Movie Death Match: "Spider-Man 2" v. "Into the Spider-Verse"

With Spider-Man: Brand New Day a bigger hit than anyone predicted, Movie Death Match executive producer Sam Van Hallgren’s impulse to pivot away from our planned Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma-themed contest to a battle of the most beloved Spidey-flicks proved to be more than sound.

My frequent Pop Culture Happy Hour co-panelist Daisy Rosario reps the 2018 Oscar-winning animated flick Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse while Screencrush editor and lifelong Spidey fan Matt Singer argues on behalf of Sam Raimi’s 2004 Spider-Man 2. It’s our most amazing / spectacular / ultmate / web-of / 2099 death match yet! Listen below, True Believers!

Great Power, Great Responsibility 4eva: Spidey's Got a "Brand New Day"

It seems I’m a little higher on this Thunderball / Ghost Protocol (read: fourth) installment of the Tom Holland-era Spidey series than many of my esteemed colleagues. My Washington City Paper review is here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Odyssey"

Matt Damon is Odysseus and Zendaya is Athena. (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal)

I fully expected my PCHH brethren Glen Weldon and (especially) Stephen Thompson to complain that Christopher Nolan’s all-star, shot-on-location-in-IMAX, no-expense-spared adaptation of a 2,800ish-year-old epic poem was too long with too few jokes. To my surprise and delight, they did not. Wailin Wong, who I had the pleasure of being on a panel with to dissect the probably-final Mission: Impossible last summer, shares my love of Tenet. It’s a fun episode.

My Washington City Paper review, meanwhile, is here.

Equine Intervention: "The Odyssey," reviewed.

Never leave Pattinson alone to brood. (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal)

My Washington City Paper review of The Odyssey is here.

District Fringe 2: District Fringer

Clockwise from left: Highly expressive District Fringe folk Tracey Erbacher, Marshall Bradshaw, Aubri O’Connor, Sophia Menconi, Hope Gundlah, Karen Lange, Marley Kabin. (Alan Kayanan/District Fringe)

I was on the Capital Fringe beat for so many years that I had to step away for a while. But when the summertime #DCtheatre institution announced in Jan. 2025 that it it would end, and a trio of Fringe veterans stepped into the breach to create the successor festival District Fringe, I was elated. As District Fringe enters its second year, I sweated it out for CityCast DC.

No Scrubs, No Skips: "CrazySexyCool," reviewed for CityCast DC

Holli’ Gabrielle Conway, Jade Milan and Stoney B. Woods as T-Boz, Left Eye and Chilli in CrazySexyCool. (Julieta Cervantes)

My review of CrazySexyCool is my first for CityCast DC, where I’ll be contributing regularly, I’m glad to say. The TL:DR on the new TLC show is that music and dancing are great, while director / book writer Kwame Kwei-Armah deploys his artistic license to compress and dramatize the pioneering Atlanta girl-group’s saga in some confounding ways. Considering that all of this history has been told not just in documentaries like 2024’s TLC Forever, but in name-naming dramatizations like the 2013 TV movie CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story, I didn’t get why so many easily identified figures get pseudonyms here — including longtime TLC manager Bill Diggins, who produced the musical!

As the end of the opening-night performance June 26, Diggins joined TLC’s two surviving members, Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins and Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas, on-stage to congratulate the cast and crew. In show, Diggins is called “Danny.” He’s played by DC actor Aaron Bliden, whose castmates turned to salute him after the real Chilli quipped to Diggins during their post-show remarks, “I didn’t know you could sing.”

Weird! But those two-dozen TLC bangers still bang.

Movie Death Match: "Inception" v. "Interstellar"

With just a week until the release of The Odyssey, two time-dilating Christopher Nolan joints go cowl-to-cowl in an IMAX melee so epic Homer could’ve written it. New York magazine / Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri rides for 2010’s Inception while Pop Culture Scientist (and University of Oxford scientist) Abigail James reps 2014’s Interstellar in an all-new, mostly-different Movie Death Match!

Welcome to the Planet(s): "Supergirl," reviewed.

Supergirl is unique in that it’s a largely faithful adaptation of one specific comic book story, and a recent one at that. But it never reaches the heights of inspiration ascended by its source material, Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. It doesn’t even come close. My Washington City Paper review is here.