Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Road House"

Look at what you can learn to do from watching Road House. (Laura Radford)

This week, I interviewed Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur “Genius” grantee playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and chopped up the new Doug Liman-directed, Gyllenhaal-headlined Road House with pals Linda Holmes and Aisha Harris. Like itinerant philosophy grad Dalton from Road House ‘89 , I contain multitudes. Or at least severalitudes.

"Outlaw Posse" and the Endurance of the Black Western

Melvin Van Peebles’ son can shoot in two directions at once.

For the day job, I wrote about Black westerns on the occasion of Mario Van Peebles’ new one, Outlaw Posse. No relation to his prior western, 1993’s Posse, except for the familial kind.

POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR: "Creed III" and What's Making Us Happy

Director/star Michael B. Jordan confers with Jonathan Majors on the set of Creed III. (Eli Ade/MGM)

I was glad to join Aisha Harris and Shamira Ibrahim — and to reunite with Gene Demby from the Creed II episode of PCHH back in 2018 — for this hard-hitting dissection of the disappointing-to-me Creed III.

My review of the film is here, and the Smithsonian piece I plugged in the Happy segment is here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Gray Man"

Ryan Gosling did a lot of hahaha training for the not-so-colorful thrillerThe Gray Man. (Paul Abell/Netflix)

Look, I cohost a podcast about The Prisoner. When a new international espionage-themed thriller appears with a lead character named Six, I have to pay attention. The Netflick The Gray Man is one of two new releases this month containing what I believe to be a deliberate Prisoner reference. The other one is Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On.

I loved Captain America: Civil War and The Nice Guys and Blade Runner 2049 and Knives Out. I appreciated No Time to Die. I wanted to love, or at least appreciate, The Gray Man. I tried to.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Going Back to "Titanic"

The great Aisha Harris hosted this conversation wherein I had the good fortune once again to join my old pal Linda Holmes and my new pal Roxana Hadadi. I had a whole digression when we recorded about The Abyss, James Cameron’s first seafaring disaster romance, released only eight years before Titanic, and from which Titanic derives a lot of its technique and one or two of its sinking-ship set pieces.

Titanic was not a film anyone other than Cameron was pushing to make when he pitched it to Fox Chairman Bill Mechanic in early 1995. (He wanted a movie studio to pay for his dives to the wreckage, which constitute the first footage he shot for this movie.) It’s not a film where Fox would have simply hired another director to make it had Cameron acceded to the prevailing wisdom and decided to focus his energies on anything else. Cameron is also the person who cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, so the movie is a Cameron project from whatever the shipbuilding equivalent of “soup to nuts” would be. I think it makes sense to foreground Cameron in any discussion of it. Try to imagine Christopher Nolan making a movie now that adolescent girls embraced and returned to again and again. That’s what happened in in the last two weeks of 1997 and the first quarter of ‘98, when the gearhead writer/director of the first two Terminator films, and Aliens, and True Lies, and yes, The Abyss, turned in a romantic tragedy where in the big boat doesn’t hit the iceberg until an hour a forty minutes into the movie.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Without Remorse" and What's Making Us Happy

Jodie Turner-Smith and Michael B. Jordan are Navy SEALS in Without Remorse. (Nadja Klier/Amazon Studios)

Michael B. Jordan has reached the point in a male movie star’s career where his name automatically gets thrown into the mix whenever a new adaptation of some ancient specimen of still-marketable IP is in the offing. Case in point: While Jordan is promoting Without Remorse, the first of an intended series of military shoot-’em-ups wherein he becomes I think the third actor to play John Clark — a special ops guy created by Cold War technoscribe Tom Clancy — reporters are asking him whether he’s going to be the next Superman.

For what it’s worth, I think Jordan would be a marvelous Superman — never mind that like recent (current?) Superman Henry Cavill, he is, through no fault of his own, shorter than I am. At the very least, I’d be more excited for that movie than I am for the already-announced follow-up to Without Remorse, a rote, dreary, boring, and humorless affair that boasts a great performance by Jodie Tuner-Smith as Clark’s commanding officer and very little else. It’s certainly the least of the big-screen Tom Clancy adaptations, unless 2002’s The Sum of All Fears (which had Liev Schreiber in the Clark role) is worse. I never saw that one. I heard Baltimore gets nuked in that movie.

I was glad to join Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson, and Daisy Rosario to hash out our shared disappointment in Without Remorse on Pop Culture Happy Hour. And to shamelessly promote my podcast A Degree Absolute! and its upcoming guest bookings and its undisputed banger of a theme song once again.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Showgirls" at Twenty-Five

Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. Gershon’s career survived. (MGM)

I was surprised when I heard from erstwhile Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Jess Reedy that the show had opted to cover Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 riff on A Star Is Born set in the world of Las Vegas dancers. The movie got a lot of attention at the time, because Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas were both coming off of Basic Instinct — controversial, but also a huge hit — and because Verhoeven had promised their new $40-million plus movie would carry an NC-17 rating due to its realistic treatment of the sex trade.

But realism isn’t Verhoeven’s Versace (pronounced Vehrr-SAYce) bag. Showgirls tanked, all but ending the career of former Saved by the Bell star Elizabeth Berkley, whose bizarre performance is one of the features that got the movie pilloried by critics 25 years ago, and is also one of the elements that has driven the movie’s latter-day reclamation as a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style campfest. (That reclamation is the subject of a good documentary called You Don’t Nomi, which in part inspired PCHH’s Showgirls episode. I recommend the doc.)

I was very happy to join in the Showgirls discourse with the brilliant panel of Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris, and Barrie Hardymon a couple of months back. That episode has now posted, just when we need it most. One thing I wish I’d found a place to point out is how Showgirls’ failure (though the movie by most accounts become profitable on home video) sent Verhoeven back to the R-rated sci-fi satire genre for 1997’s Starship Troopers — another movie that underperformed and got lousy reviews at the time (though not from me!) but has, over time, been rightfully recognized as a sort of masterpiece.

FURTHER READING: Seven long years ago I made 1987’s RoboCop — the movie that made Dutch auteur Verhoeven into a bankable Hollywood filmmaker for about a decade — the subject of the first and ,sadly, only installment in a proposed series of posts for what was then called NPR’s Monkey See blog on the subject of remakes. The column didn’t happen, but I certainly didn’t abandon the approach, as my review of 2016’s instantly forgotten Ben-Hur remake shall demonstrate. Maybe I’ll get to revive it if the long-threatened remake of Starship Troopers sever happens.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "John Wick Chapter 3 — Parabellum" and What's Making Us Happy"

John Wick 3 boasts the best equine motocross sequence since True Lies.

What a treat to dissect the third and gnarliest John Wick with Linda and Glen and Aisha Harris.

While recommending Brian Raftery’s Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen, I happened to name one of my most be-loathed movies from that year, the Best Picture-winning American Beauty, while omitting the names of my most beloved: Rushmore, Three Kings, Eyes Wide Shut, and so on. Raftery did not include John McTiernan’s remake of The Thomas Crown Affair in his book about 1999’s most notable and groundbreaking movies, probably because a remake of a 30-year-old thriller isn’t groundbreaking, and the movie did not have a substantial cultural impact.

But it was was the last good movie McTiernan made, I’m sorry to say, and I saw it in the theater that summer along with Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Notting Hill, American Pie, The Sixth Sense, Mystery Men, and all the rest, and I have revisited it on several occasions since.