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.

Radio, Radio: Multiversal Exports

The contemporaneous cape-flicks Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Flash are both riffing on a lot of the same ideas. I put together a fun radio piece asking if the concept of fictional multiverses has gone fully mainstream. it aired today on Here & Now, but you can listen right here.

The Seven Ages of 007: How Daniel Craig Became the Bookend Bond

No Time to Die is a Bond flick like no other for several reasons, one of them being that it’s the only one I’ve ever gone to see immediately after interviewing Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, who’ve been producing these films since 1995’s Goldeneye. The Bond movies are their family business, having been started by their father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, with his partner Harry Saltzman six decades ago. Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson were very generous with their time, which gave me the platinum-level problem of having lots more good material than I could Tetris into my four-minute radio piece for Friday’s All Things Considered, which you can listen to below.

Here’s the prose version, which became a related-but-separate piece that wouldn’t have worked on the radio for several reasons, including the fact I wrote it before I landed the interviews.

I have all the thanks in the world for the wonderful and ultra-capable NPR Books editor Petra Mayer, who edited both the prose piece and the radio piece, which meant adding two labor-intensive tasks to what was already a packed week for her. (She hosted a panel at New York Comic Con this week, along with all her usual duties.) Nobody does it better.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "No Time to Die" and What's Making Us Happy

Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright as old soldiers James Bond and Felix Leiter. (Nicola Dove/MGM)

What a treat to join my pal and Degree Absolute! cohost Glen Weldon, frequent co-panelist Daisy Rosario, and writer/comedian Jourdain Searles to perform the Pop Culture Happy Hour autopsy on No Time to Die.

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: "In & Of Itself"

From Isabel Greenberg’s The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (Bond Street Books, 2013)

I was delighted to join my pal Linda Holmes to discuss the just-released-on-Hulu filmed version of illusionist/storyteller/railer-against-the-labeling-of-people Derek DelGaudio’s stage show In & Of Itself, which he performed several hundred times over engagements in Los Angeles and New York circa 2016-2018. You can listen to the episode below. I also recommend Claire McNear’s 2018 profile of DelGaudio in The Ringer.

Naturally, Linda mentioned my onetime employment by the great illusionist Ricky Jay. I wrote about my time in RJ’s employ shortly after he passed away in November 2018.

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.

Talking Yuletunes on All Things Considered

I didn’t put quite as much muscle behind promoting my yulemix this year as I have in years past, but I was very glad to get an invitation to talk to All Things Considered’s Ailsa Chang about some of the selections featured on my 2020 compilation, Four Seasons Total Greetings. The show suggested I choose three new-for-2020 recordings and one of the surprising deep cuts I uncovered in the prior year, which is how I got to talk about The Shades’ recorded-in-1966-but-eerily-topical “Prancer’s Got Some Red Spots” and also sneak a little bit of Canadian country singer Hank Snow’s “Christmas Wants” in at the outro.

We recorded this conversation in mid-December, and there was enough dire news in the days after that that I assumed this piece would be axed. It was my old boyhood pal Chip Goines who notified me, via Twitter, that the piece was airing on Christmas Eve, just as I was loading up to drive to my parents’ house in Virginia (after two weeks in quarantine) for the holiday. The bar for Christmas miracles has rarely been lower, but I’ll take it. God bless us, everyone!