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What's Making Us Happy: A guide to your weekend viewing and reading
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This week, Stevie Nicks aired her ID, a very chipper brand ran into a not-very-chipper lawsuit, and Paddington got a passport.
Here's what NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to — and what you should check out this weekend.
The Shadow Strays
The Shadow Strays is a new action spectacular by Timo Tjahjanto, which is now out on Netflix. This is Tjahjanto’s follow up to The Night Comes for Us, which is a bone-shattering, mind-melting fight blitz of a movie – one of my favorites ever. Now we have The Shadow Strays. If you are an action fan, it has been The Shadow Strays week for us: celebrating it, celebrating each other, reveling in things that are very inappropriate and not suitable for work. If you can handle some high-octane action cinema, I highly recommend it. – Jordan Crucchiola
Death, Let Me Do My Special
Death, Let Me Do My Special is Rachel Bloom's new Netflix comedy special. Rachel Bloom, of course, of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Reboot and YouTube fame. As the title suggests, it gets pretty heavy at times. She talks about the death of her writing partner, Adam Schlesinger. She talks about giving birth at the height of COVID and having the kid spend days in the neonatal intensive care unit. She talks about her relationship with death in the face of her atheism. So yeah, it's heavy and it's heartfelt, but she is so smart about the subject, and specifically so smart about this format of the “one woman show” – all the clichés of that genre – that she never lets it get anywhere near sentimentality. And if all that weren't enough, it makes fun of Dear Evan Hansen in a very smart way. I'm always going to be there for that. – Glen Weldon
Ephemera: A Memoir
If you are at your local comic book store, picking up the latest Venom issues to bone up for the movie, but you want something with a very different flavor, I read a beautiful graphic memoir recently called Ephemera. It is from cartoonist Briana Loewinsohn. It is a sad, contemplative story about a kid dealing with a troubled parent. It uses plants as a very beautiful central metaphor, and it's just a gorgeous comic book. And the creator is also a great follow on Instagram. She is drawing the ‘90s all month — if you want to see a very loving rendition of a bottle of Crystal Pepsi or OJ’s Bronco chase. – Jordan Morris
More recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter
by Linda Holmes
It's not coming out until November 13, so I can't exactly recommend that you watch it (YET), but I strongly recommend that you watch the trailer for the Netflix movie Hot Frosty. I don't want to say too much about it — you should watch for yourself — but I will say that I'm considering putting up a sign in my living room next to my TV that says "X DAYS UNTIL HOT FROSTY."
Do you need to listen to Kylie Minogue on It's Been A Minute? Obviously, yes.
A few years ago, Jean Hanff Korelitz had a big hit with the unsettling book The Plot, about a writer who borrows the bones of an idea his student once had and ends up with a successful novel. A sequel didn't seem likely, but it's out now, and it's called The Sequel. It's a different book, but it remains in the same universe and has some of the same fascination with the derivation of ideas and the haunting of writers.
Dhanika Pineda adapted the Pop Culture Happy Hour segment "What's Making Us Happy" for the Web. If you like these suggestions, consider signing up for our newsletter to get recommendations every week. And listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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