Scientification! "Amazing Stories" at 100 on All Things Condered

The prose version is here.

Blue Man Regroup: "Avatar: Fire and Ash," reviewed.

He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake…(20th Century Studios)

I wish I could give a more full-throated endorsement to the third, not-as-long-awaited Avatar, but I’m starting to have some real reservations about my first favorite filmmaker’s life’s work. My Washington City Paper review is here. You can also hear me discuss the movie with Stephen Thompson and Reanna Cruz on Pop Culture Happy Hour below.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Alien: Earth"

Babou Ceesay as Morrow, the cybernetic Inspector Javert figure of Alien: Earth. (F/X)

On today’s Pop Culture Happy Hour I had a gay old time (double) jawin’ with Glen Weldon and Joelle Monique about Alien: Earth, an attempt by Legion and Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley to implant a feature-film embryo into a prestige-TV host body.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Phoenician Scheme"

A new Wes Anderson joint is a cause for celebration if you’re me. I join pal-for-life Glen Weldon and Code Switch host B.A. Parker to scheme, Phoenician-style. My jokes about how Anderson never phoens it in have all been cut.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "MIssion: Impossible — The Final Reckoning"

When you stare into The Abyss, etc., etc. (Paramount)

When you watch 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, you can see the shot wherein Tom Cruise breaks his ankle leaping across London rooftops.

When you listen to our new Pop Culture Happy Hour on Mission: Impossible — The Final Recknoning, you can hear the moment when I suffer an aneurysm. It’s when my friends Aisha Harris and Linda Holmes once again compare these films to the Fast & Furious movies. And they are like those, in the sense that the 1969 Rolling Stones and circa 2012 Aerosmith are both rock bands.

Talkin' Long Movies on "Weekend Edition Sunday"

Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Martin Scorsese’s 3.5-hour historical epic Killers of the Flower Moon. (Apple)

There’re few things I love more than to immerse myself in he richly-imagined world of a movie, but even I can see that popcorn flicks, in particular, have hulked out to dangerous dimensions. I noted this alarming trend on the occasion of Avengers: Endgame in 2019 and again back in May when Martin Scorsese’s 3.5-hour adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction true-crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Weekend Edition Sunday host Ayesha Roscoe had me and my pal Bob Mondello on to refute, which great respect, her assertion that movies are too long. According to Bob, what was originally slated for a four-minute time slot was allowed to strech out to a luxurious 7:15, which seems fitting.

Radio, Radio: Multiversal Exports

The contemporaneous cape-flicks Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Flash are both riffing on a lot of the same ideas. I put together a fun radio piece asking if the concept of fictional multiverses has gone fully mainstream. it aired today on Here & Now, but you can listen right here.

The Seven Ages of 007: How Daniel Craig Became the Bookend Bond

No Time to Die is a Bond flick like no other for several reasons, one of them being that it’s the only one I’ve ever gone to see immediately after interviewing Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, who’ve been producing these films since 1995’s Goldeneye. The Bond movies are their family business, having been started by their father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, with his partner Harry Saltzman six decades ago. Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson were very generous with their time, which gave me the platinum-level problem of having lots more good material than I could Tetris into my four-minute radio piece for Friday’s All Things Considered, which you can listen to below.

Here’s the prose version, which became a related-but-separate piece that wouldn’t have worked on the radio for several reasons, including the fact I wrote it before I landed the interviews.

I have all the thanks in the world for the wonderful and ultra-capable NPR Books editor Petra Mayer, who edited both the prose piece and the radio piece, which meant adding two labor-intensive tasks to what was already a packed week for her. (She hosted a panel at New York Comic Con this week, along with all her usual duties.) Nobody does it better.