Talkin' Long Movies on "Weekend Edition Sunday"

Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Martin Scorsese’s 3.5-hour historical epic Killers of the Flower Moon. (Apple)

There’re few things I love more than to immerse myself in he richly-imagined world of a movie, but even I can see that popcorn flicks, in particular, have hulked out to dangerous dimensions. I noted this alarming trend on the occasion of Avengers: Endgame in 2019 and again back in May when Martin Scorsese’s 3.5-hour adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction true-crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Weekend Edition Sunday host Ayesha Roscoe had me and my pal Bob Mondello on to refute, which great respect, her assertion that movies are too long. According to Bob, what was originally slated for a four-minute time slot was allowed to strech out to a luxurious 7:15, which seems fitting.

The Last Balcony: An Oral History of the Uptown

I wrote an oral history of my favorite cinema, the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Ave. NW here in DC, for the Washington City Paper. I love the oral history format. Cutting this down to publishable length tested me. My apologies to the various people whose comments were cut for length.

AMC Theatres declined to make attendance figures available for publication, but they told me they've ticket up slightly in the last year. I hope that means the Uptown will stick around a long time.

Appendix! A probably-incomplete list of films I saw at the Uptown, compiled from memory, by year.

1993: The Abyss [Extended Edition]

1996: Vertigo

1998: Godzilla (the awful Roland Emmerich one), The Thin Red Line

1999: Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, Sleepy Hollow

2000: The Perfect Storm

2002: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

2004: Spider-Man 2

2005: Good Night and Good Luck, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, King Kong (the underrated Peter Jackson one)

2006: Mission: Impossible III, Superman Returns

2007: Spider-Man 3, Blade Runner: The Final Cut

2008: Iron Man, The Dark Knight

2009: Watchmen, Terminator: Salvation

2010: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

2011: Super 8

2012: The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Prometheus

2013: Iron Man 3, Jurassic Park (20th anniversary 3D rerelease), Gravity

2014: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

2015: Tomorrowland

2016: Ali, Independence Day: Resurgence

2017: Close Encounters of the Third Kind 

2018: Ant-Man and the Wasp

Pop Culture Happy Hour No. 283: Hail, Caesar! and Backstage Stories

George Clooney plays a pampered Capitol Pictures movie star in Hail, Caesar! (Universal)

I'm very happy to be on the panel for this week's Hail, Caesar!-focused Pop Culture Happy Hour, my first with my Washington City Paper pal Bob Mondello. In it, Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon tells Bob he "beat [him] to the Hamlet punch," which is a funny phrase, if you think about it. Earlier in this episode, G-Weld beat me to the Sullivan's Travels punch, but here's the clip I was going to play.

This episode also has some thematic crossover with the Top Five Movies About Movies segment in which I participated on an episode of WBEZ's Filmspotting from late 2011. My NPR review of Hail, Caesar! — wherein I may have underserved the film's philosophical payload, unless I didn't — is here. This was an especially enjoyable episode for me; I hope you all dig it.