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Anna Kendrick and Ben Affleck throw discretion to the glass. (Chuck Zlotnick/Warner Bros.)
Here, for NPR, is my rough accounting of The Accountant, a very strange action drama. It's basically Good Jason Bourne-ing, and yet still more fun than Jason Bourne.
I ride public transit. Every day. And at the risk of saying a deeply male-privileged thing, I enjoy it. Decrying the crumbling state of Metro is—like paying federal taxes while being denied voting representation in Congress—a part of life in Our Nation’s Capital, and it is indeed embarrassing that what is ostensibly the seat of power on Earth has such an easily stymied subway system, one that now shuts down at midnight even on weekends. But my commute is short, six stops, and the number of times I’ve missed having to sit in traffic every day since I moved to DC 11 years ago is exactly zero. Zero times.
I love people-watching on the subway and the bus. I especially like to peek at what they’re reading. This is becoming more difficult as Kindles and other tablets replace paper books, but if I see that someone has a book I feel compelled to angle for a glimpse at the cover.
Sometimes a specific person will catch my eye for no easily identifiable reason—and sometimes for the most obvious, lizard-brain reason.
Read MoreMitchell Hébert and Jon Hudson Odom in Perestroika. (Danisha Crosby)
Lemme tell ya, people: It was much easier to figure out why Tony Kusher's most recent play is lousy than it was to try to figure out why Angels in America, the epic masterpiece that shall be his legacy, is so good. You have countless other, more reputable sources on that, of course. I was just writing about the show's latest and largest local revival, the product of a Marvel Team-Up between Olney Theatre Center and Round House Theatre.
While researching this review I discovered that Mike Nichols' 2003 HBO miniseries of Angels in America earned four-stars-out-of-four for its artistic merit and four-for-four for its depiction of the nursing profession on the website The Truth About Nursing.
FURTHER READING: Here's my review of the 2011 revival of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, which came to Arena Stage four years ago. It was the first major play to address the AIDS crisis, and it was written from inside the trenches with shells exploding all around. Which is at least one of the reasons it hasn't had (in my opinion) the afterlife the more contemplative and mythic Angels, written several years afterward, has had. (Twelve years elapsed between Angels' premiere and its emergence as an HBO miniseries; for The Normal Heart to go from the stage to HBO took 29 years.)
Once again, Isaac Butler and Dan Kois' mighty oral history of Angels in America—soon to be expanded to book-length!—is here, and highly recommended.
Curiously, the lineup for this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour is the same as it ever was last time I was on the show: Host Linda Holmes was once again away living a life of intrigue and excitement, leaving her pal Stephen Thompson to moderate a panel that included regular bloviator Glen Weldon and guest-talkers Tanya Ballard Brown and me. Our topics: The remake of The Magnificent Seven, which I reviewed for NPR, and Fleabag, an Amazon series written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, an English actor of whom I was previously unaware. One of these two items is terrific!
Read MoreEva Green as Miss Peregrine (Jay Maidment / Twentieth Century Fox)
The evergreen Eva Green is the best thing about Tim Burton's adaptation of Ransom Riggs' bestselling, "vernacular"-photography-inspired YA novel. But the stop-motion sequences are great, too. I reviewed the film for NPR.
For various critic-related, theater company-related, and publication-related reasons, my reviews of Studio Theatre's production of Caryl Churchill's anticolonial sex romp Cloud 9 and Constellation Theatre Company's new production of the Y2K-era Greg Kotis-Mark Hollman musical Urinetown have taken a long time to see print. But they're in this week's Washington City Paper, and online, too.
Chris Pratt and Denzel Washington take over for Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner, respectively, in Antoine Fuqua's update of The Magnificent Seven.
Wait, Michael Biehn starred in a short-lived Magnificent Seven series on CBS in the late 90s? I've always been bad at keeping up with what's on TV, but this I should've known, given my long-term interest in the guy.
Anyway, here's my NPR review of the new Magnificent Seven from Antoine Fuqua and Denzel with Chris Pratt mugging his way around, too. Random note: It's funny that both The Magnificent Seven and Westworld, two long-dormant properties that starred Yul Brynner — most famous for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, "etcetera, etcetera" — as a black-clad cowboy, are both getting reimagined in 2016, isn't it? I think it is.
Wes Robinson and Valorie Curry in Blair Witch.
In 1999, the nanobudget horror hoaxumentary The Blair Witch Project rode a brilliant marketing campaign to blockbuster-level success. Now there's a legacy-quel called Blair Witch. My short review is that Blair Witch has displaced previous champ Frances Ha as the longest sub-90-minute movie I've seen in the last decade. My longer review, for NPR, is here. Boo. Also, boooooooooooooooo.
