The Review

Top Gun: Maverick is out soon! But can any movie with fast planes, Tom Cruise, and beach volleyball truly compare to the classic fighter pilot movie about, as writer Shirley Li puts it, "cute boys calling each other cute names"? Find out with Shirley, Megan Garber, and David Sims, and explore the moral (but fictional) simplicity of an earlier era: the Cold War 80s.

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In a possibly-soon-to-be-post-Roe v Wade world, our hosts Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Hannah Giorgis thought it'd be worth re-examining the Judd Apatow/Seth Rogan comedy "Knocked Up," to discuss the way the movie treats women's bodily autonomy, angry reactions from men, and abortion.

Megan also wrote recently on what it says that the movie simply edits direct mention of abortion out — and what that portended for the future of Roe, even fifteen years ago.

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The 1980s Los Angeles Lakers were one of the most dominant teams in sports. At a time when professional basketball was on its heels, the Lakers dynasty brought new excitement: Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird, Jerry Buss and the glitzy Forum Club, and an uptempo flow offense. That’s the story of HBO’s big-budget series Winning Time, whose season 1 finale aired on Sunday, May 8th.

David Sims, Vann Newkirk, and Ross Andersen—three of The Atlantic’s biggest basketball fans—get together to discuss the series. Does it manage to weave together the era’s many storylines? Does producer Adam McKay’s style energize or distract? And why is the story of the Showtime-era Lakers called “Winning Time”?

• Ross Andersen: It Had to Be the Lakers (Oct 2020)
• Ross Andersen: Fight Night With LeBron (Oct 2018)

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The Apple TV+ dystopian thriller Severance is one of the most acclaimed shows of the year. Its grim take on the furthest extreme of "work-life balance" speaks to our strained pandemic-era relationship with the workplace and, according to our critics, offers a gripping throwback to an era of prestige TV before (as David Sims sees it) Netflix ruined everything. 

Spencer Kornhaber, Sophie Gilbert, and David Sims go down the elevator to Lumon’s basement to talk waffle parties, real-life workplace anxieties, and what dystopian sci-fis they recommend besides Severance.

Further reading:

• Sophie: 'Severance' Makes the Workplace Eerily Dystopian
• David: The Netflix Bubble Is Finally Bursting

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Shirley Li, David Sims, and Sophie Gilbert discuss the brutal new blockbuster The Northman. From the director of The Lighthouse and The Witch and based on the viking legend that inspired Hamlet, the film is a visceral experience that’s hard to summarize: Is it an arthouse revenge epic? A viking myth about toxic-masculinity? Shakespeare for people who love crossfit?

The Northman joins The Green Knight and The Last Duel as part of a trend of recent films recontextualizing medieval tales. David, Shirley, and Sophie unpack that trend. They discuss the 10th century tale the film is based on, how both Shakespeare and director Robert Eggers adapted it, and how modern storytelling has tried to bring the historical experiences of women into these hypermasculine myths.

Further reading:

• The Northman Is an Unsentimental Portrait of a Hero

Coming Soon: 

Severance

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Shirley Li, David Sims, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss the hit action comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once. At a time when every show or movie has a multiverse, how does this film’s “verse-jumping” manage to be so cathartic it made us cry?

The trio follows up on last week’s discussion of Turning Red to unpack how this movie uses a multiverse to convey the experience of an immigrant family. They also unpack Michelle Yeoh’s incredible career and how the film’s unique mix of silliness and sentiment gave her an opportunity she’s waited years for. 

Further reading:

• Everything Everywhere All at Once Is a Mind-Bending Multiverse Fantasy
• How Hollywood's Weirdest Filmmakers Made a Movie About Everything
• Everything Everywhere All at Once Is a Masterpiece

Coming Soon: 

The Northman

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Shirley Li, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz discuss the Pixar coming-of-age film Turning Red, why they found it utterly charming, and why this post-villain era of animation is a welcome one.

