I hadn’t exactly written off Spike Lee as a relevant filmmaker, but it has been 12 years since Inside Man, the last “joint” of his I truly enjoyed. And that film was atypical for Lee, a pretty straight-forward heist film. You have to go back to 2002’s 25th Hour for something really meaty and thought-provoking.
In fairness, I missed 2015’s Chi-Raq, which divided critics but was generally regarded as a return to form for the filmmaker.
If you drew a venn diagram of the first two movies I wrote about this week, with Crazy Rich Asians in the “romantic comedies with an Asian-American lead actress” circle and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society in the “NetFlix Original films with long titles” circle, the overlap is where you’d find today’s featured film: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.
NetFlix has stepped up its game in the rom-com genre, with Set It Up earning strong reviews earlier this year, The Kissing Booth emerging as an unexpected favorite, and now this adaptation of a 2014 YA novel by Jenny Han, easily the best of the bunch.
In case anybody thinks my lavish praise for Crazy Rich Asians means my affection for Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again has waned, rest assured that is not the case. My heart has room enough for two crowd-pleasing entertainments.
While counting the days to Mamma Mia‘s DVD release, I have sought out other work by the incomparable Lily James. That includes The Darkest Hour, which I enjoyed quite a bit, and a new NetFlix release with a mouthful of a title: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
I haven’t had a chance to chime in on the astronomically stupid decision by the Motion Picture Academy to introduce a “Best Popular Film” Oscar to the Academy Awards lineup. How about you just broaden your definition of what constitutes excellence and allow that a movie people actually enjoy can also be award-worthy?
And don’t get me started on what I suspect was the genesis of this idea — lack of trust in the membership to give Black Panther a legit Best Picture nomination. As the astute film journalist Mark Harris put it on Twitter, “It truly is something that in the year Black Panther, a movie made just about entirely by and with black people, grosses $700 million, the Academy’s reaction is, ‘We need to invent something separate…but equal.'”
Here’s a cut from Bob Dylan’s 2013 Bootleg Series release Another Self Portrait, which compiled alternate and discarded takes from the sessions for his most loathed album, Self Portrait. It’s a fine collection, and one that makes you wonder how Dylan ended up with such a dog of an album given the source material.
However, even more entertaining than the music on Another Self Portrait is the comment section of my initial post about this album back in 2013.
Meet Me In Montauk 