second season of .

Victoria: Both of us have found one podcast that rises above the others over the last year: You're Wrong About. For each episode, hosts Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall pick a past media phenomenon to revisit, explaining how the popular narratives about the event got the substance of what actually happened wrong.

I started to listen to YWA before the pandemic, but it's one of like three podcasts I can stomach lately (and one of those is my sleep podcast, so it barely counts). I've been listening to newer episodes, but I've also gone back to the very first one and have been working my way from there. I pull up a game on phone and pop in my headphones and let them carry me away.

In her 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.

“Listen to me: The right guy is an illusion. Start living your lives.”

Hayley: Okay, let's talk about one of the best episodes of one of the best television shows of all time that also HAPPENS to be topical: The twelfth episode of season six of 30 Rock, "St. Patrick's Day." 

We established early on in our friendship that this is one of our top episodes. Which is odd, because it happens on the other side of season four, where the quality of the show definitely drops. "St. Patrick's Day" is pure gold because it feels like early , but it also has its own special flair. 

When I think of fan casts, I think of all the Harry Potter fans who spent hours on tumblr in the 2000s deciding who they would cast in a Marauders sequel film (I was always partial to Andrew Garfield as James and Ezra Miller as Sirius). A quick google tells me that people still do this, and many people would like the Sprouse Twins and/or Harry Styles to be involved. Sure.

Anyway, those 2000s tumblr teens were right: coming up with casting ideas for things rules. And sometimes it actually comes true! Gwendoline Christie first heard about the role of Brienne on Game of Thrones because fans kept suggesting her for the part. Fans of the romance novel long wanted Lucy Hale to play the lead in a movie adaptation (which uh….I don't know who cares about Lucy Hale like that, but sure), and she started filming it in the fall. Dreams come true.

Victoria: Last weekend, I was cooking and listening to Spotify radio. A song I had not heard in a long time came on: “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” by Scissor Sisters. Immediately, I was transported back to the summer of 2008, when I binge-watched Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice.

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 , which is true. There is a of sex.

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 the weekend it came out (yike), and I went to early showings of all the sequel trilogy movies. I have seen every episode of . I go here.

When I was a junior in high school, I was captain of the dance team. The “governing” body of high school dance teams is called the Universal Dance Association (UDA) and every year they send a block of dancers to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In November 2006, I was one of the dancers who went.

I went to New York with three other girls from my team. Before I left for New York, they sent me a package that included my costume, a huge puffy red “Parade Participant” jacket that I was legally required to wear every time I left the hotel, and a DVD (lol!) with a welcome message and a recording of the routine that I needed to learn before the big day. 

We were in New York for a full week, arriving the Sunday before Thanksgiving and flying home the Saturday afterwards. We stayed at some big fancy hotel with one of those big fancy lobbies that you want to walk in and spin around, absorbing it in slow motion before one of your friends yells, “Come ON!” and pulls you out of your reverie, like a girl in a movie about New York City.

This wasn’t my first time in the city; I had been two years earlier for a wedding (which I obviously told everyone about in the most insufferable way). Every day we had rehearsals, and sometimes we had two. In between rehearsals we were taken on a full tour of the city. We went to the top of the Empire State Building and we went to Ground Zero. We saw on Broadway, we took one of those bus sightseeing tours, went to Times Square, and we got to go to Macy’s for Christmas shopping (obviously). One day they just dropped us off in Chinatown for a few hours and my friend and I were looking at knock-off designer purses in a storefront when an old woman said “Come with me” and for some reason we did (???) and we followed her up two flights of stairs and into an apartment and then into a walk-in closet filled with factory rejects of designer purses. I bought a Kate Spade bag that had the inside label sewn on crooked and a Coach bag that had an extra panel of liner fabric. Concrete jungle where dreams are made of!!!!

Hayley: It's that time of year again: the Holiday Season is upon us! And boy, what a weird one this is going to be. I got a Peppermint Mocha last week that made me cry, so clearly I'm doing very well. 

I am going to be honest here, because I think that's what the readers of Gold-Plated Girls expect from us — beautiful, perfect, honest opinions: I am not a huge fan of Thanksgiving. Sorry!

I know that this is some people's favorite of the season, but for me, Thanksgiving has never quite taken off in my brain. It's like all the stress of Christmas without any of the gifts. It's the anxiety of New Year's Eve without the celebration. 

I am very sad.

There is a new Netflix show called Dash & Lily. It is, in spirit, a Christmas movie, just one that’s been stretched into eight episodes of about 20 minutes each. It could have easily been seven episodes, or even six, but the powers that be gave us eight. I started the first episode on Friday afternoon, and in the blink of an eye I’d seen them all. They go down smooth.

The plot of is not important. It’s light and cute and sweet and not that deep. The two leads, high school students, never go to school, and their parents are conveniently absentee so they can go on Christmas- and Hanukkah- themed adventures in N.Y.C. Other viewers have compared the series to a Hallmark movie, but as someone who has actually watched a lot of Hallmark movies, it is better than that. It’s not great, but it’s much better than it needed to be. The show is warm and charming and a nice little escape from the hell we live in.