Further reading:

• What the Controversy Over Turning Red Misses
• Pixar's Turning Red Has the Cleverest Take on Puberty

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Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Hannah Giorgis assess the state of pop music following the Grammys. While the much-derided awards have improved at celebrating the diversity of modern music, they still tend to reward safer throwback sounds. And modern music as a whole seems to be going through a nostalgic phase—just look at Silk Sonic’s retro soul, or Lady Gaga’s big-band ballads, or even Olivia Rodrigo’s pop-punk influences.

The trio reviews the Grammys, debates pop music’s retro obsession, and explains why we’re in a moment with more sound-recycling than usual. With streaming tracking all our listens, is old music killing new music? Or is the industry finally seeing (and monetizing) a type of listening we’ve always done? And with a backward-looking mainstream intersecting with a Tik-Tok-ification of pop stardom, where do we expect music to go next?

Further reading:

• How Jon Batiste's Album of the Year Win Broke Grammys Expectations
• Is Old Music Killing New Music?
• An Artist Who Makes Me Excited About the Future of Music

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From Theranos to WeWork to the socialite grifter Anna Delvey, television these days is all about the art of the scam. Why are we so fascinated with the rise-and-fall stories of swindlers? What do these shows reveal about American culture at this moment? 

And with many of these shows following female scammers through the “Lean In” / girlboss 2010’s in particular, what should audiences make of that brief era of feminism today?

Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Shirley Li attempt their best Elizabeth Holmes impressions as they discuss the Hulu series The Dropout and the other scammer shows airing now. 

Further reading:

• The Comedies That Understand What Peak Scammer TV Does Not
• Netflix's Inventing Anna Writes a Check It Can't Cash
• The Mueller Report, Theranos, 'Billions': American Scams

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West Side Story is a work with some huge names behind it: Leonard Bernstein wrote the musical, Stephen Sondheim the lyrics, and Shakespeare the source material Romeo and Juliet. And sixty years after the classic 1961 film dominated the Oscars, another name was added to that list: Steven Spielberg.

The big names behind West Side Story don’t just have status in common though; they’re also all white men telling a story of Puerto Rican migrants in New York City. That lack of diversity among the creative team is evident watching the original film sixty years later. The Puerto Rican characters are portrayed by white actors, often in broad stereotype and brownface. Even Rita Moreno, who portrayed Anita and was born in Puerto Rico, was forced to wear dark makeup.

The 2021 update escapes many of the dated and problematic aspects of the 1961 version by grounding the story in real history. Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner used the period setting of slum-clearance era New York to give the rival gang members more real-world motivation and less stereotyping. In doing so though, the remake may lose some of the kaleidoscopic dreaminess that made the old Hollywood original the classic that it is.

David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber compare the two versions ahead of an Oscars weekend in which West Side Story is up for seven awards.

Further reading:

• Spielberg's West Side Story Is an Undeniable Triumph
• How Stephen Sondheim Changed Musical Theater
• When a Hit Musical Becomes a Bad Movie 
• Why West Side Story Abandoned Its Queer Narrative
• What Stephen Sondheim Knew About Endings

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The Batman is already 2022’s highest-grossing film. In some ways, it’s yet another comic-book adaptation to dominate theaters. In others, it’s a return to a pre-MCU cinema experience free of the weight of universe-building. Robert Pattinson stars in the first standalone Batman movie in a decade, bringing a grim detective story with the caped crusader that seems to draw more from David Fincher than DC Comics. 

While superhero films still top box office charts, the types of stories they’re capable of telling seems broader each year. Should The Batman make us optimistic for the future of comic-book movies—or cynical that any big-budget film has to include capes?

David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss Robert Pattinson, their favorite Batman, and the state of our superhero monoculture.

Further reading:

• Robert Pattinson's Batman Is Wonderfully Grim
• How Batman & Robin Changed the Superhero Movie For the Better
• The Complicated Legacy of Batman Begins

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Drive My Car is a special movie. It’s Japan’s most Oscar-nominated film ever—and its first to be up for Best Picture. It enters the final weeks of awards season as the first non-English-language film to be picked at Best Picture by all three major American critics groups (including the New York Film Critics Circle, for whom one David Sims tallied the results).

