Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Dog Stars"

Glen, Aisha, and I were all fairly unmoved by Ridley Scott’s latest, The Dog Stars, which I wrote about last week. But it disappointed each of us in a slightly different way. Hear the Pop Culture Happy Hour episode below.

I Have Bad News About the Dog Star of "The Dog Stars"

A boy (Jacob Elordi) and his dog and his plane. (Fabio Lovino)

We’re left wondering why Scott wanted to make this movie. His contemporaries who’re still working have turned their attention in recent years to long-contemplated dream projects and/or summations of their guiding obsessions: Steven Spielberg, 79, waited for his parents to die to make The Fabelmans, then returned to his seminal subject of extraterrestrial ambassadors this year with Disclosure Day. Francis Ford Coppola, 87, had completed the first draft of his 2024 opus Megalopolis in 1984, four decades before the movie hit theaters. Michael Mann, 83, spent decades trying to get the already-all-but-forgotten 2023 biopic Ferrari made. He’s about to start shooting Heat 2, a sequel to the 1995 masterpiece that he’d already previewed back then with a 1989 made-for-TV version and elements of the Mann-produced NBC shows Miami Vice and Crime Story.

My Washington City Paper review of the 88-year-old Sir Ridley Scott’s latest is here.

The Wright Stuff: "The Running Man," reviewed.

In his 2015 book Silver Screen Fiend, comedian and Broad Run High School Class of 1987 graduate Patton Oswalt recalls that he worked at a three-screen cinema at the intersection of Dranesville Road and Route 7 in Sterling, Virginia. That happens to be the theater where my dad took me to see The Running Man, the Arnold Schwarzenegger-headlined adaptation of a 1982 Stephen King novella set in the year 2025, three or four months after Oswalt’s graduation. When I read Oswalt’s book, it occurred to me that Oswalt might’ve been the guy who sold my dad one adult and one kid ticket to The Running Man on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon 38 years ago.

I see now that Oswalt graduated from the College of William & Mary in 1991, so when The Running Man opened in November 1987, he would’ve been down in Williamsburg, most of the way through the first semester of his freshman year. Unless he was coming home to work at the theater on weekends! I don’t recall him saying anything about that in his book.

The subject of Silver Screen Fiend is the way Oswalt’s exploding cinephilia as a Los Angeles resident in his late twenties, aided and abetted by the brilliant every-night-a-double-feature programming of the New Beverly Theater, curdled into something very like addiction. As a guy who used to drive down to the New Beverly a lot during my own late twenties in Southern California, and who is now frequently at one of two Alamo Drafthouse locations within bicycling range of my apartment on the evenings when I’m not attending a critics’ screening of a new release, I think about that a lot.

Anyway, my Washington Post review of director Edgar Wright’s new, more faithful adaptation of King’s novella is here.

Deleted Scenes: On Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Isabela Moner and Benicio Del Toro are forced to lam it in the Sicario sequel. (Sony)

Spoiler for Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which is the Denis Villeneuve/Roger Deakins/Emily Blunt/Daniel Kaluuya-free sequel to the very good 2015 drug war thriller Sicario. Late in the movie, Josh Brolin, reprising his role as a C.I.A. black-ops guy from the first movie, is ordered to kill a 16-year-old girl—an unarmed noncombatant who is the daughter of a drug kingpin but not a criminal herself. There's more to it than that, but that's all I'll say just in case you feel compelled to see the film, which I do not endorse. 

Anyway, I talked about that scene in my review of the movie, which went into production in November 2016, the same month we elected a president who said on TV during the campaign that if you want to stop terrorists, "you have to go after their families." Given that Day of the Soldado opens with a scenario wherein Muslim suicide bombers are believed to have snuck into the United States across the Mexican border (though they're later revealed to have been American citizens from New Jersey), I believe this plot element was directly inspired by the current president's campaign rhetoric.

So I said that Soldado might "make you nostalgic for the more recent time when wondering whether an American soldier (or intelligence operative) would refuse a direct order to shoot an unarmed, noncombatant child in the head was a purely hypothetical exercise." That passage was cut from the review, ostensibly because it was too political. In my view, it was a fair observation to make about a film that has a clearly articulated political bent, albeit a more nuanced and humane one than anything we've heard the current president say on the topics of immigration or crime or drugs.

Friends, Coens, Countrymen: All Hail Hail, Caesar!

Josh Brolin as an Eddie Mannix who only superficially resembles the historical Eddie Mannix.

No one in the world can possibly appreciate the way the narrator of the new Coen Brothers picture, Sir Michael Gambon — the man who once declined the role of James Bond because, quoth he, "I've got tits like a woman" — says "in westerly Malibu" as much as I do. But just about everyone seems to like the movie. I do, too. My NPR review is here.