This week, the public domain grew larger. Creators prepared for a possible TikTok ban. And a very, very long divorce was settled.
Here's what NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to — and what you should check out this weekend.
Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary
The film "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary" is now streaming on Max. It's informative and fun. It gets into the coining of the genre, which infamously came from a comedy web series from the mid-aughts describing a certain type of music and an era of music in the '70s and '80s. Then it goes back and interviews a lot of the guys who became synonymous with this genre like Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross. Steely Dan member Donald Fagen is not a talking head in the film, but he does have a hilarious audio cameo. It also features interviews with people like Questlove and Thundercat. The film really shows how this is a very specific genre — it's mostly white guys, but it comes from Black art and a lot of current-day Black artists really love and have embraced it. — Aisha Harris
Love To You, Mate
The album Love To You, Mate by Colouring, also known as Jack Kenworthy, is inspired by his brother-in-law's battle with cancer and how his family rallied around that. Kenworthy is from England, and that title, "Love To You, Mate," sums up so much of what I really love about this record. It's full of deep love, warmth and gratitude. The sound and the style conjures up everything from bands like The Blue Nile to artists like James Blake, Rhye or Cigarettes After Sex. There's a smoothness to this music. It's deeply catchy, but it's also just so sweet. One of the singles I enjoyed is called "Lune." There are so many interlocking hooks within that song and there's this beautiful piano line, but then there are lines over that. I just love it. — Stephen Thompson
Pentiment
My favorite game of 2024 is called Pentiment. It's a game about illuminated manuscripts. You are an illustrator at a monastery in the 16th century and someone gets murdered. The story is great, but what I love about this game is the look and feel of it because it's basically point and click — you are this two dimensional dude in this two dimensional world, because the look of the game is very similar to illuminated manuscripts. It's giving King's Quest vibes, if that means anything to anybody. The story is giving The Name of the Rose. If you could have told teenage me that two of my favorite things would come together in a game, I wouldn't believe you.
You just walk around investigating the abbey and you talk to these incredibly gossipy monks, and you learn a lot about ancient manuscripts. There are many people who don't don't like it because you do nothing but reading. It made a lot of best game lists in 2022 and won a Peabody award, but on the off chance that somebody out there has not yet played this fantastic game, go and do it. Pentiment is available on a bunch of different platforms. — Glen Weldon
Carry-On
The latest Netflix action movie I've enjoyed is called Carry-On. It is an airport-based, Die Hard-ish action movie starring Taron Egerton as a guy who, while running a TSA line, gets a mysterious contact from a bad guy who wants him to let through a carry-on bag that has dangerous cargo in it. He has to figure out what to do with the whole "if you don't do what we say, we're going to kill someone that you love, blah, blah, blah" situation. All that good stuff that you would normally find in a typical action movie. Is this an absolutely necessary movie? No.
Listen, when you see a movie that wants to be Die Hard, you are reminded of the many wonderful things that make Die Hard very hard to imitate. This movie is not as witty as Die Hard by a mile. I do not think I am breaking ground to say Jason Bateman is not Alan Rickman. Taron Egerton is not Bruce Willis. However, this is a fun action movie. Danielle Deadwyler shows up playing the good cop, trying to set everything right. It is a lot of fun. —Linda Holmes
More recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter
by Linda Holmes
I liked the novel The Perfect Home, by Daniel Kenitz, which comes out Tuesday. It's a domestic thriller about a married couple who have a basic-cable home improvement show, and — you guessed it — something goes terribly wrong. If you've always thought there was a strangely dark undercurrent to those shows, you might enjoy it too.
Several of the big movies of 2024 that have come out relatively recently are already available for premium rental (the kind where you pay 20 bucks, which is both a lot and not bad, depending on how you think about it). You can, if you choose, find Wicked, Gladiator II, A Real Pain, Anora and Heretic available to be streamed into your home. (Conclave is too, by the way, but that one is also on Peacock if you want to go that route. Others of these may pop up on other services you already have as well.)
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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