And its Oscar run comes at a time of tentative hope for the future of international film. Drive My Car won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, an award whose last two winners were Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Minari’s nomination was controversial as a film set in Arkansas that deals with very American experiences around immigration and isolation. In both English and Korean though, Minari was put in the “foreign language” category.

Reflecting on that recent history then, should Drive My Car’s success offer some hope for international film? After Parasite’s 2019 Golden Globe win, director Bong Joon Ho urged viewers to “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” Are audiences closer than ever to that goal?

The language of Drive My Car isn’t just remarkable for its domestic success too: Based on a story by Haruki Murakami and directed Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the film is also a deeply moving examination of language itself. 

David Sims, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz came together to unpack the film, its message about how we communicate with one another, and why it resonated as widely as it has. They also discuss their love for Murakami, despite his gendered flaws and storytelling crutches. (“And then the phone rang and it was a secret agent!”)

Further reading:

• An Electrifying Adaptation of Murakami's Drive My Car
• Drive My Car Pushes the Limit of Language
• How Haruki Murakami's Translators Shaped His Early Novels

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The Jane Campion western drama The Power of the Dog is the most Oscar-nominated film this year. But does it—as Spencer Kornhaber has written—have a queer problem? Based on a 1967 novel, the movie’s found praise as an incisive study of masculinity. Does its dated source material also make it a collection of cliched gay narrative though?

Spencer joins Shirley Li and David Sims to analyze the film, as well as the Oscar race it’s currently leading. David also breaks down some recent Oscar history with how the reforms that followed #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 have shaped the Best Picture award in particular.

Further reading:

• Spencer: The Power of the Dog Has a Queer Problem
• David: The Biblical Clash at the Core of The Power of the Dog

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Sophie Gilbert, Spencer Kornhaber, and Shirley Li discuss the Hulu series about “the greatest love story ever sold” and ask: Is Pam & Tommy just repeating the exploitation it depicts? Or is its retelling of internet history revealing something new about our current culture?

The sex tape at the core of the show is effectively the first instance of revenge porn online. It opened up questions of celebrity and privacy that we’re still grappling today. Now, shows like Pam & Tommy (with which Pamela Anderson was not involved) similarly raise questions about where the line is with telling a public person’s private story.

The series also falls into a familiar category these days of the modern reconsideration of 90s culture: Framing Britney Spears, several American Crime Story iterations, even Girls5Eva and Yellowjackets. What is it about this era that’s drawing us to it? 

[Note: Spoilers through episode 6 of Pam & Tommy.]

Further reading: Sophie Gilbert’s review: Pam & Tommy and the Curse of the '90s Bombshell

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The romantic comedy was once a cinema tentpole. The films defined A-list careers. They won Hollywood studios awards. And they made oodles of money. Then one day, rom-coms seemed a thing of the past. What happened to the genre? Is it dead, or just alive in another form? And what would it take to mount a comeback?

David Sims, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert discuss the state of the rom-com and review two new entrants to the genre that premiered this past Valentine’s Day Weekend: First, the glitzy Marry Me starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. Second, the indie-inflected I Want You Back starring Charlie Day and Jenny Slate.

The trio breaks down what they love about the genre, what works and what doesn’t in the new films, and how Hollywood can recapture the old magic. (Maybe cast male leads for chemistry over comedy?) They also share their favorite rom-coms from the golden age of the genre—the 1990s and early 2000s, of course—and why they love them despite their formulaic flaws. Romantic comedies are, after all, the only movies that meaningfully explore how regular people connect with each other. As Sophie succinctly explains: “It’s this or porn, people.”

Further reading:

• Marry Me and the ​​Revenge of the Old-Fashioned Rom-Com (David Sims, The Atlantic)
• Rom-Coms Were Corny and Retrograde. Why Do I Miss Them So Much? (Wesley Morris, The New York Times)

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This episode is the first in a new three-part miniseries from The Experiment—“SPAM: How the American Dream Got Canned.” 

During World War II, wherever American troops spread democracy, they left the canned meat known as SPAM in its wake. When American GIs landed overseas, they often tossed cans of SPAM out of trucks to the hungry people they sought to liberate. 

