Nothing to do this Sunday? Don't worry about it. Courtesy of the Vox culture squad, here's a procrastination schedule to keep you from being productive from now until work tomorrow.
1pm: Wake up
Get up (or get home from church or a run or what have you if you're an early bird), shower, get dressed, brush teeth, etc.
1:20pm: Lunch
Walk over to Chipotle for lunch. Listen to this playlist on the way there and back. This playlist is meant to be enjoyed in the privacy of your own earbuds or in your convertible while cruising down a highway in California. We're in a safe space here, so please leave judgments at the door.
You'll probably have enough time to make it through the first ten songs:
"Sexy Love" by Kylie Minogue. It's basically the 2014 version of Minogue's 2001 hit, "Love at First Sight." And we're okay with that.
"Million Miles" by Kylie Minogue. Because you can't just have one Minogue song on a playlist.
"Red Lights" by Tiesto. The deal Calvin Harris signed with Lucifer to gain the power to dominate pop charts with summer jams has expired and was offered to Tiesto.
"Sissy That Walk" by RuPaul. If it wasn't obvious, this list was compiled by a homosexual male.
"Can't Remember to Forget You" by Shakira feat. Rihanna. The video features Rihanna and Shakira on striped daybeds smoking Cuban cigars. That alone sells the track.
"I Luh Ya Papi" by Jennifer Lopez. Another case where the video is argument enough.
"Under Control" by Calvin Harris. Let's take a moment of silence for all the kickboxing/spin class instructors in gyms around the nation that will never escape this earworm.
"Wild Wild Love" by Pitbull. Think of this as the little sister of "Timber."
"Chandelier" by Sia. This is Rihanna's "Diamonds" 2.0.
"A Public Affair" by Jessica Simpson. There was a time when Jessica Simpson, Christina Milian, and Eva Longoria appeared in a video together. This track makes it on for historical preservation purposes as much as anything.
— Alex Abad-Santos
2pm: Don Jon
Eat your lunch while watching Don Jon, currently streaming on Netflix.
1 hour 30 minutes. Metacritic: 66. Rotten Tomatoes: 81.
Don Jon is a funny, difficult, and beautiful story about relationships— as beautiful as a story can be when the lead character is addicted to pornography. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays an Italian womanizer from New Jersey, opposite love-interest Scarlett Johansson.
Though the movie centers around Don Jon's pornography addiction, the action of the movie follows a traditional romantic plot, and keeps from emotionally isolating the characters the way movies like Shame do. Ultimately, Don Jon is a comedy that carries the emotional heft of a well-crafted drama.
— Kelsey McKinney
4pm: Let the Fire Burn
1 hour, 35 minutes. Metacritic: 86. Rotten Tomatoes: 97.
Once you're done with Don Jon, try last year's Let the Fire Burn, also on Netflix. It's an astonishingly well-made documentary about an incident in 1985 in which the Philadelphia police department dropped four pounds of C4 explosives on a row house in the city's Cobbs Creek neighborhood. Eleven residents of the house, including five children, were killed, and 61 houses (mostly inhabited by black families) were destroyed after the police decided to "let the fire burn."
The bombing was a culmination of a years-long conflict between the city and a primitivist black liberation group called MOVE, which was both, director Jason Osder makes clear, something like a cult, and the target of wholly disproportionate and unjustifiable violence from the Philadelphia PD. Osder eschews present-day interviews and voice-overs, telling the whole story through archival footage, using testimonies before the panel appointed to investigate the incident to frame the story. The result is far better paced than your average documentary, and more powerful too.
— Dylan Matthews
5:30pm: Orphan Black
43 minutes (plus commercials). Metacritic: 79. Rotten Tomatoes: 97.
Orphan Black is currently in its second season, and it's only getting better. The story keeps spiraling out as Sarah, Allison, Cosima, and the rest of the clones played by star Tatiana Muslany struggle to understand how they came to be, the shadowy biotech company that created them, and the religious fundamentalists who want to see them dead.
Unfortunately, BBC America has decided to air it on Saturday nights, of all times. Missed it? Now's a great time to watch last night's episode. If you have Comcast/Time Warner Cable, FiOS, or DirectTV/Dish, you can stream it on demand. Cord cutters can buy episodes from iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, and the like. Behind on the series, or haven't started? If you have Amazon Prime, you can catch up with the whole first season for free here; most satellite and cable providers also offer it. Try the pilot now, and see if you aren't hooked.
— Dylan Matthews
~6:20pm: Dinner
Dinner time! Go to Chipotle (or another place, I suppose there are other places one can buy food) and listen to the next ten tracks from our playlist:
"Fancy" by Iggy Azalea. Who would have thought that in 2that Iggy would be the more successful Azalea/Azealia?
"I Wish" by Cher Lloyd. The British, female, 2014-version of Skee-Lo's "I Wish."
"The Way" by Ariana Grande. Just close your eyes and pretend you're listening to vintage Mariah.
"Baby I" by Ariana Grande. Seriously, just let Ariana wash over you. Resistance is futile.
