Did you know that February marked two whole years of the Monthly Hoot?? Wow! Really fun! We hope you enjoy getting these newsletters as much as we enjoy writing them.
On that note, we’ll keep it short and sweet this month so you can get what you came for: updates from the team! Let us know how you’re doing in the comments! Note… we have a big update a few paragraphs down. :)
Love ya!
xoxo,
Gaby, Hannah, Marcelle, Coach, and Zoe
First, beloved podcaster and author Vanessa Zoltan (she/her) joins Hannah and Marcelle to dig into one of the most famous "weepies" of the 21st century: The Notebook (2004). If you cry at the line "If you're a bird, I'm a bird," have the phrase "What do you want?" ringing in your head, or regularly view the 2005 MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss, then this episode is for you.
Next up, it’s a new Material Concerns! In this Material Concerns episode, Hannah and Marcelle talk MORE about the 2005 Music Video Awards (and the Gosling/McAdams kiss), Noah as the The Notebook's (unreliable?) narrator, the line between melodrama and camp, and Gosling's undeniable charisma. As a reminder, for just $5 USD/month you'll get part two, our extensive backlog of bonus content, and ad-free episodes, oh my!!
More updates and perks coming soon (see below!), but save the date for our upcoming Movie Watch Along on April 12th! We are going to be voting for a Canadian film to watch together over Discord. Join today at a $10 USD+ tier to have your vote count — and to get access to the watch along next month!
We’re Going Weekly!
I, Coach, could not be more excited to announce that Material Girls is going weekly starting April 1st. If you’re a longtime listeners, you know that we’ve never been a weekly show. Even when we were producing Witch, Please, we were, famously, “a fortnightly podcast.” This is only possible now because:
Our listenership and our Patreon supporters provide the financial footing to up the work (double the editing, the recording, the social posting, etc).
Our team is committed to making the show the best it can be which means investing even more time and effort into researched episode and fun Material Concerns eps.
Every other episode will be in our regular format, with Material Concerns episodes coming out on the “off week.”
Going weekly is ambitious, but we believe it’ll only strengthen our show. Thanks for your support in getting us to this point! If you have the resources to spare, now is as good a time as any to jump onto Patreon (even as a Free Member)!
I’m sort of in a place where I can only listen to the same 3 songs on repeat (bonus points if you can guess which ones they are in this playlist!), and I won’t lie to you and say that this playlist has a “cohesive” “theme” but look there’s no rule that says you can’t have Sabrina Carpenter and Kendrick Lamar on the same playlist ok??? Get unhinged with me here. Xoxo.
Hello! Are you feeling mad about the whole fascist-patriarchy-hellscape situation? Do you need an old-fashioned dose of feel-good girl power with a side of watching a man get punched a bunch and then literally exploded in punishment for his misdeeds? Then may I recommend: 2021 Scarlet Johansson vehicle Black Widow. I know, I know, recommending a four-year-old Marvel movie isn't very cool, but I missed this one when it first came out, both for pandemic reasons and spite reasons. I was so fucking mad about the way this character was treated in the final arc of the Avengers saga that I couldn't bring myself to watch it until this past weekend, when, after seeing the trailer for the upcoming Thunderbolts*, I remembered how much I wanted to see Florence Pugh and David Harbour do Russian accents at each other. And that part absolutely ruled, but what I didn't know going in is that the plot circles around a genuinely frightening man amassing power through what he refers to as the only natural resource the world has too much of: girls. Y'all, this movie made me cry in a pleasantly cathartic way instead of a miserably heartbroken way, and also Rachel Weisz is in it. HOW CAN YOU GO WRONG?
My fondness for playlists comes from a lifelong love of soundtracks. The many OSTs of my youth undoubtedly introduced me to music genres I might have otherwise missed out on, like 1940s swing or Motown. The rise of streaming has meant a wild proliferation of playlists, which is so fun and I love that, but one thing an OST can do that a playlist generally can't (or won't) is bring your ears a variety of genres (the monthly WPP playlists are a splendid exception thanks to the eclectic tastes of our team). So this month, I want to recommend my latest favourite soundtrack... BUT BEFORE I TELL YOU WHAT IT IS, I have to give you a caveat. The second track on this OST is the song "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits. This song slaps, musically speaking, but the lyrics use a violent homophobic slur (an f-word, not fuck). Dire Straits has released a version of the song without the slur (in fact, the slur-less version can be found in the band's remastered album, Money for Nothing), but for some reason the OST I'm recommending includes the original (completely unnecessary) version. I gotta say that hearing the f-word used so deliberately really ruins the song for me, so I want to give our beloved newsletter readers a heads up in case it might do the same for you. Caveat complete. The OST I'm recommending you check out is the official soundtrack for the Netflix show Kaos. It has fantastic generic range (e.g. it features both the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Mozart AND Judy Garland); it combines chart toppers and (at least for me) new gems; and it's a cool 3hrs and 16mins. If you've got a lengthy commute or a long walk coming up this week, give it a spin! It's (mostly) a blast!
This month I’m recommending ramen. I have a small kitchen and a bad habit of putting food prep at the bottom of my priorities, so having dried ramen noodles on hand to zhuzh is my best rec for you! Buy these noodles (I can hear my mom saying “it’s just salt!), or these, or these and join me in cracking an egg into the broth (or soft boiling, or frying one on the side). Add some soy sauce (or coconut aminos), white sesame seeds, green onions (I keep them chopped in my freezer), corn (I’m from the midwest and corn is my god), other greens you may have, some miso paste if you’re fun, etc. and treat yourself to a bowl of very easy noodles that make me think of this near-perfect film (I think they eat ramen in the first 15 minutes of the movie but I could be wrong).
In my early 20's I was known to go to great lengths to avoid what we could call “life admin”. I would eat dinner with a large spatula rather than clean a fork. I didn’t get glasses until it became abundantly apparent that everyone else in my university class could read the white board and I was the only one struggling to see it. I broke a desk chair because I pushed too hard on the lever rather than take the time to learn how the lever worked. I’m impatient when it comes to these sorts of things. But more recently (since moving into almost 30 territory) I’ve been tackling these small discomforts (I guess not being able to see isn’t as small discomfort, but you get the idea). My most recent example is that my glasses were getting very loose on my face. The hinge wasn’t tight, so I was constantly having to push the glasses up my nose (ARGH). Instead of never wearing those glasses again and buying a new pair (which is something I have done in the past) I bought a glasses repair kit and used the tiny screwdriver provided to tighten the hinges!! Now my glasses stay on my face and I’m so much happier. I hope this inspires you to take care of a minor pain in your life today. It’ll be worth it and you’ll be so much more comfortable. Here is an example of the quality of repair kit I got.
I had a really fabulous reading month in January after spending most of 2024 not really falling in love with anything I read (there were a few exceptions!). February was less fabulous but I finished and LOVED Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul, which is out now! I love Scaachi’s writing and read her first book during the depths of lockdown in 2020, but her latest is even sharper. Sucker Punch follows the dissolution of her marriage (which played a very pivotal role in her first book), while also featuring chewy and incisive essays about body image and her mother’s cancer diagnosis, among many other things. I loved it, plus it has one of the coolest covers I’ve seen in recent memory. This month, I’m looking forward to finishing The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green, The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami, and maaaaaybe Best Woman by Rose Dommu if I’m feeling optimistic.
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