Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Bullet Train"

Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brad Pitt can’t just get along. (Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures)

Bullet Train, director David Leitch’s strangers-on-a-fast-train-fight thriller, is way less diverting and way more confusing than it oughta be. Letich and Chad Stahelski made John Wick together, and Stahelski stayed on for the subsequent Wicks while his old creative partner went off to make Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde, the hilariously double-ampersand-packin’ Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, and now Bullet Train. Stahelski is fairing better, I reckon. Anyway, it was fun to talk Bullet Train with Glen Weldon, Aisha Harris, and Mallory Yu.

A Degree Absolute! episode thirty-eight: "A Time to Kill" with Linda Holmes

Matty McC meets Patty McG, in the battle you didn’t know you wanted to McSee!

A Time to Kill, the fourth big-studio adaptation of a John Grisham legal thriller to hit theaters in a 37-month period during the first Clinton Administration, is not a great showcase for our man Patty McG. There are just too many high-caliber, high-profile, and high-maintenance players in its stacked cast, and probably too much studio pressure for him to get away with anything weird. (Braveheart, released 14 months earlier, was a long time ago.) Company-man director Joel Schumacher seems to have saved all his creative chits for putting nipples on Batsuits in this era, turning in a serviceable but unshowy piece of work the summer in between Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. He sure does like to spray his actors with baby oil, though.

The good news is that our friend Linda Holmes is back this episode, lending her quadruple-threat expertise as (in increasing order of significance) a Sandra Bullock expert, and Grisham expert, an actual-albeit-no-longer-practicing lawyer, and of course as a world-class critic to our examination of the picture. Join us, won’t you, on this jurisprudent journey back to nineteen-niner-six.

A Time to Kill

Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, adapted from John Grisham’s novel

Directed by Joel Schumacher

Released July 24, 1996

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Our song: "A Degree Absolute!"

Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek

Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark

Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark

Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark

Bass by Marcus Newstead

What Gravity Should've Learned from ALIENS

Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn in ALIENS. 

Sandra Bullock in Gravity. 

Admittedly, ALIENS is a film I've loved unconditionally since I was a kid. I need very little prompting to think about it, and only a little more prompting than that to write about it. But a deleted scene from that 27-year-old movie highlights what is, to me, the sole flaw in Alfonso Curaon's still-fantastic new space movie Gravity, and how audience expectations have changed in the generation since ALIENS. This is the subject of my first piece for Slate, which you can read here.