Victoria: Today! Is! The tenth anniversary of the premiere of the iconic Disney animated film Tangled. Frozen might loom larger in American culture, but we both know that  is far and away the superior late Disney animation film!

In Timely Stuff, Hayley reviews period dramas currently available for streaming and decides whether they’re worth your time or not. 

Hayley: I was born in September so my very first Halloween was spent as a little one month-old pumpkin blob. I think it should be a legal requirement that you dress your baby as a pumpkin for their first Halloween because it is very cute.

Growing up I had the incredible asset of a mom who was thrifty and creative and made almost all of my Halloween costumes and accouterments. Usually the base was some form of an old dance costume (I had approximately 900). Of course all I really wanted was a prepackaged Princess Costume from the store because that was "a real costume" to me. Kids are brats. But my mom did let me get a Princess Costume once and it was terrible: it didn't fit right, it was scratchy and thin, and it certainly didn't make me feel very princess-y. Mom 1, Hayley 0.

If you had asked me, circa 2012, what I associated with Mariah Carey, you probably would have gotten this list:

1. All I Want For Christmas Is You,

Victoria: This week we're talking Saoirse Ronan. If your brain is tumbling over those vowels, Saoirse tells people to pronounce it sir-shuh, so that it rhymes with inertia (though I believe a more traditional Irish pronunciation is seer-shuh). Sometimes I copy RuPaul and .

The first time Olive & June came into my life was last year, when I wrote up a small piece for the Cut about their foray into an at-home manicure kit. I received the Spring 2019 collection and for free a few weeks after that article went live. While I remember thinking that everything was very cool, aesthetically pleasing, and fun to use, my obsession didn’t really start there. I was getting so much PR from beauty brands at that time that everything kind of blended together. 

Hayley: On September 22, you tweeted: "'historical accuracy' is honestly kinda fake!!" and I have been wanting to revisit this ever since.

It’s election season! If you social media pages look like mine, it seems that every other post is encouraging people to check their registration, to apply for a mail in ballot, to make a voting plan now so their vote will be counted. Your vote matters!

I am not going to say voting isn’t important. I checked my registration multiple times. I applied for my absentee ballot in August, and, when I finally got the correct one, I mailed it back the same day. I have badgered many people in my life to make sure they do the same.

But also…it’s not actually true that my vote matters, and pretending that it isn’t a lie is pissing me off.

Victoria: There's been a lot of social media chatter about comfort movies during this year, for obvious reasons. The two of us rewatched The Parent Trap with our friend Brita last week, and it was definitely a comforting moment for me.

A comfort movie is built through repetition. When I was a kid, that meant wearing out the VHS tapes of the movies we liked the most, like and, of course, . Then there were movies my parents bought us because liked them — I'm thinking of watching  with my brothers in our basement. Han and Leia's enduring love burnt itself into my brain earlier than I can remember.

In Timely Stuff, Hayley reviews period dramas currently available for streaming and decides whether they’re worth your time or not. 

Hayley: On Tuesday, my friend Ashley tweeted something that quickly went viral. It was about the Amelia's Notebook series, which I had completely forgotten about until she brought it up. I remember having all of those books and loving them, and also asking my mom to buy me composition notebooks (which, actually, I did not like because they were not spiral bound). 

Sunday morning, I woke up and did my daily “scroll through my phone while I try to motivate myself to get out of bed” ritual. I noticed, not for the first time, a meme about the game “Among Us.” I knew it was popular, and I was vaguely familiar with the characters, who are brightly colored astronauts who look like cute little jelly beans. But despite seeing references to this game for weeks, Sunday morning was the first time I googled it. Twenty minutes later, I played my first game.

You can play “Among Us” on a PC for $5 or your phone for free. You compete with a group of friends, Internet strangers, or a mix of both. In a round of the game, you and up to nine other people are sent to an adorable little space station, where you must complete basic tasks. While you try to do them, some of your fellow jelly bean astronauts are trying to kill you. Every time a body is discovered, the beans try to vote out the killers. If you get rid of them before they kill you all, you win. If you die, you come back as an adorable ghost bean who can finish tasks.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in March, both of us have bought a lot of stuff: loungewear, activewear, bras, underwear, sweaters, socks, shoes, nail polish, hair dye, snacks and more. Early in the summer, Hayley went through a big iced tea phase that Victoria soon copied. Victoria made her hair orange, then pink. Hayley got new leggings for her yoga teacher journey. Here is a brief accounting of the best, worst, and weirdest things we purchased during this dumbass pandemic.

The Best Thing I Bought:

In Timely Stuff, Hayley reviews period dramas currently available for streaming and decides whether they’re worth your time or not. 

Last week, Netflix dropped the trailer for its new adaptation of Rebecca, starring Armie Hammer, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas. The film will hit the streaming service in October. I decided to reread Rebecca this weekend; I read it once in eighth grade and found the whole thing horribly romantic. I made it about halfway through before sitting down to write this.

Victoria: I want to say the first Reese Witherspoon movie I watched was Legally Blonde, but I think I got Sweet Home Alabama from Blockbuster first. A bad choice.