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: "Jaws"

Having done the dirty work of surveying all three Jaws sequels for the Paper of Record earlier this summer, it’s only right that three-fourths of the original PCHH cast had me back to talk about the titanic original. Which I’ve seen on the big screen twice this summer.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "A Complete Unknown"

Timmy as Bobby. (Fox Searchilight)

I was less than enthused when I read Timothée Chalamet would be playing Bob Dylan in a biopic set during the most widely-covered period of Dylan’s career, circa 1961-5. But I’m glad to say I was wrong! Placed within the Dylan Cinematic Extended Universe, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is not as original as Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There or the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis, nor is it as informative as No Direction Home, the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary that covered this same Dylan era — and takes its title from the lyric that immediately precedes “a complete unknown” in “Like a Rolling Stone.” (I actually like the way this suggests Mangold’s dramatization of the same era as a companion piece to Marty’s fact-based account.)

I was glad to sing the praises of the new movie alongside Stephen Thompson and Bedatri D. Choudhury on today’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein I also sneak in my traditional plug for my latest Christmas mixtape.

POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR: "Avatar: The Way of Water" and What's Making Us Happy

Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Zoe Saldaña, and Sam Worthington shooting one of the current or forthcoming Avatar sequels at some point between late 2017 and early 2020. (Fox)

James Cameron only releases a new feature film every dozen or so years, so you’ll forgive me if I’m excited. My Avatar: The Way of Water media blitz kicks off with a fun PCHH wherein Stephen Thompson, whom I’d incorrectly predicted would hate this movie, Reanna Cruz, and I talk through our reactions, and I plug my holiday mixtape.

POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR: "THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN" and What's Making Us Happy

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in another Martin McDonagh joint. (Fox Searchlight)

I was happy to join Bedatri D. Choudhury and host Stephen Thompson on Pop Culture Happy Hour to talk The Banshees of Inisherin, playright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh’s latest feature. I was one of the few defenders of his prior film the highly divisive Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri five years ago, but I was mostly here as a stan for McDonagh’s plays, which are what Inisherin recalls far more than any of his prior movies. My reviews of some of his plays seem to have blinked out of existence, but I reviewed Constellation’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2015, and Keegan’s The Lonesome West and Forum’s The Pillowman, both in 2016. When we got to the What’s Making Me Happy segment, I had several good candidates, but I chose — defaulted, really — the most Irish of them. Because McDonagh.

I went with the Most Irish of my Happy candidates on today's INISHERIN-themed @pchh, but: QT's CINEMA SPECULATION, Bechdel's THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH, & on @criterionchannl BLACULA & THE FAN*.

*scenes wherein Lauren Bacall rasps her way through Broadway rehearsals only pic.twitter.com/UHO8blcQ7D

— Chris Klimek (@ctklimek) November 4, 2022

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Those Who Wish Me Dead" and What's Making Us Happy

Finn Little and Angelina Jolie are on the run and in the woods. (Warner Bros.)

I’m back on PCHH this week with cofounding hosts Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson plus Walter Chaw, a Denver-based writer and critic whose work I’ve long admired, to chew over Those Who Wish Me Dead. The flick is an Angelina Jolie-headlined rural adventure thriller that will disappoint you only if you happen to know that its writer-director, Taylor Sheridan, wrote Sicario and Hell or High Water — two films that are leagues above this one in every regard. The panel is fairly unanimous in their mild enthusiasm for this so-so movie, but it’s a fun discussion all the same. But in the What’s Making Me Happy segment, I get to praise once again one of the most unique blockbusters of the 90s, or ever.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Without Remorse" and What's Making Us Happy

Jodie Turner-Smith and Michael B. Jordan are Navy SEALS in Without Remorse. (Nadja Klier/Amazon Studios)

Michael B. Jordan has reached the point in a male movie star’s career where his name automatically gets thrown into the mix whenever a new adaptation of some ancient specimen of still-marketable IP is in the offing. Case in point: While Jordan is promoting Without Remorse, the first of an intended series of military shoot-’em-ups wherein he becomes I think the third actor to play John Clark — a special ops guy created by Cold War technoscribe Tom Clancy — reporters are asking him whether he’s going to be the next Superman.

For what it’s worth, I think Jordan would be a marvelous Superman — never mind that like recent (current?) Superman Henry Cavill, he is, through no fault of his own, shorter than I am. At the very least, I’d be more excited for that movie than I am for the already-announced follow-up to Without Remorse, a rote, dreary, boring, and humorless affair that boasts a great performance by Jodie Tuner-Smith as Clark’s commanding officer and very little else. It’s certainly the least of the big-screen Tom Clancy adaptations, unless 2002’s The Sum of All Fears (which had Liev Schreiber in the Clark role) is worse. I never saw that one. I heard Baltimore gets nuked in that movie.

I was glad to join Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson, and Daisy Rosario to hash out our shared disappointment in Without Remorse on Pop Culture Happy Hour. And to shamelessly promote my podcast A Degree Absolute! and its upcoming guest bookings and its undisputed banger of a theme song once again.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Our Favorite Concert Films

The Live in New York City film released in 2001 is drawn primarily from this tour-ending July 2000 Madison Square Garden concert, later released (in audio only) in its entirety through Springsteen’s live archive in 2017.

On Feb. 29, 2020, nine days after I had knee surgery, I bolted my despised immobilizer to my left leg and crutched down the 9:30 Club to see the Drive-By Truckers . I’d seen this beloved band play this beloved venue on many, many prior occasions, including on New Year’s Eve at the end of 2011, but never before with only three working limbs at my disposal. The club reserved a couple of barstools for me so I could keep my leg elevated and I had a fine time, not knowing that a global pandemic would extend what I’d expected would be four to six weeks of post-op confinement to 13 months and counting.

We haven’t been able to go to concerts in a year now. So I was glad when the Pop Culture Happy Hour crew invited me to join my longtime pal Stephen Thompson and my new-time pals Cyrena Touros and LaTesha Harris to talk about some of our favorite concert films. (Music documentaries were excluded from consideration.) While there are a dozen or so such films to which I have returned time and again, the indefensible police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd last year and the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations those tragedies gave rise to made the 20-year-old film documenting the tour where Bruce Springsteen pissed off the NYPD with his then-brand-new song “American Skin (41 Shots)” — inspired by the NYPD killing of unarmed delivery man Amadou Diallo in 1999 — once again sadly timely. So I decided to talk about Live in New York City, the film shot during the final two concerts of Bruuuuuuuuuuce’s 1999-2000 reunion tour with The E Street Band — their first time out on the road together in 11 years — which concludes with that haunting, magnificent song.

The reconstituted E Street Band has now been playing together longer than its original incarnation did (circa 1974-88) but in 1999 it was not at all clear that this reunion would be permanent. Bruce had dismissed the E Street Band several years before I was old enough to be going to rock shows. The reunion was a big deal. I saw five shows on that tour. One of them, for which I begged a ride to Philly from a colleague I barely knew and then paid a scalper $240 for a nosebleed ticket, was finally released in sublime quality through the Springsteen’s live archive last summer. It only took 21 years.

I looked up the proper unit of measurement to describe how much Bruuuuuuuuuuce sweats during the performance captured in Live in New York City. Turns out it’s Wilburys. He loses five Wilburys of fluid during the show.

Thanks as always to ace producers Jessica Reedy and Candce Lim for having me on.