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Pop Culture Happy Hour: Enola Holmes

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Enola Holmes

Henry Cavill, Millie Bobbie Brown, and Sam Claflin as Sherlock, Enola, and Mycroft, respectively. (Netflix)

Wherein the alphabetical dream team of Klimek, Daisy Rosario, Glen Weldon, and Margaret H. Willison, LLP, breaks down Enola Holmes, the Millie Bobby Brown-shepherded Netflix movie adapted from Nancy Springer’s YA novels about Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister.

https://www.npr.org/…

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Pop Culture Happy Hour: Star Trek: Lower Decks

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Star Trek: Lower Decks

It’s been nine months since last I joined a PCHH panel, and they’ve been dog months. In that span I’ve bought myself a pricey new microphone, had knee surgery, run zero point zero miles, and watched in impotent rage as a global pandemic has slain hundreds of thousands of Americans who might still be with us had responsible adults been in charge when the plague hit. Police officers murdered George…

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Talking "Life on Mars" (the song) on the National Air and Space Museum's Instagram Feed

Talking “Life on Mars” (the song) on the National Air and Space Museum’s Instagram Feed

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by National Air and Space Museum (@airandspacemuseum) on Jul 17, 2020 at 4:22pm PDT

It’s been an uncharacteristically un-prolific several months for me—I’ve been busy recuperating from / dealing with complications of knee surgery while trying not to contract COVID-19 during any of my frequent in-person visits to various medical…

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Vin Diagram: "Bloodshot," review. Memento

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Bovine Intervention: "First Cow," reviewed.

Bovine Intervention: "First Cow," reviewed.

Orion Lee and John Magaro play friends and business partners in 1820s Oregon. (A24)

Full disclosure: I saw First Cow, the new 19th century-set frontier drama from cowriter/director Kelly Reichardtlast night at a screening that was followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker herself. At the end of the evening, she saw me crutching along—I had arthroscopic surgery to repair my meniscus two weeks ago…

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The 58-Year Mission: “Nobody Does It Better,” reviewed for The Washington Post I was a big fan of Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross’s two-volume Star Trek oral history…

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Love, American Style: Folger's "The Merry Wives of Windsor," reviewed. The cast of Aaron Posner’s ERA-era Merry Wives dances the night away. (Cameron Whitman) The new bellbottoms-era…

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Toff Guys: "The Gentlemen," reviewed. Colin Farrell and Charlie Hunnam are no gentlemen. (Christopher Raphael) An hour after my review of…

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"1917," reviewed. Here’s my review of Sam Mendes' 1917. I guess it doesn’t mean much to say it’s the best war movie since Dunkirk (whose Oscar-winning editor, Lee Smith, cut 1917 too) but it is, and it’s first film Sam Mendes has made that I’ve found fully satisfying.

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Talking Christmas Music on All Things Considered

Talking Christmas Music on All Things Considered

With Rhett Miller at Rams Head Live in Baltimore, Dec. 2018

Christmas music has been an interest of mine for long time, obviously. My yulemix project is in its unfathomable 14th year, I wrote a Slate piecesix years ago asking where the follow-ups to “All I Want For Christmas Is You” were (several complicated answers), and now that that last of the breakthrough secular holiday hits is 25…

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The Ballad of "Richard Jewell" Sam Rockwell and Paul Walter Hauser are good actors in a bad-faith movie. (Warner Bros.) Billy Ray…

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Yulemixed Messages: And now, Side B of my 2019 yulemix, still entitled <em>Let’s Talk About Christmas!</em>

Yulemixed Messages: And now, Side B of my 2019 yulemix, still entitled Let’s Talk About Christmas!

Comprising fifty (50) more minutes of buoyant-if-occasionally-baffling yuletunes to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. It’s so fresh and I have so many other deadlines that’ve languished while I’ve been polishing this that I can’t think of one doggone thing to say about it. Just press Play.

https://soundcloud.com/ctklimek/lets-talk-about-christmas-yuletunes-eclectic-inexplicable-xi…

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Pop Culture Happy Hour: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and What's Making Us Happy

Pop Culture Happy Hour: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and What’s Making Us Happy

Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers. (Lacey Terrell)

I sure hope my friends Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, Jess Reedy, and Emmanuel Johnson aren’t suffering today from the head cold that audibly ailed me during the recording of today’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. Our subject is A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the Tom Hanks-IS-Fred Rogers movie directed by Marielle (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)

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Yulemixed Messages: Announcing Side A of my 2019 yulemix, Let's Talk About Christmas!

Yulemixed Messages: Announcing Side A of my 2019 yulemix, Let’s Talk About Christmas!

It’s quarter ‘til eight p.m. Eastern on Thanksgiving Day, so let’s talk turkey: The first side of the fourteenthmighty installment in my indefatigable Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series is now available to provide a seasonal, tuneful, treacle-free, and generally baffling soundtrack to your Record Store Day cratedigging and any attendant treetrimming and/or halldecking. I believe this is the…

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A Moon For the Mediocre: Amadeus, reviewed. Samuel Adams as "the creature" Wolgang A. Mozart. (C. Stanley Photography) Antonio Salieri, as self-assessed in the imagination of Peter Shaffer, is mediocre. The Folger’s new production of Amadeus is quite good.

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Jaws 3-D: Roland Emmerich’s Midway, reviewed. Ed Skrein and Luke Kleintank as real-life WWII veterans Dick Best and Clarence Dickinson. Just in time for Veterans Day, disaster artist…

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In the new Terminator: Dark Fate, SkyNet Is History But U.S. Customs and Border Protection Remains

In the new Terminator: Dark Fate, SkyNet Is History But U.S. Customs and Border Protection Remains

Gabriel Luna as the Rev-9 Terminator, which can divide itself in two. (Kerry Brown/Paramount)

No amount of Terminator scholarship is too much if you’re me. So just as the new Terminator: Dark Fate (which bombed over the weekend, but you people keep buying tickets for those The Fast & The Furious movies, so there’s no accounting for taste) is a follow-up to 2015’s Terminator: Genisys (sic)…