What to listen to, watch, play, and read this weekend
The podcast to listen to
F This Movie! It
“On the latest F This Movie!, host Patrick Bromley is joined by filmmaker Joe Maddrey to discuss the latest big-screen adaption of Stephen King’s It. The It 1990 miniseries is touched on as the two discuss the necessity of setting the film in 1989 rather than the late ’50s, an appeal to a generation that grew up with the novel as well as potential audiences’ nostalgia for the era as stoked by Stranger Things. (Full disclosure: Spoilers abound for the film, the book, and the imminent follow-up film in this deep exploration by two longtime King enthusiasts.)”
Read about the rest of the week’s best podcasts here.
The TV show to watch
Tales From The Tour Bus
“The legends that Mike Judge features in this animated Cinemax series—the first few episodes alone feature familiar names like Jerry Lee Lewis, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Johnny ‘Take This Job And Shove It’ Paycheck—are already larger than life. Interviews with longtime country music staples like the Adams brothers… offer an invaluable and humanizing behind-the-music glimpse of backstage shenanigans and barroom fights. The animation then helps bring the stories to life in a way straight interviews couldn’t.”
Read the rest of our review here.
The album to listen to
The Horrors, V
“V, The Horrors’ fifth album, feels like the culmination of that steady, unlikely rise: It’s a swaggering, occasionally self-reflective record that sounds, for lack of a better term, really big. The group recently toured with Depeche Mode, and it seems to have rubbed off—and not just in songs that bear traces of that band’s vibe, from the strobe-lit, black-leather strut of ‘Machine’ and ‘World Below’ to the somberly soulful synth-romance of ‘Ghost’ and ‘It’s A Good Life.’ It’s also there in its own ability to make even smaller, shadowy moments feel arena-ready. But mostly, it’s there in how The Horrors have now amassed a similarly singular body of work that, for all its once-obvious influences, can’t be compared to anything but itself.”
Read the rest of our review here.
The video game to play
Marvel Vs. Capcom: Infinite
“The Marvel brand has become so much bigger since the release of Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, which predates every Marvel movie but Iron Man and Iron Man 2. Its increased mainstream appeal clearly pushed the developers at Capcom to give Marvel Vs. Capcom: Infinite a simpler path to the visceral thrill of pulling off double-digit combos and stylishly smacking superheroes around. The game is wildly successful at getting straight to the pleasure of pushing buttons, and for those of us who don’t have the skills to harness MVC’s fidgety complexity, which Infinite also has in spades, this reach for accessibility is a godsend.”
Read the rest of our review here.
The movie to see
Thirst Street
“Visually, a lot of Thirst Street is designed to look like a lost artifact from the Emmanuelle era, with soft lighting, luminous colors, and an emphasis on old-world elegance. Silver then warps that style, contrasting the heroine’s perception that she’s immersed in a sexy, classy Parisian adventure with the actual seediness of her surroundings, amplified by the mundanity of modern life. Every time someone pulls out a cellphone, or whenever Silver lingers over the painful case of pinkeye that Jérôme passed on to Gina, the retro-smut spell is broken—and wickedly so.”
Read the rest of our review here.
The book to read
Grady Hendrix, Paperbacks From Hell
“Paperbacks From Hell, the new foray into nonfiction from horror novelist Grady Hendrix, opens with an image that will be familiar to voracious readers, or pop culture obsessives of any sort: The thrill of discovering a piece of media that you know is about to send you down a fanatical rabbit hole. In Hendrix’s case, that piece of media was a paperback novel called The Little People about S&M-obsessed Nazi dwarves (really). That discovery eventually led to this book, which weaves together social history and outrageous plot descriptions to form a portrait of the horror paperback boom of the 1970s and ’80s.”
Read the rest of our review here.