Weird Screenplays, Satiric Docuseries and Sexy, Sexy Vermouth

View this email online by Glen Weldon Welcome! It was the week Rihanna shone bright like a diamond. And it was the week we learned that one of the internet’s favorite interpreters of her work will return to his day job (spinning webs of any size, catching thieves just like flies, etc.) a fourth time. And it was the week one of our last classic, old-school, honest-to-God movie stars embarked upon her final fantastic voyage. Let’s get to it.  The Screenplay’s the Thing For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to the Oscars. Or at least, I didn’t pay attention to the Big Six categories – best picture, best actor/actress, supporting actor/actress and director.  In my defense, those categories never paid much attention to me. Growing up, the Motion Picture Academy tended to honor movies and performances that left me cold. So many bloated historical epics, with their bonnets and bustles and bushy mustaches. Endless box-checking biopics. Year after year of mainstream, moralistic tales about scrappy individuals lifting themselves up by their bootstraps. And I lost count of the sheer number of actors who slapped on prosthetics or feigned a disability so as to deliver a tidy uplift to people of my parents’ generation and older. It’s not that the Oscars outright ignored the films I personally gravitated toward – the smaller, weirder, defiantly idiosyncratic movies that would just as soon discomfit an audience as delight it. It’s just that the Academy was careful to keep such films at arms’ length. Oscar statues on display at the Time Warner Center in New York City/Getty Images Oh, it would acknowledge these movies – but it would assiduously relegate them to the screenplay categories.  So every year I’d watch the ceremony dutifully but passively, only really digging in once the writing categories were announced. I thought of them as, somehow, mine.  So I’d sit there, year after year, and wave my little rah-rah pennant for “my” movies like The Grifters, and A Fish Called Wanda and Sex, Lies and Videotape and Do the Right Thing and A Simple Plan and Ghost World and Adaptation and In the Loop and Boogie Nights and The Usual Suspects and Heavenly Creatures and Being John Malkovich and In Bruges and many others like them – films that had not received a nomination for best picture from the Academy fuddy-duddies, yet had managed to eke out a writing nod. (All of the films I just listed received studio distribution and found a sizable audience, so it’s not like any of them were particularly transgressive or experimental. But they weren’t the usual anodyne Oscar fare, and that was enough for me.) But then, something happened. Maybe it was the year The Silence of the Lambs took home best picture. That felt new – here was a grisly genre thriller earning the most mainstream prize in all of popular culture. Or maybe it was the year Fargo – a dark dissection of American greed and violence – earned its best picture nomination. (It didn’t win – that was The English Patient’s year, yawn – but it did take home the original screenplay award.)  Suddenly, the old formula was breaking down. Weird movies I loved now had an honest, if long, shot at the big prize. My favorite directors, who’d spent years languishing in the screenplay categories – the Coens and Paul Thomas Anderson and Charlie Kaufman and Peter Jackson and Alfonso Cuarón and Spike Lee – started getting invited up to the adults’ table. The reason why isn’t complicated: People my age were now entering the Academy and voting according to our shared, slightly more eclectic (and less bustle-oriented) tastes. Intellectually, I knew this phenomenon was occurring. And so I’d get my hopes up, year after year. But then the Academy kept turning around to throw best picture to predictably uplifting and ultra-traditional choices like The King’s Speech or Green Book and I’d think: Not yet. But then, this year. The Daniels’ deeply, deeply bizarre Everything Everywhere All at Once is maybe my favorite movie of last year, with its frenetic, insistent, bagels-and-butt-plugs take on family and love and nothing less than the meaning of life itself. It’s arguably the single weirdest movie to ever receive a best picture nomination – and yet it did. And it’s widely considered a favorite to win. And its 11 nominations make it the most honored film of this year’s Oscar ceremony. The weird is now normal, the offbeat is now mainstream.  