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Christopher Bloch, Nick Lehan, Lawrence Redmond, and Bobby Smith in Signature's Titanic. (Christopher Mueller)
Signature Theatre has revived Titanic, a multi-Tony Award-winning musical from 1997 that almost no one remembers. Apparently it was upstaged by some movie? My Washington City Paper review is here.
Elle Fanning and Ben Affleck face off. (Claire Folger/Warner Bros.)
My NPR review of Live By Night, writer/producer/director/star Ben Affleck's second adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, is here. It aspires to be a sweeping period gangster film in the tradition of The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America, Miller's Crossing, and so many others, but it tries to bite off too much of Lehane's book to really resonate. It's the weakest of the four films Affleck has directed. Too bad.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers, a miscast and misbegotten fairy tale in space.
I had hopes for Passengers, from Prometheus writer Jon Spaihts and The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum, because I root for science fiction films in general and because I've just edited a story for Air & Space/Smithsonian about research into human hibernation for long-term spaceflights, which is key to the premise of this movie. But its billion-dollar ideas are undermined by its five-cent guts, as I aver in my NPR review. Bummer.
Good news! I’ve overcome my profound Electoral Affective Disorder to assemble yet another mood-elevating, hall-decking, merry-making Christmas mixtape. This one—my eleventh, for all you completists—kicks off with Charley Pride, one of only three African-American artists in history to be inducted into the Grand Ole Opry, and it only gets funkier and more festive from there.
And when I say festive, what I really mean is... well, you'll hear. This is probably the blackest, saddest, most 1970s-sensitive entry in the Yule-Tunes Eclectic & Inexplicable saga—a series not historically wanting for blackness or sadness or 1970s sensitivity.
Read MoreFelicity Jones and Diego Luna lead a small team of rebel guerillas in Rogue One.
My NPR review of what is probably the second-most-review-proof movie of the year after Captain America: Civil War (which I reviewed) is here.
Jeff Simmermon looked only marginally less intimidating than this when we first met in 1986.
My boyhood chum Jeff Simmermon is recording his debut comedy album tonight at the Black Cat. I wrote about him for today's Washington City Paper.
Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as glamorous spies in Allied. (Paramount)
Here's my review of Robert Zemeckis' high-tech-but-old-fashioned WWII espionage thriller Allied. It's meant to evoke a genre that includes great films like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious or Carol Reed's The Third Man. Or lesser Graham Greene works, like this one.
Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams, humans.
I was delighted as always to join my friends Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon, Stephen Thompson, and Jessica Reedy for this week's badly-needed Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein no one mentions politics at all because that's not how we do on this show. Here's the episode.
The name the lazy file-clerk in my brain was trying to retrieve while Stephen was talking about how much he loves the Anthrax & Public Enemy version of Public Enemy's jam "Bring the Noise" was Clyde Stubblefield: Clyde is the link between Stephen's picks and mine, because he was James Brown's drummer at Brown's late-60s-to-mid-70s peak. That drums sample you hear at the end of "Bring the Noise" — probably the most-sampled ever — is Stubblefield's, originally recorded for Brown's "Funky Drummer" in 1970.
