A Degree Absolute! episode thirty-eight: "A Time to Kill" with Linda Holmes

Matty McC meets Patty McG, in the battle you didn’t know you wanted to McSee!

A Time to Kill, the fourth big-studio adaptation of a John Grisham legal thriller to hit theaters in a 37-month period during the first Clinton Administration, is not a great showcase for our man Patty McG. There are just too many high-caliber, high-profile, and high-maintenance players in its stacked cast, and probably too much studio pressure for him to get away with anything weird. (Braveheart, released 14 months earlier, was a long time ago.) Company-man director Joel Schumacher seems to have saved all his creative chits for putting nipples on Batsuits in this era, turning in a serviceable but unshowy piece of work the summer in between Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. He sure does like to spray his actors with baby oil, though.

The good news is that our friend Linda Holmes is back this episode, lending her quadruple-threat expertise as (in increasing order of significance) a Sandra Bullock expert, and Grisham expert, an actual-albeit-no-longer-practicing lawyer, and of course as a world-class critic to our examination of the picture. Join us, won’t you, on this jurisprudent journey back to nineteen-niner-six.

A Time to Kill

Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, adapted from John Grisham’s novel

Directed by Joel Schumacher

Released July 24, 1996

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Our song: "A Degree Absolute!"

Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek

Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark

Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark

Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark

Bass by Marcus Newstead

Does Whatever a Spider Can, Again, Some More: "Spider-Man: Far From Home," reviewed.

Secret identity, shmecret identity: Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Holland in Far From Home (Sony/Columbia)

Here's my NPR review of Spider-Man: Far From Home, a lovably shaggy vestigial tale on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Y'all are great at this. Now just stop it for a while already.

I'll be on Pop Culture Happy Hour next week to talk about the movie with the great Mallory Yu, Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon, and guest host Stephen Thompson.

Summer 1989: Todd McFarlane was a good Spider-Man artist whose fast-growing popularity convinced him he could write, but he was wrong.

The Third Time's the Charmless: "Shaft," reviewed.

Alexandra Shipp, Jessie T. Usher, Samuel L. Jackson, and Richard Roundtree in the third series entry to be called Shaft. (Kyle Kaplan)

Some stuff I didn't have space to say in my NPR review of Tim Story's not-very-good new Shaft: The distinctive feature of the Shafts is a shared contempt for crosswalks and a love for walking into traffic. And it's a shame that after Gordon Parks' Shaft hit big in 1971, newspaperman-turned-novelist-turned screenwriter Ernest Tidyman got right to work adapting his third novel about the Black Private Dick Who's a Sex Machine to All the Chicks, Shaft's Big Score!, skipping right over Shaft Among the Jews.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Glass" and What's Making Us Happy

Not Acting Enough, Acting Too Much, and Acting Just Right (Universal)

I am chuffed to be back on the iHeartRadio Podcast Award-nominated Pop Culture Happy Hour this week to discuss Glass, fallen auteur M. Night Shyamalan's joint sequel to 2000's Unbreakable and 2017's Split. It isn't very good, but the movie has an anachronistic quality that's sort of... sweet. While it's made explicitly clear—every damn thing in this movie is explained and re-re-re-explained—that Glass is set 19 years after Unbreakable, Shyamalan acts as though superhero comics haven't become Hollywood's No. 1 source of grist during the back half of that period. (In the years since Unbreakable, we've seen three different A-list actors play The Incredible Hulk, for chrissakes.)

A goodly portion of those films have featured Samuel L. Jackson, who, to be fair, looks like he's having at least as much fun sitting in a wheelchair staring into the middle distance in Glass as he does when he's cashing another check as Nick Fury. After his brief return to acting in both Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom and Rian Johnson's Looper back in 2012, I'd hoped maybe Bruce Willis would deign to open his eyes again, but no such luck. And the movie's top-billed star continues to perform his solo show Scares Ahoy with James McAvoy.

Ape-Pocalypse Now: Kong: Skull Island, reviewed.

This Bell UH-1 Huey is 'bout to get rung. (Warner Bros.)

Look, I'm no hero, but did you happen to notice that my NPR review of Kong: Skull Island contains not one occurrence of "titular" or "eponymous"? Please notice that.

Vernacular Spectacular: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, reviewed.

Eva 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.

When the Legend Becomes Fact: Tarzan, reviewed.

Samuel L. Jackson as real-life Renaissance man George Washington Williams, with Alexander Skarsgård as fictional he-man Tarzan. (Jonathan Olley)

For NPR, I wrestled with the 201st (give or take) iteration of The Legend of Tarzan, a movie wherein in the Uncanny Valley is often represented by a valley. 

Pop Culture Happy Hour No. 278: The Hateful Eight and the Theatrical Filmgoing Experience

Samuel L. Jackson in The Hateful Eight. (The Weinstein Co.)

It's a split verdict from the Pop Culture Happy Hour panel this week on the merits of Quentin Tarantino's eighth and—on account of having been shot in 65mm Super Panavision, for a 2.76:1 aspect ratio when projected in 70mm—widest feature, The Hateful Eight. I don't think I was at my sharpest trying to defend the picture. All I can tell is you that I saw its refusal to give us any character to empathize with fully as a strength, not a weakness, and reflective of a deliberate decision by Tarantino. Although more modest in scale and contained in its setting, this is a more complicated film than the two historical fantasias that preceded it, 2009's Inglorious Basterds and 2012's Django Unchained. I enjoy and admire all of these films, but it's very clear in the latter two who is supposed to enjoy the audience's support. Not so in The Hateful Eight. That discomfiture ain't for everyone. "The viewership for this one narrows to the self-selected," wrote my pal Scott Tobias in his NPR review three weeks ago.

When we moved on to discussing how theatrical film exhibition has evolved, I missed my window to mention Sensurround, the gimmick that Universal rolled out with the 1974 release of Earthquake! That's okay; I used it as my lede for my review of San Andreas eight months ago. You know, The Hateful Eight is only the 11th feature ever shot in Super Panavision 70/Camera 65; of the 10 others, three of them starred Charlton Heston, who is also in Earthquake! That cat sure got around. Imagine the performance he would've given in a Tarantino movie.

More trivia: Scent of Mystery, the 1960 "Smell-O-Vision" epic I mentioned, was directed by Jack Cardiff, who was probably better known for the films he shot as a cinematographer. He was behind the camera for a trio of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classics in the 1940s, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes, and then for John Huston's The African Queen. Much later, after he'd retired from directing, he shot 1984's Conan the Destroyer and 1985's Rambo: First Blood, Part II. But not the first Conan or Rambo movies—the ones you can actually defend. Too bad.

Hear it all here.