I can’t believe it. I mean that literally – I don’t trust the online buzz pitching it as the front-runner. I’m standing ready for the Academy to let me down again, as they have so many times before. Because we can’t pretend this hoary institution has turned some definitive collective corner. They’re still keeping great, idiosyncratic films like Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Lobster, Knives Out and Ex Machina out of the main awards while tossing them writing noms as consolation, just as they always have. But come Oscar night, I’ll be home, watching the ceremony – and not just for a couple of categories. I’ll watch start to finish, with a stiff drink in one hand and an Everything bagel in the other, hoping against hope that a 95-year-old organization can perform a bait-and-switch – which is to say, can turn up its nose at the usual Oscar bait and sit down to a rich, satisfying meal of bagels and hot dog fingers. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend Cunk on Earth is a Netflix series produced by Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker. It stars comedian Diane Morgan as the confident yet clueless TV host Philomena Cunk. The series satirizes nature and historical documentary series, with Morgan’s presenter blathering on about important moments in human development and witlessly interviewing actual experts, most of whom are in on the joke. These expert segments are great, but my favorite bits of the show are the stretches where Cunk’s getting her Attenborough on and pompously pontificating about the nature of Man. As she strolls along a windswept beach or through the ruins of some ancient civilization, she dryly delivers monologues packed to the gills with very, very dumb jokes, without ever giving the game away.  Much has been written and said about the passing of Burt Bacharach. By the time I was six or seven, the man’s music had already become a staple of the “Easy Listening” radio station my parents played on every car ride. I’m not proud to say that for years I associated “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head” and his other hits with low-level carsickness and the odor of my mother’s Winston-Salems. It took a concerted effort on my part, once I reached my twenties, to disentangle those associations and appreciate his work. The news of his death triggered another association, too: A series of TV ads for vermouth that he did with his then-wife Angie Dickinson. The reason I can still quote them in their entirety is how much they fascinated a very young me – everything about them seemed adult and self-possessed and mysteriously unconcerned with anything having to do with kids. The way they fit into their clothes. The way the two of them traded off being the one who makes the sales pitch, commercial to commercial. The blasé way Bacharach tosses off the jingle, like he’s composing it on the fly. The way it looks like they decided to throw a party and the theme is turtlenecks. The way they look at each other at the end of the ad and whisper, “yeah.” I remember thinking, as a kid: This is sex. This is that sex thing everyone talks about. And I wasn’t entirely wrong. We’ve already discussed how I’m angling for the terrific 1973 mystery film The Last of Sheila to attain a kind of cultural currency in this, the year of its 50th anniversary. Sadly, the passing of Raquel Welch supplies a fresh news peg to urge you, yet again, to check it out. It’s one of her most grounded, nuanced performances and she blends effortlessly into the film’s ensemble cast.  What We Did This Week Jason Segel in Shrinking/Apple TV+ Stephen, Gene Demby and Kiana Fitzgerald (along with producer Mike and editor Jess) stayed up until the wee small ones on Sunday night to recap the Super Bowl – the game, the ads and the diva. On Tuesday, with Titanic returning to theaters for its 25th anniversary, we encored our discussion of the film with Aisha, Linda, Chris Klimek and Roxana Hadadi. On Wednesday, Linda, Chloe Veltman and Ronald Young, Jr. had a healthy range of reactions to Apple TV+’s Shrinking. Also on Wednesday, my review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania went live.  On Thursday we shared our pal Andrew Limbong’s NPR Life Kit episode on how to be a better movie watcher. He gets some great advice from some folks who’ll be familiar to you. And on Friday, I got granular with Joelle Monique, Daisy Rosario and Mallory Yu about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, plus What’s Making Us Happy.  What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Joelle Monique: The podcast Scriptnotes  Daisy Rosario: Hysterical by Elissa Bassist Mallory Yu: His Dark Materials on HBO Glen: The Oscar-nominated documentary short Haulout Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy

🍛 Wait... What’s for dinner?

Plus, your meal prep tips!