That’s how producer Gabrielle Berbey’s grandfather first came to know and love SPAM as a kid in the Philippines. But 80 years later, SPAM no longer feels American. It is now a staple Filipino food: a beloved emblem of Filipino identity. Gabrielle sets out on a journey to understand how SPAM made its way into the hearts of generations of Pacific Islanders, and ends up opening a SPAM can of worms.

Listen and subscribe to The Experiment here:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts

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Attempts to summarize the Showtime series Yellowjackets often lean on creaky comparisons: A female Lord of the Flies? A 90's Stranger Things? Teen Lost, but in Canada? 

In any case, the coming-of-age horror story is as addictive as it is perceptive. The show follows a championship-bound girls soccer team that crashes in the wilderness in 1996, threading their story with that of the surviving members as adults in 2021. Yellowjackets takes the life-or-death feeling of high-school to its furthest extreme, with the pilot episode teasing a cannibalistic cult that the girls become after nineteen months in the wilderness.

Episodes have kept viewers rapt and spawned dozens of theories about the show’s many mysteries: Who are the ‘pit girl’ and the ‘antler queen?’ Who’s blackmailing the adult Yellowjackets? What does the cult’s strange symbol mean? And Is Christina Ricci’s Misty the best character on television?

Shirley Li, Megan Garber, and Lenika Cruz break down the first season.

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“I’m an unnatural mother.” It was this one line that drew first-time director Maggie Gyllenhaal to adapt the 2006 Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter. Her new Netflix film of the same name examines motherhood and its secret shames. 

Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, the movie portrays a woman at two different points in her life: Colman as a present-day professor on holiday in Greece, and Buckley as a mother with two young daughters decades earlier. Arriving two years into a pandemic whose burden has fallen especially hard on parents, the movie received a fiercely polarized reaction.

David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Shirley Li analyze The Lost Daughter and the questions it raises. Is anyone a “natural mother”? How far does society expect women to sacrifice for their children? And how did they react to the film as parents?

Further reading:

• Shirley’s interview with director Maggie Gyllenhaal: The Lost Daughter Understands the Secret Shame of Motherhood
• Sophie on a trend: The Redemption of the Bad Mother
• David ranked it #9 in his list: Best Movies of 2021

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Comfort watches are a mainstay of the pandemic—old television and movies one can revisit over and over again. And for a few writers on The Atlantic’s culture team, that go-to watch has been the 1990s sitcom Frasier.

Megan Garber, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber debate why, despite its problems, Frasier holds up remarkably well (especially compared to more cringe-inducing contemporary shows like Friends and Seinfeld). What exactly explains its enduring appeal?

Frasier is a show whose tastes are very much of its time. (See: Niles Crane’s lapels.) But in a uniquely ‘90s end-of-history kind of way, the sitcom wrings its comedy from class tension while also existing in a strangely post-partisan world. 

That lack of politics can seem like fantasy to a viewer in 2022, but its treatment of identity is fantastical as well. Frasier is a comedy about class that elides race and, often, sexuality. (Is this a show for—or even about—gay men?) The trio breaks down the legacy of the sitcom today, shares favorite moments, and debates whether Frasier is the worst or best character on his own show.

Further reading:

• Megan Garber: Frasier Has Always Had a Maris Problem

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Adam McKay’s disaster satire is many things at once: a parable of our distracted society, a primal scream of a warning, and a broad comedy from the writer/director of Anchorman. Such a delicate balance has made the star-studded Netflix film a polarizing movie. 

Critics, audiences, and activists have both savaged and praised the movie, with cycles of backlash highlighting the difficulty of sending a funny yet urgent message. But of course, isn’t that what political satires have done for decades? Or has reality become so absurd that it’s now beyond parody?

As McKay told David Sims, he wrote the story about a planet-killing comet (and our society’s inability to act collectively to stop it) as a climate change metaphor. But after the script was done, production shut down for the pandemic and he watched the follies of a real disaster surpass his fictional one. Sophie Gilbert, Spencer Kornhaber, and David Sims unpack Don’t Look Up and whether modern satire can make a difference.

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