"HEAT 2" Reviewed in The Washington Post

Michael Mann’s 1995 crime epic HEAT gets a new prose sequel.

HEAT 2 is—like The Godfather, Part II—both prequel & sequel. It is also—unlike The Godfather, Part II—a novel and not a movie. One that preserves little of what made HEAT, the movie, a classic. I’m a Mann’s Man. It pains me to air my disappointment in the Paper of Record.

"BLOOD, SWEAT, AND CHROME" reviewed in the Washington Post

Zoë Kravitz and Charlize Theron in George Miller’s 2015 masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. (Warner Bros.)

Mad Max: Fury Road is one the wildest and most unconventional blockbusters ever made, and I’d like to think I did it justice when I reviewed it for NPR upon its release in May 2015.

I’m just as enthusiastic about New York Times reporter Kyle Buchanan’s new oral history about the movie’s genesis, production, and legacy, which I reviewed for the Washington Post. Anyone interested in filmmaking should read this book.

The 58-Year Mission: "Nobody Does It Better," reviewed for The Washington Post

Daniel Craig in 2006’s sublime Casino Royale, chronicling a formative mission for a wet-behind-the-ears 007.

I was a big fan of Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross’s two-volume Star Trek oral history The Fifty-Year Mission, so I fairly leapt at the chance to review Nobody Does It Better, their new oral history of the James Bond movies, for the Paper of Record. It’s not as illuminating or contradictory as their Trek books, though I was delighted to find some comments from my pal Matt Gourley within its (seven! hundred!) pages.

Trump's "A Salute to America" is just a lame reboot of 1970's "Honor America Day."

A dollar well spent.

I’ve bought an embarrassing number of weird old records over the last several years, some of them priced considerably higher than the $1 I dropped on Proudly They Came… to Honor America. The double LP was a memento from "Honor America Day," a 1970 Independence Day observance organized by President Nixon's inaugural committee chair.

I'd never heard of that event until I found this record, but when I read up on it, mostly in Kevin J. Kruse's 2015 book One Nation Under God, it struck me as similar in intention to the self-aggrandizing “Salute to America” that President Trump has announced for this Thursday, but far less dire and militaristic. I wrote about all this for the Washington Post. .

Dad Rock of Ages: Twilight of the Gods, reviewed in the Washington Post.

The Rolling Stones of 1969 are not the latter-day Stones. Mick Taylor (second from left_ and Bill Wyman (far right) both quit, for one thing, albeit decades apart.

My first Washington Post byline in two years in a review of Steven Hyden's new book Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock. I had it with me on my own journey to the end of classic rock, when I caught an Amtrak up to New York two months ago to see Springsteen on Broadway. (I wrote up my impressions for Slate.) Strangely enough, my prior Post item was a review of Hyden's previous book, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me. That book was good. This one is better. Maybe your mom would enjoy receiving a copy on Sunday. I don't know. I don't know your mom.

George Jones Talks About His Greatest Lines

My review of Rich Kienzle's new biography The Grand Tour: The Life and Music of George Jones, is in Sunday's Washington Post. There's probably some other stuff in there that would be good to read, too, I bet.

Anyway, here's a paragraph I had to cut for space.

Amid his dutiful, carefully sourced recounting of booze-lubricated recording sessions and singles, Kienzle highlights some amusingly unexpected sides of Jones, like when he told his ex-wife Tammy Wynette in a 1980 interview in Country Music (a magazine Kienzle contributed to for 24 of its 31 years) that if he had to find a second career he would enjoy being an interior decorator. He might fare better than he did as the proprietor of three outdoor country music parks, which he opened at three different points in his life and quickly abandoned. He was also wanton enough with his brand to lend it to random products: George Jones Country Sausage and, also, troublingly, George Jones Country Gold Dog Food and Cat Food. Kienzle notes that a TV spot for the latter was called “George Jones Talks About His Greatest Lines.” If a TV commercial has to have a title, that’s either an unfortunate one or a brilliant one for a pitch from a man whose life and career were so damaged by his eight-year dalliance with cocaine.

I wouldn't ordinarily be so flip discussing something as serious as an addiction problem but that ad just beggars belief.

Audrey and Bill, reviewed for Washington Post Book World

Audrey Hepburn & William Holden in a promotional image for Billy Wilder's Sabrina, 1954.

I reviewed Audrey and Bill: A Romantic Biography of Audrey Hepburn and William Holden, a crummy book about the two stars' affair during the making of Sabrina in the early 50s, for The Washington Post. If decades-old Hollywood gossip is your bag, I recommend Karina Longworth's podcast You Must Remember This. The author of Audrey and Bill, Edward Z. Epstein, is a former publicist; Longworth is film critic and historian. It's a crucial difference. 

UPDATE: Whoops, You Must Remember This already covered Hepburn and Sabrina. I should've checked that. Also, I stumbled upon this 10-year-old Slate piece about Arnold Schwarzenegger's incredibly luxe deal for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, by one Edward Jay Epstein. It's richly reported and has a strong point of view, two qualities Audrey and Bill lacks, in my opinion. Having written for Slate myself, I know that their editors encourage this sharper, more argumentative tone, but even allowing for that, this Schwarzenegger piece and Audrey and Bill still don't read like the work of the same author. Probably because they're not: Edward Jay's site is here; Edward Z.'s is here. But that's still a pretty big coincidence.