Unsinkable? Unthinkable! Signature Theatre’s all-singing, all-dancing Titanic, reviewed.

Signature Theatre has revived Titanic, a multi-Tony Award-winning musical from 1997 that almost no one remembers. Apparently it was upstaged by some movie? My Washington City Paper review is here.

Hat’s all, Folks: Live By Night, reviewed.

 

My NPR review of Live By Night, writer/producer/director/star Ben Affleck’s second adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, is here. It aspires to be a sweeping period gangster film in the tradition of The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America, Miller’s Crossing, and so many others, but it tries to bite off too much of Lehane’s book to really resonate. It’s the weakest of the four films Affleck has directed. Too bad.

Lost in Space: Passengers, reviewed.

I had hopes for Passengers, from Prometheus writer Jon Spaihts and The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum, because I root for science fiction films in general and because I’ve just edited a story for Air & Space/Smithsonian about research into human hibernation for long-term spaceflights, which is key to the premise of this movie. But its billion-dollar ideas are undermined by its five-cent guts, as I aver in my NPR review. Bummer.

The Yule Prologue: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, reviewed.

My NPR review of what is probably the second-most-review-proof movie of the year after Captain America: Civil War (which I reviewed) is here.

And I Am Not Lying: My You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown co-star Jeff Simmermon is recording a comedy album at the Black Cat tonight.

My boyhood chum Jeff Simmermon is recording his debut comedy album tonight at the Black Cat. I wrote about him for today’s Washington City Paper. 

Yulemix 2016, The Christmas Hack, has already breached your unsecured server. Submit and make merry.

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Good news! I’ve overcome my profound Electoral Affective Disorder to assemble yet another mood-elevating, hall-decking, merry-making Christmas mixtape. This one—my eleventh, for all you completists—kicks off with Charley Pride, one of only three African-American artists in history to be inducted into the Grand Ole Opry, and it only gets funkier and more festive from there.