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Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'Blue Jasmine' And A Summer Movie Postmortem

NPR

As summer was giving way to fall, preseason football was giving way to actual football, and Linda Holmes' week was giving way to the Toronto International Film Festival, the Pop Culture Happy Hour gang managed to gather just long enough to look back on a divisive summer full of big, loud, robot-on-robot movies. Our own postmortem can't help but skim past other postmortems — was Man of Steel a hit or a flop? — as we look at box office both domestic and international, the weight of budgetary and audience expectations, the glut (or near-absence) of certain kinds of movies, audience awareness of industry minutiae, and sundry other aspects of summer cinema. And, because we'd neglected to do so already, we weigh in on Batfleck.

Then it's on to Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's much-loved character study about a woman who falls from great wealth into a workaday world she can't navigate. We try to approach it from every angle — in terms of not only Cate Blanchett's nervily committed performance, but also comparisons to A Streetcar Named Desire, Allen's portrayals of the working class, Allen's portrayals of women, and Allen's portrayals of men.

Finally, as always, we close with what's making us happy. I skim across an assortment of beginnings, endings, changes and hopes, while Trey Graham teases a promising Broadway musical. Trey also shares with Glen Weldon an affinity for this article about this cult favorite. And Linda shares my love of waste disposal, Glen's love of a popular podcast, and news about the heightened availability of two of her favorite obsessions.

Find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: Linda, me, Glen, Trey, producer Nick Fountain, and our esteemed producer emeritus and music director, Mike Katzif.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)