August 2024 Pop Culture Diary

Industry, Gone Girl, Sabrina Carpenter, beabadoobee, Clooney & Pitt and more

We’ve reached the end of the summer and started to pick back up on culture again. Late entries for Album of the Year have released; Oscar season is right around the corner; and major television premieres are right around the corner. Oh, and the NFL, who can forget that!

Looking for some recommendations for your Labor Day Weekend? Take a look at the below!

As always, if you enjoy this Pop Culture Diary, share it with someone who you think would too. Sharing what we enjoy is the whole point of this exercise.

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TV

• Watching Industry Season 3 is what I imagine it’s like to drive a car at 300mph. It’s such a refreshing feeling to see a show that isn’t pulling punches to extend it’s lifespan and instead is packing episodes with as much action (drugs, sex, money, backstabbing, etc) as possible. Each installment is emotionally exhausting, but that’s largely because I am rapt by every story. For those who haven’t caught up, there’s a reason the reputation of the Pierpoint crew has only grown and grown over the last 3 seasons. Bonus - 24 total episodes make for a relatively straight-forward catch up!

• I have loved Donald Glover since I was in high school. I think Maya Erskine is an incredible performer on the rise. Why the hell did it take me 6 months to watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith!? There’s a very, very short list for best things I have watched in 2024, headlined by this show, Industry, and Challengers as of writing. Surprisingly funny, hot, action packed, and a terrific binge for a long weekend. The show flies by while feeling so detailed and lived in that you can’t help but get engrossed.

• Disclaimer: I am very close friends with two people who worked on Bad Monkey, so I know my judgment is somewhat clouded; but at the same time Bill Lawrence just has my number and makes better television than most anyone else. What a delightful Summer treat this show is. Breezy and a great hang.

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FILM

• Twisters was fun! Wish I would have had the opportunity to see this in 4DX and had my spine permanently altered, but alas. As a card carrying “Glen Powell = Star” member since Everybody Wants Some this was another great piece of validation. Though my wife thinks Daisy Edgar-Jones missed on her accent work - which might be fairly true - I continue to root for her and hope this makes her a bigger star. 

• Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema is a treasured Los Angeles haunt - who could want more out of a Saturday night than eating hot dogs and Kit Kats while taking in a Wes Anderson Double Feature? This was somehow my first time seeing both films - kicking myself for not getting to Fox faster; why isn’t Luke Wilson a bigger actor?? - and there’s no better way to take them in than on film in a theater.

• I also got to see Gone Girl at an American Cinematheque screening for it’s 10th anniversary this month. I completely forgot that this film got one Oscar nomination - Rosamund Pike for Actress, which was deserved, but so were like 7 more nods - and now am retroactively mad again at this. This didn’t pick up a Best Picture nomination over American Sniper, The Imitation Game, or The Theory of Everything!? Highly recommend Blank Check’s 3 hour retrospective on the film.

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MUSIC

• I quite enjoyed “This Is How Tomorrow Moves” by beabadoobee which released in early August. She has a light, ethereal singing voice that plays better on the most stripped down songs on the album. She’s not a belter in the Olivia Rodrigo/Chappell Roan model, nor does she need to be, as there’s a singer-songwriter gentleness that plays quite well for her here.

• After buying tickets last October to see Foo Fighters take on their first tour of the Josh Freese era, my wife and I finally caught them at BMO Stadium in LA, which was a much better concert venue than expected for yours truly in a wheelchair sense. The concert is a typical marathon through their now 30 year old catalog of songs, but we caught some standout deeper cuts including “Arlandra” from 2011’s Wasting Light (a personal fave), “Aurora” which might be the band’s best non-”Everlong” track, and 2005’s “Skin and Bones” which I had written off long ago figuring it wouldn’t ever make a setlist. Still reeling from the fact Dave Grohl namechecked the dispensary across from my apartment on stage, reminding me that we’re technically neighbors.

• I have been playing “All You Children” by Jamie XX and The Avalanches all month long. I cannot wait for the full project to drop in September, as Jamie XX has released three singles that have become gigantic ear worms, though none more than this so far. I would love nothing more than a dance-heavy fall.

• Was I the only one totally taken aback by how Short n’ Sweet  by Sabrina Carpenter sounded outside of the singles? This is probably a me thing, as “Please Please Please” shares a stronger thematic tone with the rest than “Espresso” but I was still not expecting as gentle, funny, and folksy an album as we got. Sabrina sticking the landing on an absolute breakout year.

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READING

• In the wake of Vince McMahon’s stepping away from WWE permanently in wake of the horrors inflicted on Janel Grant, I have been loving the reinvention of the company in the post-McMahon era to the kinder and better. The Ringer’s Michael Cole profile details how the micromanaging noose has been removed and let Cole become one of the genuinely best sports announcers working today and made me happy for the guy to finally feel comfortable in his job 20+ years in.

• This month’s GQ cover story with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, written by Zach Baron, is almost scientifically aimed at yours truly. Ocean’s Eleven might be my favorite movie; I adore all three of Clooney, Pitt, and Baron; hell, I even have the watch Clooney is wearing in the above as my most desired purchase. I’m fascinated by their friendship with commonalities as Super A-List stars, and over the moon for Wolfs in September.

• Pete Wells’ farewell piece in the New York Times was unexpectedly touching. I’m not overly familiar with Wells - save for his takedown of Guy Fieri - but thought his arguments for preserving the humanistic elements of restaurant culture were very poignant. There’s a time and place for hyperspeed service - I don’t need overwhelming hospitality attention if I am buying a 4am tea at the airport - but divorcing connection from dining out is the specific wrong lesson to take from the COVID era.

• Revisited Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mix Tape this month and found myself getting sad all over again from the jump. It’s a short, impactful book that details meeting and falling in love with his first wife, and how he recovered from her sudden death in 1997. As a hypochondriac, this was far more terrifying than anything in mainstream horror. The Babadook has nothing on pulmonary embolisms.

• The moment I picked up Max Read’s Washington Post piece on Explainerism I figured that Lost would get some flack. It did, obviously, but I appreciated the argument here that is the same I’ve made for years - if you’re watching shows/movies with the expectation that every single question you have must be answered, you’re watching it wrong. Just because I am the super-nerd who knows the significance of specific details - like all the behind-the-scenes references in Deadpool vs. Wolverine - doesn’t mean the movie should be made for me. Channing Tatum as Gambit confused the hell out of her and probably hurt my case to get her back to the MCU in the future.

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GRAB BAG

• A part of my brain exploded watching PointCrow play a Pokemon game that mashes up Gens 1-3 with a map that randomizes - IE: every door you walk in can go anywhere on three maps, and he must figure out the new path to beat the games. I wouldn’t put myself through this, but watching someone else tackle it is hilariously fun.