Pop Culture Happy Hour: Logan Lucky, discussed.

I dropped by NPR HQ to talk about Steven Soderbergh’s return to features, Logan Lucky, with screenwriter and author Danielle Henderson and regular Pop Culture Happy Hour panelists Linda Holmes and Glen Weldon.  When we recorded this discussion, I’d taken the opportunity to see the movie a second time after filing my review, and my opinion on it had evolved a little. Anyway, you can find the episode here.

I wish I could put my finger on why it read to me as condescending in a Coenesque way the first time but not the second. I love the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. But the ones Logan Lucky most recalled for me, Raising Arizona and Fargo, are not among my favorites.

Hillbilly Elegy: Logan Lucky, reviewed.

Logan Lucky, Steven Soderbergh’s return to features after a four-year “retirement” in prestige TV, is a lot of fun, though I’m not as high on it as some. I have the same reservations about it that I do about the Coen Brothers films it most readily recalls. Anyway, here’s my review.

The Strangest Yard: Whipping, or The Football Hamlet, reviewed. Plus: King Kirby.

My review of Kathleen Akerley’s latest opus, Whipping, or The Football Hamlet, is in today’s Washington City Paper, along with a few paragraphs about another show that has regrettably already closed: Crystal Skillman & Fred Van Lente’s King Kirby, a bio-play about legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby and his lifelong struggle to be fairly compensated for the dozens of Marvel Comics characters he created—or co-created with Stan Lee. They don’t agree on who did what, and therein lies the tale.

If this subject interests you, I recommend Sean Howe’s 2012 history Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Don’t Forget the Motor City: Detroit, reviewed.

Review-writing is easier when you can interrogate your responses to the work and make judgments quickly. Detroit just wasn’t one of those movies for me.

 

I thought it was important to try to discern exactly where the Bigelow-Boal directing/screenwriting duo deviated from or compressed the facts, which is hard in a 50-year-old case where so many of the facts were disputed. But I also saw some odd parallels between this movie and a couple of the ones Bigelow made before her historic Oscar win changed the way we receive her work. So my review is, among other things… long.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Atomic Blonde

The Mondo two-LP blue-and-yellow-vinyl edition of the soundtrack to David Leitch’s stylish Charlize Theron-headlined, set-in-1989 espionage thriller Atomic Blonde that I ordered won’t arrive for several weeks, I’m told. Until then you and I will just have to make do with our extant libraries of New Order, The Clash, A Flock of Seagulls, etc. And with this thrilling recorded-in-one take episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein host Linda Holmes and regular panelists Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon brought me in to talk about how much we all like watching Ms. Theron kick ass. It’s a lot more satisfying that watching her play second-fiddle to some grunting no-talent clown in a tank top.