Category: Pop

Minions & monsters & sheep

Movies for family viewing

If you have kids, you will probably have contact with the newest entry in the Minionsverse, Minions & Monsters (PG, in theaters), and that is fine. I kind of view all Minions-related content as not-quite-as-clever Looney Tunes, which is I think a completely acceptable form of entertainment. No, nobody is learning or growing or imparting any life lessons, but also you don’t have to sit through any learning or growing or poorly conveyed life lessons. The Minion-speak means you don’t even really have to listen to all that much dialogue — all the better to avoid quippiness or writers’ attempts at sounding “of the youth.” It’s kinda great.

Here, the movie piles up a bunch of riffs, mostly visual, on the early years of Hollywood — you get some Roaring 20s, silent film, introduction of sound, suffragettes and Prohibition thrown at you along with some nods to 1920s, 1930s and 1940s films and also Jaws and The Day the Earth Stood Still and the existence of George Lucas. Historical inaccuracies, you ask? “Poop” the Minions would say, and I probably agree because these little touches are nice treats for the adults in the audience — probably watching this movie because it is a family outing in the air conditioning.

The Minions (all voiced by Pierre Coffin) wind up in Hollywood after their attempts at finding an evil “Big Boss” to serve fail, usually because the Minions accidentally do in the Big Boss. In 1920s-or-something Hollywood, they stumble through an elaborate action sequence in a movie being shot by director Max (voice of Christoph Waltz). You ruined everything, get out of here!, he tells them. But then the heads of his studio, the Bright Brothers (both voiced by Jeff Bridges), tell him that the Minions sequence is brilliant. You’re my best friends, come make more films with me!, Max says to the Minions after he rushes to find them. The movie focuses primarily on Minions Henry and James and their buddy Edward. Henry and James have long been amusing themselves with outlandish stories and now find in Hollywood the perfect outlet for their imaginings. When the advent of sound ends the Minions’ serious career in Citizen Kane-ish and Maltese Falcon-y films, the trio attempt to make a monster movie by conjuring a real monster, Goomi (voice of Trey Parker). Perhaps they should have paid attention when he said his full monster name, which included “the Deceiver.” (Also adding their vocals to the movie are Allison Janney, Jesse Eisenberg and Zoey Deutch.)

The monsters are fun, the Minions are fun, the callback to Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock and a building falling around Buster Keaton are fun nerdy tidbits. Minions & Monsters is a jolly entry in kid-focused entertainment that offers just enough to the adults who are also in the room.

Of course, learning doesn’t have to be a drag to a kid movie — for example, see the recent The Sheep Detectives (PG, 2026), which was released in May and is now on Amazon Prime Video. This movie, which really feels more straight down the middle all-ages fare rather than just kid-specific, contains a complex examination of grief and what it means to belong and also talking sheep solve a murder.

The sheep here — some kind of computer-generated creatures based on real sheep or something, according to some light Googling — are of the “live-action animation” variety living in an otherwise human live-action world. There is a bit of an uncanny sheep valley you have to walk through and acclimate yourself to but then you can — or at least I could — basically live with what you’re watching, because the sheep are so sweet and so cute and have such a lovely life on their English countryside farm with their shepherd George (Hugh Jackman), who only raises sheep for wool. What would another reason to raise sheep be, wonders Lily (voice of Julia Louis-Dreyfus), displaying that though she is a very clever sheep, she has been protected from some of life’s harsh realities. Well, except for the harsh reality of Murder!, due to George’s nightly reading of mystery and detective novels to the sheep. When George is found dead, Lily and her buddy Mopple (voice of Chris Dowd) and flock loner Sebastian (voice of Bryan Cranston) begin to investigate his murder, trying to nudge village police officer Tim (Nicholas Braun) in his investigation of suspects, principally the people named in George’s will. The chief suspect appears to be American Rebecca (Molly Gordon), George’s long lost daughter. But there’s also the neighboring shepherd (Tosin Cole) who is interested in George’s flock, the local butcher (Conleth Hill) and an out-of-town lawyer (a glammed up Emma Thompson, having such fun).

In addition to sheep being sheep — a Brett Goldstein-voiced pair of rams always looking for something to smash with their horns — we get a very touching and straightforward consideration of grief and how the pain of loss might be worth it to keep the memories of our loved ones. Louis-Dreyfus in particular does a beautiful job at conveying her character’s feelings with her vocal delivery, really helping to bring life to these digital creatures. The movie does a good job of bringing this serious, weighty stuff to the story without weighing it down and still giving us a very solid and fun “English village murder” murder mystery.

If your family movie nights largely involve older middle schoolers and up, Netflix’s recently released Enola Holmes 3(PG-13) is an enjoyable option, if not quite as crackling as its previous entries. Millie Bobby Brown returns as Enola, younger sister of Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill), who has been making quite a name for herself as a detective in her own right. And as the movie opens, she’s worried about that name because the wedding dress-wearing Enola is about to become Lady Tewkesbury as the wife of her longtime friend and sort of boyfriend Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge). After some debating whether she actually wants to go through with the marriage, she heads to the church only to be waylaid by Dr. Watson (Himesh Patel), who has come to tell her that Sherlock, who had also come to Malta for her destination wedding, has disappeared, possibly been kidnapped.

Of course this case quickly spreads, with another kidnapping and other nefarious events and Enola desperate to solve the mystery and also figure out how exactly to get the life she wants with Tewkesbury.

