Michael Heat: It’s quite good. Katie?
Katie Drummond: My recommendation is very specific and very strange. This is a film from 2003 called What a girl wantsStarring Amanda Bynes and Colin Firth.
Michael Heat: Wow.
Katie Drummond: I watched this film in a high school in which I cheat mathematical exams. Sorry. For some reason, only a memory of me cheating at mathematical exams in high school makes me laugh, and then I repeated them with my daughter this weekend, and it is so bad, so absurd and simply fantastic. Colin Firth is a child. Amanda Bynes is amazing and I wish her all the best. And it’s a very amusing, stupid movie, if you just want to disconnect your brain and learn about the story of a 17-year-old girl who goes to Great Britain to meet a father she never knew.
Michael Heat: Wow.
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Katie Drummond: Thank you. This is really good.
Lauren Goode: I can’t decide if you say it’s good if it’s terrible.
Katie Drummond: It’s both. Do you know what I mean?
Lauren Goode: It’s a bit of a combination of both.
Katie Drummond: It’s so bad. He falls in love with a bad boy with a motorcycle, but with a golden heart, who also sings in a band who plays in the parliament in Great Britain, so he is simply all the time. He has peppery hair. Do you remember 2003? All guys had gel, spiky hair.
Lauren Goode: Yes, I still remember it. Movies from the early 2000, boy, do not age well.
Katie Drummond: However, he ages like good wine.
Michael Heat: That’s great.
Katie Drummond: This is perfect.
Lauren Goode: That’s great.
Katie Drummond: Mike, what do you recommend?
Lauren Goode: Yes.
Michael Heat: Can I go exactly the opposite?
Katie Drummond: Please, someone. Yes.
Michael Heat: I’m going literary.
Katie Drummond: Ok
Michael Heat: And I recommend a novel that I recently read that she just shook me to my core. It’s Elena Ferrante and it’s called Days of abandonment. This is a novel written in Italian, translated into English and many other languages, by the great pseudonym writer Elena Ferrante. And it’s about a woman who one day wakes up and learns that her husband is leaving her, and she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know where she is going or with whom she is going, but she just disappears from her life, and she goes through it. He accidentally closes in his apartment. He has two children, whom he is suddenly trying to take care of, but somehow neglects because it is-
Katie Drummond: This is terrible.
Michael Heat: But this is the way it is written is really good. This is a really challenging book. It is rugged, it is really complex in terms of the subject, but writing is simply amazing and it is not a long book, so you do not have to sit and suffer from it for a long time. I will not spoil anything, but I will say that there is some resolution in it. This is not a elementary journey to hell. It’s really, just a wonderful observation of how human processing sadness and how people deal with crises, and I really liked it.