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

Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks in Wes Anderson’s latest. (Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features)

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is one of my favorite films of the almost-half-concluded year, an entirely predictable result given his track record with me. I was chuffed to discuss it with Pal-For-Life Glen Weldon and The Indicator host Wailin Wong.

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 Flash": You Will Believe a Man Can McFly

Ezra Miller and Sasha Calle in The Flash. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/™ & © DC Comics)

Before Guardians of the Galaxy auteur James Gunn comes in to start the whole DC Comics movie project over again, they’ve one movie left in the can, and it’s The Flash. Specific is multiversal, the saying goes. My Washington City Paper review is here.

More Power, More Responsibility, More Everything: "Spider Man: Across the Spider-Verse," reviewed.

Spider-confederates Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy share a quiet moment in Across the Spider-Verse. (Sony)

My Washington City Paper review of the lovely new animated sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is here.

Aaaaaaaand 2018 All Things Considered feature with a number of the creative people inovlved with Into the Spider Verse — comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis, screenwriters/producers Phil Lord & Chris Miller, and directors Peter Ramsay & Rodney Rothman — is still here.

Momma's Boy: "Beau Is Afraid," reviewed.

Repast is Prologue: Nathan Lane, Joaquin Phoenix, and Amy Ryan in Ari Aster’s new mindbender. (A24)

I haven’t seen a movie this wild since Darren Aronofksy’s mother! (sic), a film that came with its own exclamation point. My Washington City Paper review of Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid is here.

If I Could Be (Paid) Like Mike: "Air," reviewed.

Viola Davis was Michael Jordan’s handpicked choice to play his mother in Ben Affleck’s Air. (Amazon)

My review of Air, Ben Affleck’s movie from first-timer Alex Convery’s screenplay, is here.

Egg McGuffin, or the Xenomorph-or-Egg Paradox

The 1991-2 production of Alien 3 was by all accounts more of a slog than this photo of Sigourney Weaver and her tall, dark plus-one would suggest.

Here’s a Smithsonian piece wherein I put my lifelong independent study of xenobiology to good use by documenting curator Ryan Lintelman’s quest to sleuth out exactly which ALIEN flick the big prop egg in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. It’s not the first time I’ve recounted the tortured history of of Alien 3, a less imaginative exponent of the visual and thematic ideas that had made the first two pictures in the slime-dripping series so widely admired.

Trigger Warning: "John Wick: Chapter 4," reviewed.

Keanu Reeves and Donnie Yuen in John Wick: Chapter 4 (Lionsgate).

John Wick: Chapter 4 looks great, goes on forever, and ends with dudes facing off with archaic single-shot dueling pistols at dawn. It's Barry Lyndon: Chapter 2 — Parabellum, basically. 169 minutes. More is less... says the guy who saw Avatar: The Way of Water more than once.

My Washington City Paper review is here.