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When The Noseletter was first pitched to me, the idea was a weekly pop culture newsletter that would serve as a companion to, and an extension of, The Nose.
But by the time we published the first issue (more than three years ago now!), we had moved away from a pure pop culture focus. And we were never able to ramp all the way up to a weekly publishing schedule.
But I’m the kind of person who imprints on an original idea, so there’s been a part of my brain that’s been coming up with weekly endorsements for all this time — with nowhere to put most of them.
But. This week, Colin is away. And the offices of Lily Tyson Quality Entertainment Productions have been dark, too. Which means there’s no one to stop me from doing a bit of a brain dump of endorsements for you!
Oh, and I have another excuse: The great granddaddy of pop culture roundtable podcasts, Slate’s Culture Gabfest, ends its 18-year run this month. Slightly less than 18 years ago, when The Nose was just a swaddled baby full of pop culture roundtable ambitions, it, let’s say, borrowed the idea of endorsements from the Gabfest.
So as a thank you to the Culture Gabfest, and to relieve some of the pressure in my head, I’m going to start off this month’s Noseletter with four (4!) new endorsements, three movies and an album. But don’t worry. You aren’t stuck with just my dumb opinions. We’re running a regular slate of endorsements from other folks, too.
Pressure
I had to include a dad movie on Father’s Day weekend. As a pop history, Allied-centric, World War II drama that happens almost entirely away from the battlefield, Pressure is seen as kind of the obverse to last year’s Nuremberg. For my money, this is the better movie.
It tells the story of, basically, the weather forecast that saved the world, the weather forecast that made D-Day possible. It stars Brendan Fraser as Maj. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, but Andrew Scott and Kerry Condon — as the Scottish meteorologist and Eisenhower’s personal secretary, respectively — steal the show. Pressure is based on a stage play, and it sustains the energy of good theater in a way that obscures that it’s really mostly 100 minutes of people in rooms arguing about the weather.
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Henry Fonda and Paul Newman in Newman’s Sometimes a Great Notion. (FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images)
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Sometimes a Great Notion
Last month, Universal released hundreds of movies that had never before been available for digital rental and purchase. There’re TONS of good stuff. But a title I was really excited to see is Paul Newman’s Sometimes a Great Notion. It’s an adaptation of Ken Kesey’s second novel, a serious ’70s action drama about an independent family logging business flouting a union strike in the Pacific Northwest.¹
We think of Newman’s pal Robert Redford as an actor and a filmmaker in a way that we don’t about Newman. But he was an accomplished director, too. This was the second of six pictures he helmed, and he deftly handles both the logging action sequences and the family drama bits, some of which are quite dark. Sometimes a Great Notion stars Newman, Henry Fonda, and Lee Remick. Richard Haeckel was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting performance.
I should say: This movie includes the single most intense and affecting death scene I’ve ever seen portrayed on screen. (If you’ve seen this picture before, I’d imagine it’s the first thing you thought of when you saw that I was endorsing it.) That sequence is reason unto itself to watch this movie. But when I rewatched it to write this, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sit through that bit again.
The Nice Guys
Neo-noir can be tricky. The more you lean into the noir trappings, the more you run the risk of unintentional spoofing. There are great noir parodies, of course. The Long Goodbye, The Late Show, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But great, straight, earnest noir (rather than just noirishness-inflected thrillers or whatever) can be harder to come by in recent decades.²
Shane Black’s genius move with The Nice Guys is that he made a full-on comedy that’s simultaneously a genuine, serious neo-noir mystery. And the movie works on both fronts at once. Its 10th anniversary was last month, which led me to finally watch it, and it’s as funny as anything I’ve seen in a long time. If you’ve never seen its (NSFW) bathroom scene, do yourself the favor, and then I’d expect you’ll want to watch the rest of the movie post haste. And just know that along with the laughs, you get an agreeably inscrutable hardboiled mystery for free.
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DEVO perform in Columbus, Ohio, on August 4, 2010. (Joey Foley/Getty Images)
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Something for Everybody by Devo
Paul Simon went on a run of albums early this century — Surprise, So Beautiful or So What, Stranger to Stranger — that I liked basically as much as his best work from many decades ago. But regardless of how good the songs are, you understandably aren’t going to hear a lot of people mentioning Surprise in the same sentences as albums like Graceland and things.
Now, I get that it’s not really fair to DEVO, who were in town last week, to compare them to the likes of Paul Simon.³ But I think of their most recent (last?) studio album in kind of the same way. 2010’s Something for Everybody came out decades after DEVO’s late-’70s/early-’80s heyday, but it’s probably my favorite DEVO record? If you love upbeat, danceable, synthy rock, you should definitely give this album a try. It’s a dozen tracks, and every single one of them is fun from start to finish.
