A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-two — ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ

I wish I knew you actually painted this portrait of Patrick McGoohan’s sadistic, unnamed warned, attributed in the 1979 film Escape From Alcatraz to the character of Doc as played by Roberts Blossom.

Maximum Fun? More like maximum security! Maximum Fun podcast network founder and San Francisco native Jesse Thorn joins us this week to tunnel through the crumbling walls of Escape From Alcatraz, the 1979 Clint Eastwood-starring dramatization of the real 1962 prison break, featuring Patty McG as…The Warden. Stunt casting doesn’t get any stuntier, though Glen and I differ on exactly how much The Artist Formerly Known Only as Number Six contributes to the 115-minute picture in his roughly 10 minutes of screen time.

Also, am I the only person on this dang podcast who respects Eastwood as an artist? Sure, I hated his film Richard Jewell, and I said in my 2019 review that the then-89-year-old’s make-a-movie-every-year working tempo may have contributed to the declining quality of his ouvre. But you can’t just dismiss the guy who made Unforgiven and A Perfect World and Bird and so many others, outside of the westerns and cop thrillers and middling airport novel adaptations that his name conjures up.

I never saw The Mule, but I heard he has not one but two threesomes in that movie, which my parents saw at the cheap seniors-only early-afternoon weekday show. That’s reason enough for me to choose anything else from his 45-film, 50-year feature film directing resume next time I feel like clearing up one of my Eastwood blind spots.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Suicide Squad" and What's Making Us Happy

Margot Robbie, Daniela Melchior, Idris Elba, a shark-man voiced by Sylvester Stallone, and David Dastmalchian are most of the lineup of The Suicide Squad. (Warner Bros/DC Comics)

Wednesday was my birthday, and it was not the first time I’d spent part of my birthday talking about a James Gunn comic book movie on Pop Culture Happy Hour. In 2014, I reported to the now-long-since-demolished-and-replaced NPR headquarters to talk about the just-released Guardians of the Galaxy before heading off to dinner at Oyamel. This year, I skipped the studio — we all skipped the studio — but still joined a panel chaired by my A Degree Absolute! co-host Glen Weldon and allies Daisy Rosario and Ronald Young, Jr. to dissect (it’s a grisly movie) The Suicide Squad.

Glen and I two-handed its kinda-sorta precursor, the definite article-free Suicide Squad, in 2016. I also wrote a review of that film for NPR. God, what a rotten year that was.

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: "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: "Showgirls" at Twenty-Five

Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. Gershon’s career survived. (MGM)

I was surprised when I heard from erstwhile Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Jess Reedy that the show had opted to cover Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 riff on A Star Is Born set in the world of Las Vegas dancers. The movie got a lot of attention at the time, because Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas were both coming off of Basic Instinct — controversial, but also a huge hit — and because Verhoeven had promised their new $40-million plus movie would carry an NC-17 rating due to its realistic treatment of the sex trade.

But realism isn’t Verhoeven’s Versace (pronounced Vehrr-SAYce) bag. Showgirls tanked, all but ending the career of former Saved by the Bell star Elizabeth Berkley, whose bizarre performance is one of the features that got the movie pilloried by critics 25 years ago, and is also one of the elements that has driven the movie’s latter-day reclamation as a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style campfest. (That reclamation is the subject of a good documentary called You Don’t Nomi, which in part inspired PCHH’s Showgirls episode. I recommend the doc.)

I was very happy to join in the Showgirls discourse with the brilliant panel of Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris, and Barrie Hardymon a couple of months back. That episode has now posted, just when we need it most. One thing I wish I’d found a place to point out is how Showgirls’ failure (though the movie by most accounts become profitable on home video) sent Verhoeven back to the R-rated sci-fi satire genre for 1997’s Starship Troopers — another movie that underperformed and got lousy reviews at the time (though not from me!) but has, over time, been rightfully recognized as a sort of masterpiece.

FURTHER READING: Seven long years ago I made 1987’s RoboCop — the movie that made Dutch auteur Verhoeven into a bankable Hollywood filmmaker for about a decade — the subject of the first and ,sadly, only installment in a proposed series of posts for what was then called NPR’s Monkey See blog on the subject of remakes. The column didn’t happen, but I certainly didn’t abandon the approach, as my review of 2016’s instantly forgotten Ben-Hur remake shall demonstrate. Maybe I’ll get to revive it if the long-threatened remake of Starship Troopers sever happens.

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.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Enola Holmes"

Henry Cavill, Millie Bobbie Brown, and Sam Claflin as Sherlock, Enola, and Mycroft, respectively. (Netflix)

Wherein the alphabetical dream team of Klimek, Daisy Rosario, Glen Weldon, and Margaret H. Willison, LLP, breaks down Enola Holmes, the Millie Bobby Brown-shepherded Netflix movie adapted from Nancy Springer’s YA novels about Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister.

The only thing I have to add to what’s in the episode is that I wanted to smuggle in a second What’s Making Me Happy pick, one with resonances both to Sherlock Holmes and the Happy I cited, Stephen Baxter’s novel The Massacre of Mankind. It’s a new track from Elvis Costello called “Phonographic Memory,” a bizarre spoken-word account of an audience in some dark future listening to a speech mashed up from various recordings of the long-dead Orson Welles. “After the peace was negotiated, and the Internet switched off, knowledge returned to its medieval cloister,” Elvis intones over an open-tuned acoustic guitar.

The track, he has said is a digital B-side, so don’t look for it on Hey Clockface, the new album he’s dropping next month. In addition to creating the most famous adaptation of War of the Worlds — his Halloween 1938 Mercury Theatre radio play, ingeniously disguised as a series of news reports — Welles played Professor Moriarty in a 1954 radio adaptation of The Final Problem.