Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Deliver Me From Nowhere"

Stations of the Boss: Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Joseph Douglas Springsteen.

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Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, filmmaker Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Warren Zanes’ eponymous nonfiction book about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska, is pretty conventional. But there’s an odd moment near the end that Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson and I did not discuss on our Pop Culture Happy Hour episode about the movie. While nothing in this barely-fictionalized account of a well-documented chapter in the life of one of the famous musicians in history could be called a spoiler, this is one of the few interpretive choices Cooper makes that’s all surprising or intriguing, so reader beware.

The scene is a coda to the film, following a title card that reads “Ten Months Later,” which I inferred meant that this post-concert scene was set on the opening night of the Born in the U.S.A. tour in June 1984. Springsteen’s father Doug (an underused Stephen Graham) is waiting in The Boss’s dressing room, and he invites his son to sit on his knee. Among his other gentle protests, Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen says, I’m 32 years old, Pop. But Bruce Joseph Douglas Springsteen (b. Sept. 23, 1949) was 34 when that tour began. I’ve probably misstated my age at some point in my life, but I can’t imagine that film as rigidly researched as this one, derived from an excellent nonfiction book and with its subject a frequent presence on the set, could miss a detail like that. I don’t think it’s an error. As I was watching the movie I thought it might be a clue that this a dream sequence. I went back and checked Springsteen’s memoir Born to Run to see if he made any mention of an odd occurrence like this happening on the beginning of the biggest tour of his career. He did not.

If my voice sounds a little odd on the episode, that’d be because I accidentally recorded myself via my crappy computer microphone instead of my Shure SM7B, a professional mic used by, among others, Marc Maron, who has a small role in the film as studio engineer Chuck Plotkin, whose name will be familiar to you if you’ve pored over 30-plus years of Springsteen liner notes as obsessively as I have. It’s only fitting that I encountered a rare recording-quality problem on the episode where we discuss the making of Bruce’s perfectly imperfect 1982 outlier LP Nebraska.

Meanwhile, my City Paper review of the film — where I go on a bit without getting into the weeds about exactly how old the now-76-year-old Springsteen was when — is here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Joker: Folie à Deux"

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga need to talk. (Warner Bros.)

I saw The Silence of the Lambs again at the Alamo Drafthouse two nights before I saw Joker: Folie à Deux, which reminded me of author Thomas Harris’s Silence sequel novel (and Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, after Silence director Jonathan Demme declined to return) Hannibal in the way it wants to punish those who loved 2019’s Joker.

I didn’t. But I liked Folie à Deux even less. And I’m still higher on it than my conversation-mates Joelle Monique and Glen Weldon!

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One"

IMF lifers Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie always wanted to crash a train together. (Paramount)

it’s an honor and a privilege to dissect the latest entry in my favorite film franchise with Linda Holmes, Wailin Wong, and Roxanna Hadadi on today’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. My estimation of the film grew when I saw it a second time after we recorded this, but it’s an accurate reflection of my somewhat perplexed initial response.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Going Back to "Titanic"

The great Aisha Harris hosted this conversation wherein I had the good fortune once again to join my old pal Linda Holmes and my new pal Roxana Hadadi. I had a whole digression when we recorded about The Abyss, James Cameron’s first seafaring disaster romance, released only eight years before Titanic, and from which Titanic derives a lot of its technique and one or two of its sinking-ship set pieces.

Titanic was not a film anyone other than Cameron was pushing to make when he pitched it to Fox Chairman Bill Mechanic in early 1995. (He wanted a movie studio to pay for his dives to the wreckage, which constitute the first footage he shot for this movie.) It’s not a film where Fox would have simply hired another director to make it had Cameron acceded to the prevailing wisdom and decided to focus his energies on anything else. Cameron is also the person who cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, so the movie is a Cameron project from whatever the shipbuilding equivalent of “soup to nuts” would be. I think it makes sense to foreground Cameron in any discussion of it. Try to imagine Christopher Nolan making a movie now that adolescent girls embraced and returned to again and again. That’s what happened in in the last two weeks of 1997 and the first quarter of ‘98, when the gearhead writer/director of the first two Terminator films, and Aliens, and True Lies, and yes, The Abyss, turned in a romantic tragedy where in the big boat doesn’t hit the iceberg until an hour a forty minutes into the movie.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Northman"

Alexander Skarsgård wears all-natural fibers in Robert Eggers divisive new VIking epic.