"Pretty Girl Rock" by Keri Hilson. There was a point in time where Keri Hilson tried to start a fight with Beyoncé, and since victors write history, Keri's been largely forgotten by now. But at least this number deserves to stick around.
"Hush" by Liz. This vaguely sounds like the Rocky theme of all things.
"Ghetto Superstar" by Pras, Mya, and Ol' Dirty Bastard. Let's be real, this song is really Mya's.
"Damaged" by Danity Kane. Stop pretending like you never sang the first three lines of this pop-and-b earworm.
"Dance (A$$)" by Big Sean feat. Nicki Minaj. Minaj's best work are on different people's songs and mixtapes. Big Sean's track is no exception.
"Summer" by Calvin Harris. This song tried a little too hard to be the song of summer. But we appreciate the effort.
— Alex Abad-Santos
7:00pm: Bob's Burgers
30 minutes (including commercials). Rotten Tomatoes: 100.
Back home just in time for Bob's Burgers on FOX! Like The Simpsons, the episodes are self-contained and you shouldn't feel bad about jumping right in if you haven't seen it before. This week features Tina trying out for the cheerleading squad, where she will no doubt, to borrow her brother Gene's phrasing, "whip the crowd into a frenzy by spelling words":
— Dylan Matthews
7:30pm: Frances Ha
1 hour, 35 minutes. Metacritic: 82. Rotten Tomatoes: 93.
All right, 90 minutes until Game of Thrones. Perfect for a quick movie. Why not last year's Frances Ha? Greta Gerwig stars (and co-wrote the film with director Noah Baumbach) as Frances, a struggling dancer whose life is thrown into disarray when her roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner) leaves their Brooklyn apartment to move in with her banker boyfriend. Frances responds by hopping around from Chinatown to her parents' home in Sacramento to her alma mater (Vassar) to Paris, trying to figure out how to get her life in order.
People who are deeply annoyed by Girls are going to find a lot of the same faults here, right down to having a lead cast member who is the child of a British rock star (Sumner's father is Sting). And it's true we need more (a lot more) movies and shows focusing on twenty-somethings who aren't well-off white liberal arts graduates working in creative professions in New York. But there's a lot to love here all the same. Sam Levy's gorgeous black-and-white cinematography alone justifies streaming it, and Baumbach and Gerwig's script smartly twists romantic comedy tropes to tell a story that's fundamentally about Frances and Sophie's love for each other. And at no point does the film let the men in their lives get in the way of that.
— Dylan Matthews
9:00PM: Game of Thrones
1 hour. Metacritic: 94. Rotten Tomatoes: 98.
Spoilers: The Seven Kingdoms have a new king (and a queen dowager hoping to win his hand), Jon Snow and his volunteers from the Night's Watch are preparing to take Craster’s Keep, and Daenerys Targaryen is turning her attention to Westeros, threatening to plunge the continent into war yet again. No idea what any of that means? Check out Kelsey's explainer to get the background you need and then dive in.
— Dylan Matthews
10:00PM: The Good Wife (DVRed)
43 minutes. Rotten Tomatoes: 100.
The failure of the Michael J. Fox Show means only good things for The Good Wife, now that Fox's charming corporate defense attorney Louis Canning is back for an extended, end-of-season arc. Canning's a nice deviation from the devious back-stabbing lawyer archetype; he's totally devious and back-stabbing, but outwardly pleasant and seemingly genuine enough that his targets barely notice they're in his crosshairs.
— Dylan Matthews
10:43PM: Mad Men (DVRed)
47 minutes. Metacritic: 85. Rotten Tomatoes: 86.
Mad Men previews are seemingly made by daring the show's editors to cut together 30 seconds of footage that includes at least half of the show's major characters without revealing any substantive plot point in the process. And they succeed! Every week! This week, apparently, Don will use an elevator, Peggy will ask "What?" and Pete will learn something he hadn't heard about before. Heady days.
— Dylan Matthews
11:30PM: Silicon Valley (DVRed or HBO Go)
30 minutes. Metacritic: 84. Rotten Tomatoes: 96.
This week on Silicon Valley, the startup it features, Piped Piper, hires a convicted felon to paint a mural at its offices. Sound preposterous? Tell that to David Choe, who served time in Japanese prison for assault and got rich by painting murals for Facebook in exchange for stock options. Except Choe is, by all appearances, way worse than the show's counterpart. A few months ago, Choe seemingly admitted to being a rapist on a podcast (he is now claiming he is only guilty of "bad storytelling").
It says something about the show's subject matter that Silicon Valley managed to actually undersell the skeeviness of the particular person it's skewering. Knowing that the gross, masculinist nonsense the show indicts is, if anything, worse in real life makes it all the more effective as satire.
— Dylan Matthews
12AM: Veep (DVRed or HBO Go)
30 minutes. Metacritic: 87. Rotten Tomatoes: 100.
The preview doesn't give us a whole lot to go on, but at least we know this week Vice President Selena Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) goes fly-fishing with former Defense Secretary and likely presidential rival George Maddox (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), which ought to be awkward as all hell. I can't wait.
— Dylan Matthews
12:30AM: Go to bed. Seriously.