View this email online Clare Marie Schneider and LA Johnson/NPR Hey y’all,  I can count the number of times I’ve cooked dinner in the last year on one hand. Part of the reason is that I’m not a picky eater. (Cream cheese on an old tortilla and a handful of trail mix is an acceptable meal.) And part of the reason is that I find most recipes overwhelming.  Being staunchly in the “no cooking” camp as a mom involves a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, frozen pizzas and take-out. And to be honest, it also means my husband carries a lot of the meal prep load. Before you judge me, know that I am the official manager of the dishwasher, laundry and family calendar! The other night my husband said to me, “figuring out what to do for dinner every night is a lot.” He’s right. It’s in the category of household duties I categorize as Sisyphean tasks — as soon as you’ve rolled that boulder up the mountain, you’re gonna have to start all over again. His very universal statement was about as close as you’ll get to a cry for help from him. So after decades of seeing a few spoonfuls of peanut butter as a meal, I decided to see what this recent episode of Life Kit had to say about meal planning. Kevin Curry, the founder of FitMenCook, says his approach to meal prep is cooking a bunch of ingredients at once and then mixing and matching them throughout the week. As a long-time supporter of the popular fast casual “bowl” staple, I’m a fan of this idea.  For 45 minutes each Wednesday and Sunday, Kevin cooks his five ingredients for the week. One combination he shared: chickpeas, chicken, jasmine rice, roasted vegetables and a green medley of spinach, chard and kale. "With those five foods I prepped, I made about ten different meal combinations," he says. One day you might want chicken, rice and greens, another day you might want chickpeas, greens and chicken. Then, transform the flavor of each meal with different condiments like tahini dressing or barbecue sauce. He also encouraged folks to experiment with different grains — black rice, forbidden rice, jasmine rice, basmati rice, quinoa and farro to name a few.  This advice was like a breath of fresh air. Or a whiff of an aromatic rice, chicken and roasted veggie bowl. Meal prep doesn’t have to involve complicated, multi-step recipes (unless that’s your thing).  This approach reminds me of one of my favorite pieces of advice I’ve heard on Life Kit. It’s from our episode about how to make a better to-do list: Take a task that feels large and insurmountable (for me, making a lasagna for dinner) and break it up into small, actionable items (like cooking rice, roasting veggies and making mix-n-match bowls all week). As with most things in life, when you take it bit by bit, you might be surprised what you can bring to the table.  Here's more of Kevin’s advice on tackling the age old question: "What should I eat?" — Beck Harlan, Life Kit visuals editor  Newsletter continues after sponsor message Your meal prep tips A few weeks ago, we asked for your best meal prep advice. Here’s what you had to say:  🧽 One tip that helped me meal prep efficiently to wash the dishes I'm done with while my food is cooking. That way when I am done meal prepping, I don't have a sink full of dirty dishes! — Maribel from Kerman, Calif. 🗓 I follow two or three good recipe newsletters and bookmark ideas during the week. On Sunday, I look at my calendar and put my meal choices for each day, linking to the recipes in the notes. 🍳Leftovers make an excellent breakfast with an egg on top. 📝Keep a running list of things to replace when you run out of them. This saves time later when you go through the refrigerator on food shopping day. — Suzanne O’Connor 🔎 Instead of searching for “meal prep” online, look up "sheet pan" and "one-pot" recipes. I've found these are less "healthy-eating" focused and include some comfort meals you can easily modify to make healthier.   — Kristen, Terre Haute, Ind. 🧊 I love when food comes in an individually wrapped containers, but I am a miser. My solution: I cook chicken, fish, pasta, rice, beans, vegetables and pastries in family size amounts, portion them into individual packets and put them in my freezer. Then for the next 21 meals, I can mix and match meals that cater to my taste at that moment. —Sara from Portland, Ore. And some evergreen advice from Carol in Laguna Niguel, Calif: 🍲 Embrace the slow cooker.  Access Sponsor-Free Episodes Want to support our show? Try a subscription to Life Kit+ and get all the tips and tricks you love sponsor-free. Learn more at plus.npr.org/lifekit.  