News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Will I Love Boosters Fix Me? Plus: The mysterious case of the zombie orchids and a cockroach you will love By Molly Templeton | Published on July 31, 2026 Image: NEON Comment 0 Share New Share Image: NEON It is the end of July and I am staring at the moon at six in the morning, when it is still bright in the sky as the sun comes up behind the building. Every week I think, “Is it really this late in the summer already?” Tomorrow it will literally be August and I cannot process this. Summer has been a lot of things in my lifetime—including smothered in wildfire smoke, as it is for many people this year—but this one still feels different. It’s hard not to think that maybe it will feel a different kind of different in the fall, when it rains, when the midterms are (at long last) upon us. Every season is change, but this one is just a different shape somehow. And still there is art. There are unexpected flowers and wise cockroaches and books—so many books!—and, oddly, late-July big movies, and also a centaur robot with a chainsaw. I’m not sure that last one is art, but I’m also not sure it’s not art. When you are not considering the merits of deadly-looking disaster robots, hug your friends, call your reps, keep some masks on hand, and maybe let your lawn go wild. Who knows what might grow there? Good Things Can Come From Zombie Films As a certified wimp, I will not be watching 28 Years Later any time soon, no matter how good it is—but I most certainly will appreciate the unexpected benefit that happened when one abbey in Yorkshire let the grass grow long for the film’s shoot. The filmmakers wanted it to look more overgrown, and overgrow it did. And then the orchids bloomed. According to the BBC, hundreds of orchids bloomed at Fountains Abbey after the film shoot. “There had been no record of the flowers on the abbey site since the 1850s and the orchids had not been seen in living memory. 170 Years Later, nobody knows where they have come from or why they have germinated once again.” Cheeky little capital letters there on “170 Years Later,” no? Anyway. This has been your orchid report for the week! We could all use some nice flower news of late.   A Game of Thrones Is Technically a Millennial (Barely) If the internet is to be believed, August is the birthday month of A Game of Thrones, the first volume of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. You can now wish the book a very happy 30th birthday, should you feel so inclined. Yes, your favorite unfinished series comes in just under the wire as a Millennial, and if I were inclined to believe in stereotypes about generations, I might make some silly jokes here. But I’m not thus inclined, so I won’t. I will just say: Holy cats, how is this book thirty? I read it for the first time a decade and change ago, when it wasn’t even yet old enough to drink. (No, this metaphor doesn’t really work. But you know what I mean.) What’s interesting to me is that while I can find a hundred articles about the sold-out, extremely expensive Folio Society edition of the book, I cannot turn up just an essay considering it after all these years. Whether this is user error on my part, the demise of functional search engines, or straight-up literary-essay burnout, I dunno. I would have liked to include something other than a date marker here. But at this point, can we even look past the fading anticipation for the next book and see this book clearly, thirty years later? Can I Convince You That a Cockroach is One of the Greatest Characters in Literature? The other week I read a handful of very short books over the course of a weekend. One was a small tome I had been moving back and forth across the country for literally decades: Archyology: The Long Lost Tales of Archy and Mehitabel, a posthumous collection of work by the genius Don Marquis. Marquis invented Archy, a cockroach who types on a newspaperman’s typewriter at night—being only a bug, he cannot use capital letters—in 1916. Mehitabel is Archy’s friend, a lady cat whose song goes, “i have had my ups and downs / but wotthehell wotthehell.” I met these characters when I was a teen, when I did not fully understand the sharpness of Marquis’ pen (or typewriter keys), and they have stayed with me ever since. Archy is, well, arch, and satirical, and far too wise for a lowly bug of the city, and sometimes these sly poems are exactly what you need in a hot, diarrhea-lettuce summer when the powers that be are letting everyone down. “boss what are you going to do,” archy types at one point, “with these spirits / who are miserable / and do not know it / who are iniquitous and proud of it / who are pitiable / and boast of their condition / who are defeated / and believe themselves victorious / who are corrupt / and contented / who are undeserving…” Archy continues in this vein before determining that this is a problem he will pass along to the sociologists. I don’t think we can leave it up to them anymore (if we ever could), but I felt a little better for how familiar this all was. Will I Love Boosters Fix Me? Is this a safe space to say that I have been struggling with movies? I have seen only a few movies this year and none of the ones I loved were the ones that I, a lifelong SFF fan, were supposed to love. None were even new! I loved Amadeus and I loved First Cow and I loved Showing Up. I loved the parts of The Mandalorian and Grogu that were a silent film about a little guy just doing his best in the swamp. (I stared at the wall for the megafauna murders. Get a new gag, Mandalorian!) I am anxious about the big movies. Will they be movies? Or toy commercials? Can I take another Spider-Man? Do I want to? Are they going to do my girl [redacted] dirty? I think I’m interested in Hope and Hot Spot. And Wicker. But I think maybe the whole problem is that I missed Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters. His Sorry to Bother You was one of the strangest, most wonderful in-theater experiences I had in the previous decade. This one, with its ensemble cast of shoplifters and (surely absurd but smart) commentary on capitalism, is so up my alley. It’s only available to rent, not to stream free-with-the-price-of-app subscription, but maybe it’s worth it. Maybe it can fix me.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Will <i>I Love Boosters</i> Fix Me? appeared first on Reactor.