Editor’s Note: Welcome to V3 Weekend, a new Vanyaland series where we help you sort out your weekend entertainment with curated selections and recommendations across our three pillars of Music, Comedy, and Film/TV. It’s what you should know about, where you need to be, and where you’ll be going, with us riding shotgun along the way.
Music: Mitski’s ‘Love Me More’
Back in Summer 2018 a fun (if not slightly annoying) game we all played was to sing-along to Mitski’s “Nobody” and accentuate the title word to stress our loneliness, repeating it over and over a few dozen times just like she does. The joke’s on us: We thought we were lonely then; well, we’re really alone now. This week Mitski returned with the buoyant “Love Me More,” complete with a video directed by “Nobody” collaborator “Christopher Good, and the creepy visual finds her out in the world left with only her doll self.
“As ‘Love Me More’ was written pre-pandemic, lyrics like ‘If I keep myself at home’ had different meanings than what they would now,” says Mitski, “but I kept them on the album because I found that some of the sentiments not only remained the same, but were accentuated by the lockdown.”
This new song will be featured on the songwriter’s forthcoming album, Laurel Hell, out February 4 via Dead Oceans; she plays Boston’s Roadrunner on March 21.
Comedy: Sean Patton’s King Scorpio
When Sean Patton is on stage doing comedy, the New York City funnyman has an uncanny ability to come off like your best friend is up there ragging on the times you’ve had together. Earlier this week, the comedian and actor chatted with Vanyaland’s Jason Greenough about his hilarious new album, King Scorpio, a 20-track effort now on Spotify that discusses the nature of beards in 2022, unexpected encounters with Belarusian women from Hoboken, and stories of “threesome” masturbation sessions with a friend back in the late ’90s where they put on Weezer’s Blue Album to drown out orgasm noises from across the couch (spoiler: It didn’t work).
“If I had to put my feelings about this album into words, I’d say there is somewhat of a maturity to it,” Patton tells us. “I know that sounds fucking ridiculous since there’s a giant chunk of material in there about the sounds that dudes make when they come, and how stupid they are, but I’m still someone who does not believe that maturity or intelligence lies in the subject matter, but rather in the execution of that subject matter. If someone can do a bit about diarrhea, but make into a whole analogy about the human condition, then who cares about the subject matter, as long as you deliver it with intelligent execution?”
His name is Jonas.
Film/TV: The Lost Daughter on Netflix
There’s nothing worse than when your personal ghosts of the past follow you along to what was supposed to be a relaxing vacation aboard, but that’s at play in The Lost Daughter, the riveting and suspenseful psychological drama from first-time director Maggie Gyllenhaal. Leda, played wonderfully by Olivia Colman, is a middle-aged professor from Cambridge (our Cambridge!) who heads to Greece for some rest n’ relaxation, but her proximity on the beach to a loud and obnoxious extended family brings back memories of her own clan, and specifically, her role as a mother of two young daughters that pushed her to the brink.
The Lost Daughter is an impactful film about motherhood, its consistent struggles and consequences, and the choices we make through our lives that will shape more than our own. Colman is her usually wonderful self, but so is the rest of the impressive cast, particularly Dakota Johnson as the inexperienced young mother who reminds Leda of her former self, and Jessie Buckley, who brilliantly depicts young Leda in gripping flashback scenes that detail her struggle to be herself versus the mother her children need.