¹ It’s also the answer to a trivia question: Sometimes a Great Notion was the first movie ever shown on HBO, in November, 1972. I should probably also mention that when it later aired on broadcast television, it was retitled Never Give a Inch, the ungrammatical motto of said independent logging family. But the movie seems to have reverted to its original title over the decades since.
² This isn’t the conventional wisdom, but I’ve always thought that Curtis Hanson lost control of this aspect of L.A. Confidential, and it’s kind of a fatal flaw for that movie. The next time you see it on TV or somewhere, give it a few minutes, and see if you can tell whether it’s making fun of film noir or not. To me, the movie isn’t sure one way or the other. (And incidentally, The Nice Guys is the only movie since L.A. Confidential that again pairs stars Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger.)
³ But I don’t mean that as a slight to DEVO, either. Those guys are pioneers of all kinds of stuff. Post-punk. New wave. Electronic music. The whole music video form. And more.
The Nice Guys, Pressure, and Sometimes a Great Notion are available for digital rental.
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All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker
This is the most recent novel by Chris Whitaker, who wrote Tall Oaks and We Begin at the End. All the Colors of the Dark is an incredible mystery thriller coming-of-age story set in 1970s Missouri. It’s about a kid who witnesses a kidnapping, and when he tries to stop it, he ends up getting kidnapped. And then it’s about his friend trying to find him. It spans about 40 years. This book tore my heart apart and then put it back together a million times. It’s like my heart was in a taffy pulling machine. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last year.
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One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
We are in a moment where far too often, we look back and wonder if we did well. I think we should actually stay here and say, “Are we doing good right now?” We can check to see if there’s a pivot we can make right now. One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This is a departure from Omar El Akkad’s other work. It’s an analysis of Israel’s assault on Palestine and how the moral arc of the universe does bend toward justice. One day, everyone is going to say that this was always an atrocity.
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Two Raoul Peck documentaries
First, Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary based on James Baldwin’s work, which is provocatively titled I Am Not Your Negro. And that’s actually a more mild version of what Baldwin really said in that moment. The documentary uses Baldwin’s own words to bring to light the centrality of his ideas to the American struggle.
And then second, Peck’s 2021 docuseries, Exterminate All the Brutes. This is about the darkest things that have happened in world civilization: colonization, genocide, imperialism, Nazism, white supremacy. It skips around from era to era but all in the service of making this larger argument about the many, many ways humans have brutalized each other and abused power — and the need always to be vigilant against that.
I Am Not Your Negro is available to stream on Hoopla, Kanopy, The Roku Channel, and Tubi. Four episodes of Exterminate All the Brutes are available to stream on HBO Max.
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A number of movies that the show has recently covered have even more recently become easier to see at home. As you run into these things on your streaming services and such, if you find yourself aching to hear some discussion of them, we’ve got you covered:
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Saturday at noon: The long tradition of songs of the summer includes classics like “Party Rock Anthem,” “Call Me Maybe,” “Despacito,” and “Blurred Lines.” This hour, we try to figure out what song everybody will eventually agree this summer’s song of the summer was. And if we’re wrong, well, it really just won’t matter at all.
Monday at 1 pm and 9 pm: Are we as a population getting dumber? How would we know if we were? This hour: stupidity. (More than usual, even! Like, this hour will not only BE stupid — it’ll be ABOUT stupidity!) We look at the history and philosophy of stupidity and explore how it shows up in our daily lives and politics.
Tuesday at 1 pm and 9 pm: Painter Frederic Edwin Church was born in 1926 on Temple Street in Hartford. Church went on to be a central figure in the Hudson River School of landscape painters. And in the 200 years since his birth, his paintings have travelled the world and helped define American art. This hour, a look at the life and legacy of Frederic Edwin Church.
Wednesday at 1 pm and 9 pm: What’s it like being a nun in 2026? Sister Monica Clare joins us to explain her path to the Community of St. John Baptist and why she is sharing her story on TikTok and in a new memoir. Plus, scholars Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita explore the lessons about friendship, money, work, love, fame, and more we can learn from 16th-century nuns.
Thursday at 1 pm: Stephen Sondheim was the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and lyricist who wrote Into the Woods, West Side Story, Sunday in the Park with George, Company, Assassins, and more. This hour, a look at the life and music of Sondheim. And, on the occasion of the new Hartford Stage/TheaterWorks Hartford co-production, we dig into the story and music of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Friday at 1 pm and 9 pm: It’s Friday, and it’s our pop culture roundtable, The Nose. We’re not sure yet what we’ll cover. But we’re thinking about movies like the Janus Films drama Blue Heron, Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, the crime comedy Tuner, and the Billie Eilish/James Cameron concert film, Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour. Oh, and Toy Story 5, too. Plus TV series like the new adaptation of Cape Fear, the New England-set horror comedy Widow’s Bay, the For All Mankind spinoff Star City, and the black-and-white superhero series Spider-Noir. And probably some other stuff, too.
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