America's Ass: "There Was Nothing You Could Do," reviewed.

The about-to-turn-40-year-old blockbuster album that came wrapped in an Annie Leibovitz closeup of the Boss-terior isn’t any true Bruuuuuuuce fan’s favorite, but it was a cultural landmark all the same. I reviewed Steven Hyden’s new Born in the U.S.A. reflection There Was Nothing You Could Do for the Paper of Record.

Don't Call It a Two-Hander: "Mexodus," reviewed.

Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, the cocreators and performers of Mexodus. (Chris Banks)

My Washington Post review of Mexodus, a brilliantly performed but still somewhat underwritten musical about the line of the Underground Railroad that ran south into Mexico, is here.

"Dark Matter," recapped.

Joel Edgerton plays a physicist menaced by an alternate version of himself.

Dark Matter, the new multiversal thriller on Apple TV+, is adapted by showrunner Blake Crouch from his own 2016 novel, but it was the show’s superficial similarities to The Prisoner that piqued my interest. I detailed the ways that seminal British spy-fi series influenced this new American one in the first of my Dark Matter recaps for Vulture.

Folie a trois: "Challengers," reviewed.

Zendaya, producer/star of Challengers, surveys her domain. (MGM/Amazon)

I saw Challengers a few weeks before I filed my mixed-positive Washington City Paper review, which is less than ideal but occasionally unavoidable. Candidly, I expect my estimation of the movie will rise when I see it again. It’s possible I was too triggered by the mid-movie knee trauma to give its second half my full concentration.

"Macbeth," in Fiennes form

Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma as M and Lady M. (Marc Brenner)

Hype Check: There’s nothing about the Ralph Fiennes-anchored, “found” spaces Macbeth that couldn’t have happened on on the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s home court on F St. NW but it’s still a great opportunity to see 007’s boss M (!) offer a more comic take on a part 007 played only two years ago, as I aver in yer now-paperless Washington City Paper.

I have no memory of seeing this prior, contemporary-warzone-set STC Macbeth — 2017 was about 25 years ago — but evidently I didn’t like it.

Walking on the Moon: "Message in a Bottle," reviewed.

If "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," then sending a once-prolific music writer to review a dance show is... an invitation to write about Sting, evidently. So I did. Many, many years after the Paper of Record sent me to review the Police reunion tour.

"Civl War" Is an Irresponsible Tour-de-Force

Kirstin Dunst as photojournalist Lee Smith. (Murray Close/A24)

Wherein Ex Machina auteur Alex Garland’s immaculate craft bumps up against his dodgy judgment. This is a yelling-fire-in-a-crowded theater movie. Leave the destruction of the White House to clowns like Roland Emmerich, FFS. My Washington City Paper review is here.

Notes on Mellencamp

A Cougar in his natural habitat. (Myrna Suarez)

There were so many parts of my tet-a-tet with John Mellencamp a couple weeks back that I knew I’d never be able to use in the <1,000-word piece the Paper of Record commissioned but that I was loath to lose all the same. When he started, I told him that I’d been listening to his music for as long as I’d been listening to music, so it was exciting and a little intimidating to be speaking with hime. “Well,” he said. “I wouldn’t put that much emphasis on it.”

I told him how it was only in 2021, after hundreds of exposures to his 1985 song “Small Town,” that I realized the line I’d always heard as hate the city was in fact hayseed. Such a specific, regional insult! He told me that audiences at his shows always mime holding a cigarette to their lips while singing along to the chorus of “Cherry Bomb,” his typical set-closer: “That’s when a smoke was a smoke.” Only that’s not the line, despite the evidence of their ears and mine. It’s “That’s when a sport was a sport,” which he said he got from the caption of a photo of him with David Bowie in some British paper in the 70s, probably not too long after Bowie’s then-manager, Tony DeFries, slapped his new client Mellencamp with the regrettable stage name Johnny Cougar. (His grown daughter Teddi Jo still calls him “Coug” to roast him, he said.)

We also talked about the consistent placement of such excellent album cuts as “Minutes to Memories” and “Jackie Brown” is his otherwise heavy-on-the-hits setlists, and why he opens his performances — not concerts — with a clip reel of scenes from films like On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Paper Moon. I misidentified the director of the first two of those as Billy Wilder, realizing after I’d said it that they were both Elia Kazan films — but I pulled the name of screenwriter Bud Schulberg before his assistant could, preventing him, maybe, from thinking me a hayseed.