Learn More Becky Harlan/NPR Make your life easier in the kitchen with these Life Kit episodes Skip a trip to the store  You know when you’re halfway through a recipe and you realize you’re out of a key ingredient? This guide will save you an emergency trip to the store by showing you what you can use as a substitute.  Embrace the one-pot meal  Dishes! The eternal downside of cooking anything at home. In this Life Kit, New York Times food writer Melissa Clark shares inspiration for making the most delicious food with the fewest dishes. Get her recipe for cheesy baked pasta here.   Improvise, improvise, improvise  Cooking without a recipe can be intimidating. Samin Nosrat, author of the best-selling book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, shares tips on getting started. From how to stock your pantry to an approachable first dish on which to wing it: beans!  Coming up on Life Kit: 💙 Caring for caregivers 👢 How to figure out (and nail) your personal style 🤑 Get ready for this year’s taxes – and next year’s too  Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: LifeKit@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Daily News, Code Switch, Health and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Life Kit emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy

A Marvel show that's marvelous on its own

View this email online by Glen Weldon Welcome! It was a record week for Beyoncé (the historical kind and not, unfortunately, the album of the year kind) and for Viola Davis, who got that EGOT. It was the week a truly iconic TV comedy set freshly to work to make itself less so. And it was the week that we received the happy news that we will soon feel justified in shouting Azúcar!! every time we dump quarters into the washer at the laundromat. Even more than we do already, somehow! Imagine! Turn and Face the Strange Ph-ph-phases Which phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are we in again? I’ve lost my scorecard. Epsilon? Black Diamond? Platinum Plus? Club Level?  Whichever one it is, you’d be forgiven for feeling a bit underwater. The IP just keeps flowing, after all; where once it pooled around our collective cultural ankles, we’re now all of us wading hip-deep through Marvel flotsam and jetsam without a bilge pump in sight.  Another big Marvel movie descends on us next week, in fact – one which promises (probably not the right word) to end one movie trilogy while tossing a big ol’ handful of Mentos into the 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke that is current MCU continuity.  Amid all that messy, sticky, corn-syrupy tumult, the Marvel animated series Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur slides onto Disney+ on Friday. It’s a bright, sunny, colorful bauble of a show that happily self-isolates itself far from the portentous multiversal shenanigans and phase-shifts that beset other Marvel properties. It’s off in its own little corner, though its retina-sizzling colors, dynamic animation and propulsive soundtrack betray its indebtedness to the terrific Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. They share a breeziness, a blithe disregard for the twin nerdy specters of Canon and Continuity that turn some fans into joyless, overzealous bookkeepers.  Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur/Marvel Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is aimed squarely at kids, starring as it does 13-year-old Lunella Lafayette, voiced by Diamond White. Lunella’s a smart Black kid living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a neighborhood she dearly loves – as witnessed by the first scene of the pilot, in which she roller skates through the streets greeting everyone she meets as the lyrics to the song in her head magically manifest on street signs and storefront windows. (The three episodes made available to critics suggest the series is also a kind of stealth musical, as original songs composed by Raphael Saadiq feature largely on the soundtrack.) Lunella’s loving family runs a popular roller disco. (Not for nothing, but her grandmother and mother are voiced by Alfre Woodard and Sasheer Zamata, respectively.) Lunella’s a steadfastly confident, upbeat presence, though her intelligence and her propensity for inventing gadgets mark her as an outsider at school. When one such gadget opens a portal that summons a T. rex with the personality of a golden retriever (voiced, or I should say grunted, by Fred Tatasciore), the two become a crime-fighting team, cleaning up the streets of their beloved LES with a publicity assist from Lunella’s social media influencer classmate Casey, voiced by Libe Barer.  There’s a STEM component here too, as each episode comes with a science or engineering lesson tucked neatly inside. In a nice, humanizing touch, the only time Lunella’s chipper demeanor cracks is whenever someone prevents her from showing off how smart she is.  