IP Picks🔎: An Adventure with a Sprinkle of Faerie Dust
➕ A cooking class drama where things heat up and a healing cross-country road trip
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
Before we dive into this week’s picks, I wanted to highlight a discouraging report from the American Library Association that was just announced. It shows that book challenges at schools and libraries jumped 65 percent in 2023, driven by a 92 percent increase at public libraries. The number of titles being contested went from 2,571 to 4,240, demonstrating that so much of this is spearheaded by organized pressure campaigns where a few activists object to multiple books at once and not ordinary parents with concerns about a single title. It should come as no surprise that nearly half of the complaints took issue with books about the experiences of BIPOC or LGBTQIA+ people.
The fight over library books may seem afield from what happens in Hollywood, but it really isn’t. Because movies, TV and streaming are national and are consumed totally within the privacy of one’s home, local politics hasn’t had as much traction with them. Not to get overly dramatic, but I’m reminded of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s line that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The more that these challenges succeed, the more emboldened these extremists become. It strains the (already strained) resources of individual libraries to fight off these constant attacks. Hollywood — both its individuals and companies — should always be at the forefront of defending freedom of expression and standing in solidarity with librarians, who have been unfairly placed on the front lines of this revanchist culture war.
Onto this week’s picks which feature two promising ensemble stories, the second installment in a fantasy-adventure series and a life-affirming road trip
An ensemble dramedy following the lives of teachers at a Texas high school
A domestic thriller about three moms chasing admission to a posh private school for their kids that ends in murder
A fantasy adventure about a professor searching for a faerie world to help her faerie-king boyfriend fight his wicked mother
A ensemble drama exploring the lives of eight people who take the same weekly cooking class
A coming-of-age story about a young woman rediscovering herself on a pandemic-era cross-country adventure
