Pop Culture Happy Hour: Atomic Blonde

The Mondo two-LP blue-and-yellow-vinyl edition of the soundtrack to David Leitch's stylish Charlize Theron-headlined, set-in-1989 espionage thriller Atomic Blonde that I ordered won't arrive for several weeks, I'm told. Until then you and I will just have to make do with our extant libraries of New Order, The Clash, A Flock of Seagulls, etc. And with this thrilling recorded-in-one take episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein host Linda Holmes and regular panelists Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon brought me in to talk about how much we all like watching Ms. Theron kick ass. It's a lot more satisfying that watching her play second-fiddle to some grunting no-talent clown in a tank top.

The Hateful Eighth: An Octoroon and To Tell My Story: A Hamlet Fanfic, reviewed.

Erika Rose and Kathryn Tkel in An Octoroon (Woolly Mammoth).

My review of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company remount of An Octoroon, the best show I saw in 2016, is here. I should've credited Gwydion Suilebhan (a Woolly staffer, though I've known him longer than he's been on payroll there) for the observation in paragraph four about police body cameras; I couldn't swear I would've thought of that if he hadn't mentioned it to me when we were chatting after the show. He's a playwright and a very smart guy, so if you're going to pilfer ideas, he's a good victim. Also, the 2016 cast isn't quite "fully intact" like I said in paragraph three; Felicia Curry is new to the remount.

I also reviewed To Tell My Story: A Hamlet Fanfic, the latest literary comedy from Washington Post humor columnist Alexandra Petri.

FURTHER READING: My 2013 profile of An Octoroon playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

Wartime in a Bottle: Dunkirk, reviewed.

400,000 stranded British soldiers await rescue on the frigid beach at Dunkirk. (Warner Bros.)

I've never understood the objection that Christopher Nolan's movies are sterile. Dunkirk, his new dramatization of the 1940 rescue of British soldiers from the beaches of Northern France carried out largely by civilians, knocked me flat. Here's my review.

By Any Means Necessary, Any Which Way You Can: War for the Planet of the Apes, reviewed.

Caesar (Andy Serkis) came to eat bananas and kick ass, and he's all out of bananas. (Fox)

What a Craig Finn-style blockbuster summer we're having this year. Nothing as visionary as Mad Max: Fury Road from 2015, maybe, or as congruent with my own sensibilities as The Nice Guys from last year, but everything I picked sight unseen for my Village Voice/LA Weekly summer movie preview—Wonder Woman, The Beguiled, Baby Driver, Spider-Man: Homecoming—has so far avoided embarrassing me. I even liked Rough Night okay. It's possible I'm not all that discerning a critic.

But my praise for War of the Planet of the Apes is well-founded. Even though I saw the movie weeks before I was assigned to write about it, which might be why the review is uncharacteristically (I hope) light on specific observations.

I'm seeing Dunkirk—and talking with Christopher Nolan!—as soon as I get home from my present holiday in Scotland, and Atomic Blonde and Detroit in short order after that.

Rock Island Party Line: Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg, reviewed.

For the Dallas Morning News, I reviewed folk singer Billy Bragg's new history of skiffle, a largely forgotten British musical form that linked blues and "trad jazz" with rock and roll in the mid-to-late 1950s. Enjoy.

Quindar Love

Mikael Jorgensen was kind enough to ask all his bandmates in Wilco to sign my copy of their 2004 LP A Ghost Is Born.

For my day job at Air & Space / Smithsonian, I wrote about Quindar, an electronic music duo comprised of art historian James Merle Thomas and Wilco multinstrumentalist Mikael Jorgensen. In their multimedia live performances and on their debut album Hip Mobility, the pair finds inspiration in the ephemera of the pre-Shuttle space program.

I met with Jorgensen backstage at Wolf Trap before Wilco's Filene Center performance there last month. I waited until we'd concluded our official interview before asking him to sign my copy of A Ghost Is Born—the first record Wilco made after he officially joined the band. He countered with an offer to get the whole lineup to sign it. That was nice. Not counting book signings, the only other person I've ever asked for an autograph was Bono.

PREVIOUSLY: I interviewed Wilco founder and frontman Jeff Tweedy for the Washington Post in 2009.

Mr. Holland's Opus: Spider-Man: Homecoming, reviewed.

Tom Holland's Peter Parker oughtta be more careful about where he removes his mask. (Sony)

I know I'm supposed to be sick to death of superhero movies, but I don't think we've ever had three as strong as Logan, Wonder Woman, and the new Spider-Man: Homecoming arrive in such rapid succession. Here's Homecoming, for NPR.

Nobody Puts Baby Driver in a Corner!

You wouldn't guess it, but Ansel Elgort recalls the amateur auto racer Paul Newman.

I've liked all of writer-director Edgar Wright's movies, so it's no surprise that I flipped for his comic thriller Baby Driver. It sings like Freddie Mercury, it dances like Fred Astaire, it burns enough rubber to curl Vin Diesel's hair.  Run, don't walk; but for God's sake don't drive because you're likely to kill someone on your way home.