I felt seen. Then I felt targeted. The press materials note that the show is directed and written by a team composed entirely of women of color – though maybe the very funny episode in which Lunella invents a chemical treatment so harsh that it turns her hair into a super villain would have tipped folks off. The series was produced and co-created by Laurence Fishburne, who shows up a few episodes in to voice a character I won’t spoil; he knocks it out of the park and, naturally, gets a great song to sing while doing so. Forget phases, forget variants, forget needing to read a MCU wiki to know how what you’re watching fits into what’s come before it. Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur simply, mercifully is – and what it is, is a delight.  Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend The MCU may be all over the map these days, but the DC Extended Universe is no slouch in the “Wait, what?” department either. It’s recently been taken over by Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn, which suggests a move away from Snyderian gloom (yay!) but augurs a drift toward cynical glibness (resigned sigh). But I’m greatly encouraged by his stated fondness for Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, a recent comic by writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely now collected in trade paperback. It’s a vastly different take that relocates Superman’s cousin to a faraway planet and turns her into a fantasy/sci-fi version of True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn. A big swing, but it works. I gave up on Elden Ring after a few months of dying, er, trying. I loved roaming the vast landscapes, but hated all the boss battles, with their rote memorization of attack patterns that only let you chip away at the bad guy’s health in depressingly wee increments before having to endlessly lather, rinse and repeat. It sent me scurrying back to the warm embrace of my old standby, the Assassin’s Creed series. I’d beaten Valhalla a month after it came out, but it was therapeutic to return to those familiar shores in such an overpowered capacity, making mincemeat out of anyone foolish to cross my path as I amassed all the gold, armor and weapons I didn’t have time to collect before. It was so satisfying to scour the map clean of all its previously overlooked glowing dots of treasure, like some kind of cartographical Viking Roomba. I’d skipped Valhalla’s precursor, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, but I just downloaded it and have started to sail the wine-dark seas of Ancient Greece while flirting with hot locals. Heaven. Or, more precisely, Elysium.  Our pal Chloe Veltman had a terrific piece on Morning Edition about how performing arts groups are being forced to change how they work – and how they think. Bill Nighy’s up for a best actor Oscar for Living, and he’s quite good in it, which made me remember some of his previous performances, big and small. One I’d forgotten about completely was his uncredited cameo at the end of the Doctor Who episode “Vincent and the Doctor,” in which he’s an art curator called to explain the legacy of Vincent Van Gogh to … an incredulous Van Gogh himself. That Who episode was one of the first things I’d talked about on the first episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour 13 years ago now. And while I maintain that the episode’s Monster of the Week (a giant invisible space-turkey) is hilarious, I’d forgotten how much gravitas Nighy brought to a tiny role, which made the ending of a mostly very silly episode land with the power it needed to.   What We Did This Week Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård star in Infinity Pool/NEON On Monday, Stephen, Anastasia Tsioulcas and Kiana Fitzgerald broke down the Grammys. And Stephen wrote up some Grammy takeaways. On Tuesday, Linda, Aisha and I rhapsodized about Poker Face, which manages to be Peak Rian Johnson, Peak Natasha Lyonne, and, not coincidentally, Peak Us. On Wednesday, Aisha and Jordan Crucchiola swam laps in Infinity Pool. On Thursday, Stephen, Daisy Rosario and Ella Cerón wondered if 80 for Brady would leave audiences feeling … deflated.  On Friday, Stephen, Linda, Aisha and Christina Tucker asked Magic Mike’s Last Dance to hold them, to scold them, cause when they’re bad they’re so, so bad. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Stephen: Remembering Burt Bacharach Linda: The movie Sharper coming to AppleTV+ on Feb. 17  Aisha: The Switched on Pop episode about SZA Christina: The Lord of the Rings at Radio City Music Hall Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy