Trenchant Warfare: "1917," reviewed.

George MacKay is a doughboy on a desperate mission. (Francois Duhamel)

Here’s my review of Sam Mendes' 1917. I guess it doesn’t mean much to say it’s the best war movie since Dunkirk (whose Oscar-winning editor, Lee Smith, cut 1917 too) but it is, and it’s first film Mendes has made that I’ve found fully satisfying.

Talking Christmas Songwriting on All Things Considered

Here I am with Rhett Miller at Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore, Dec. 2018.

Christmas music has been an interest of mine for long time, obviously. My yulemix project is in its unfathomable 14th year, I wrote a Slate piece six years ago asking where the follow-ups to “All I Want For Christmas Is You” were (several complicated answers), and now that that last of the breakthrough secular holiday hits is 25 years old, I have at last gotten to bring this passion of mine to its natural habitat: The radio!

Rhett Miller’s band, Old 97s, has been a favorite of mine since I first heard them on KCRW in 2001; I’ve seen them play probably a dozen times since and for me and my pal Brian to sit down with Miller during their tour for their album Love the Holidays was a big thrill. Aloe Blacc’s Christmas Funk was my favorite new holiday release of 2018, and Molly Burch’s The Molly Burch Christmas Album is the one I’ve been spinning the most this year. I was happy to have comments from all three of these songwriters on my All Things Considered piece yesterday.

The Ballad of "Richard Jewell"

Sam Rockwell and Paul Walter Hauser are good actors in a bad-faith movie. (Warner Bros.)

Billy Ray, the screenwriter of Richard Jewell—director Clint Eastwood’s disingenuous dramatization of the 1996 case of a security guard falsely accused of a horrific crime—spoke to my screenwriting class at UCLA in 2002 or 2003. I hope that if he’s still doing this some student will ask him how can justify defaming deceased Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs in his new movie while giving the (also deceased) FBI agent he has depicted as tipping her off in exchange for sex the dignity of a pseudonym. That malicious act undermines everything in the movie that’s any good. My NPR review is here.

Let's Continue to Talk About "Let's Talk About Christmas!" (Side B)

Comprising fifty (50) more minutes of buoyant-if-occasionally-baffling yuletunes to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. It’s all so fresh, and I have so many other deadlines that’ve languished unmet while I’ve been making this, that I can’t think of one doggone thing to say about it. Just press Play.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" and What's Making Us Happy

Tom Hanks, America’s Reasonable Dad, pulls double duty as Mr. Rogers & Daniel Striped Tiger. (Lacey Terrell)

I sure hope my friends Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, Jess Reedy, and Emmanuel Johnson aren’t suffering today from the head cold that audibly ailed me on Monday during the recording of today’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. Our subject is A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the Tom Hanks-IS-Fred Rogers movie directed by Marielle (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) Heller loosely fashioned after Tom Junod’s 1998 profile of Rogers for Esquire magazine. As I say in the show, this movie’s depiction of the life of a magazine journalist reflects the circa 1998 expectations on which I based career choices that I have, over the last 20 years, had more than one occasion to lament.

Thanks to all of them for allowing me once again to plug my yulemix. You can hear the show right here or via whatever podfeeder brings you your NPR.

Let's Talk About "Let's Talk About Christmas!" (Side A)

It’s quarter ‘til eight p.m. Eastern on Thanksgiving Day, so let’s talk turkey: The first side of the fourteenth mighty installment in my inexhaustible Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series is now available to provide a seasonal, tuneful, treacle-free, and generally baffling soundtrack to your Record Store Day cratedigging and any attendant treetrimming and/or halldecking. I believe this is the earliest in the season I’ve ever dropped one of these, and I expect you, Dear Listener, to give your own merrymaking operations a commensurate boost. Side A of Let’s Talk About Christmas! runs precisely 50 minutes, as shall Side B, so you can preserve this seasonal salgamundi on a single 100-minute high-bias cassette. Unless I deem it necessary to follow-up with a third or even a fourth side later. Stranger things have happened.

A Moon For the Mediocre: "Amadeus," reviewed.

The company of RIchard Clifford’s production of Amadeus for the Folger Theatre (C. Stanley Photography).

Antonio Salieri, as self-assessed in the imagination of Peter Shaffer, is mediocre. The Folger’s new production of Amadeus is quite good.

Jaws 3-D: Roland Emmerich's "Midway," reviewed.

Aaron Eckhart wins the jaw-hypertrophy trophy as WWII flying ace Jimmy Doolittle in Midway. (Alan Markfield)

Just in time for Veterans Day, disaster artist Roland Emmerich has made a bid to improve upon 1976's Technicolor / Sensurround-sound sensation Midway with a more historically-focused (but also more heavily-animated) dramatization of the three-day battle that turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. My NPR review of the movie is here.