I was glad to join my old pal Glen Weldon and my new pal Kristen Meinzer for a lively debate vis-a-vis the mertis and demerits of Robert Eggers’s new VIking movie The Northman, but my key takeaway listening back to this is that 30 years ago Conan O’Brien was trying to get us to say Cone-ehhn, not Cone-anne. Today the ghost of Robert E. Howard would like for us all to remember that his barbarian is called Cone-anne.

None of us remembered this.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "No Time to Die" and What's Making Us Happy

Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright as old soldiers James Bond and Felix Leiter. (Nicola Dove/MGM)

What a treat to join my pal and Degree Absolute! cohost Glen Weldon, frequent co-panelist Daisy Rosario, and writer/comedian Jourdain Searles to perform the Pop Culture Happy Hour autopsy on No Time to Die.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Black Widow" and What's Making Us Happy

Scarlet Johansson, David Harbor, and Florence Pugh take a walk in the woods. (Jay Maidment/Marvel Studios)

Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon and I have been on Pop Culture Happy Hour together on many occasions, but this is the first time since we started our own podcast. With host Linda Holmes and my fellow guest Vincent Schilling, we talked through our mixed responses to Black Widow, the Marvel movie that we all agree should’ve come out no later than in 2017, and which I wish had been more of a spy story than yet another Big Fight in the Sky. The casting of the the fabricated Russian spy “family” — Scarlet Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, and Rachel Weisz — made the film worthwhile for me, albeit frustrating.

Omitted from our conversation was my mention of this Guardian profile of Black Widow director Cate Shortland, wherein she describes removing a cheesecake shot of Johansson from the film after a test audience objected to it. I brought it up because the piece describes the film as pointedly not objectifying its star the way Iron Man 2 and other Marvel entries have, when some members of the audience I saw the film with felt strongly that the movie had done that.

My own incomplete thoughts on the subject are that it’s good that a woman directed this movie, that more films at every budget level but especially massive investments like Black Widow should be directed by woman, and that I’m not sure it’s possible to film a movie star without objectifying them. Our ability to regard them as objects as well as people may well be the mysterious quality that makes them stars. Johnasson has demonstrated herself on many occasions to be a good actor, too, but that’s a different skill.

NPR has begun to adapt the What’s Making Me Happy segment of these Friday episodes into a text blog post. Already I’m 11 chapters into The Devil’s Candy, the 1991 Julie Salamon book Linda has recommended about how Brian De Palma’s 1990 adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities went so wrong.

I’ve also made good on my promise to dive into The Criterion Channel’s July assortment of neo-noirs. I watched Arthur Penn’s Night Moves the other night and was shocked to realize near the end that the unrecognizable girl Gene Hackman’s 40-year-old football star-turned-private dick is enlisted to find was played by Melanie Griffith, who 15 years later would play a prominent role in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Three Towering Sean Connery Performances

Connery kicks off what will become a Bond-flick tradition — the pre-title sequence — in Goldfinger, 1964.

Sean Connery, not the first screen James Bond but the first one that stuck, died at the age of 90 on Friday. His time in da moviesh spanned some 45 years, but to take stock of it in manageable fashion Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Jessica Reedy asked me to choose three of his performances to discuss. I did that with my pal Glen Weldon today. I tried to pick a trio that reflected the distinct phases of Connery’s career. Which means you’ll have to wait a little longer to hear Glen and I give 1974’s Zardoz the careful dissection it deserves.