There is less Sherlock/Enola teamwork than in previous outings, perhaps one of the reasons the movie doesn’t quite have the same bouncy feel as the others. But the movie still presents its Sherlock riff with adventure and good humor.

Featured photo: Minions & Monsters.

Sparta, by Andrew Bayliss

(W.W. Norton & Co., 326 pages)

Other than Rome, is there any ancient civilization that commands more attention than Sparta?

Sparta remains front and center in the popular imagination in part because of the Spartan Race franchise, headquartered in Vermont, as well as the many books and films about the culture, to include Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire. And most everyone who is well-read knows the adjective “Spartan” and has an opinion about whether it should be capitalized.

But the popular view of Sparta is largely informed by myth, which is why historians talk about “the Spartan mirage.” British historian Andrew Bayliss proposes to correct the record in Sparta, The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower.

Although Sparta’s glory days began two centuries earlier, the first surviving history was written in the fifth century BCE. Little was written by actual citizens of Sparta, and even then, that’s “a few hundred lines of verse,” Bayliss writes. How then, did Sparta become so important that it was seen as aspirational by a diverse collection of thinkers, including Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Robespierre and even Samuel Adams, who wanted the United States to become “the Christian Sparta”?

Part of the answer appears to be selective memory because, as Bayliss explains, we have cherry-picked the good of Spartan culture and conveniently excised the abhorrent, such as the practice of throwing prisoners and babies deemed inferior off a cliff and the violent enslavement of “helots” in order to enable the lifestyle of the citizens of Sparta — who were called Spartiates, by the way, not Spartans. (Bayliss uses the terms interchangeably, however.)

Slavery was common at the time, even in Athens, where historians believe there were about 80,000 enslaved people in the fifth century BCE.

“What singled the Spartans out was the ruthlessness with which they conquered and enslaved their fellow Greeks, in order to ensure that each of their own citizens possessed a captive, self-producing human workforce,” Bayliss writes.

The official citizenry of Sparta, determined by their land holdings, did not work at all, at least not in order to sustain themselves and their families. They worked on their bodies, readying themselves for battle and for their famed athletic games. The women, too, participated in athletic games and were required to maintain a high level of fitness, although they were not required to serve in the military. (Women were also allowed to inherit and own land in Sparta, unusual for their time; Bayliss points out that this wasn’t allowed in Britain until 1870.)

Theirs was a communal lifestyle, with everyone required to gather together for meals in the evening, in which the main feature was “unbaked barley burgers” and something called “black broth,” which scholars believe was a liquid derived by boiling pork in salt and blood. “The broth was so unpleasant that a visitor … remarked that he no longer considered the Spartans to be brave after trying their food, because ‘anyone in their right mind would prefer to die ten thousand times than share such a poor living.’”

For the Spartiates, death on the battlefield was considered a privilege, an idea that was inculcated from childhood, and one that enabled the battles that have become legendary, including the “Battle of the Champions” in which 300 elite warriors of Sparta fought an equal number of warriors from the region of Argos. All but three died — two from Argos and one Spartiate; the Spartan warrior later committed suicide because he was ashamed for having survived.

Interestingly, Spartan men who died in battle were the only citizens permitted gravestones, and the ones that have been found are reminiscent of the uniform graves at Arlington National Cemetery: small, identical markers engraved with the name of the warrior and the words en polemoi, “in war.”

In their ideals and practices, Spartan culture lingers in modernity; “Come and take them,” the popular retort of gun enthusiasts, is said to have originated with Leonidas, the Spartan king who died with his men at Battle of Thermopylae, depicted in the 2006 film 300.

Despite their fierceness, the Spartiates were a superstitious people who thought that the devastating earthquake in the fourth century BCE was punishment sent by the god Poseidon. “A tremor at the wrong time would halt a Spartan army in its tracks, in the belief that the god was expressing his displeasure at the mission.”

And yet their government was oddly predictive of modern democracies. Sparta had two kings, from separate families, and a ruling council of elders composed of 28 citizens over the age of 60. The system, Bayliss writes, provided stability and worked to cancel out “the excesses” of the leaders, much like the American system of government is supposed to do. Citizens of Sparta could vote on bills the council had put worth, although the value of this seems dubious since the Sparta constitution said, “If the people choose crookedly, the kings and elders shall set it aside.”

The Spartan Race philosophy is that people become “unbreakable” by doing hard things. Unfortunately, the Spartans proved not to be unbreakable themselves; like Rome, they had a rise and fall, and the fall of Sparta came relatively fast, in less than three months. Their power, too, proved to be “illustory,” Bayliss writes. “Their alliance system gave the impression — both to insiders and onlookers — that Sparta could dominate the Greek-speaking world for generations, and even allowed them to think that they might be capable of taking on and conquering the Persians. In fact, none of this was really possible, because there were simply too few Spartans.”

In short, they overextended themselves, and not for a noble cause.

“The only freedom the Spartans were interested in was their own — and particularly the freedom to treat anyone they thought beneath them as they pleased,” Bayliss says.

Although Sparta is superbly researched, it often feels like required reading for a history class. One must be very interested in Sparta, its enemies and the Peloponnesian War to remain engrossed throughout. Fortunately for Bayliss, a good many people are. For everyone else, there is a lasting takeaway: Choose your heroes wisely. B-

Featured Photo: Sparta, by Andrew Bayliss

Album Reviews 26/07/09

Chuck Bergeron, Bass & Face: Duets With Ten Premier Vocalists (Summit Records)

The ever-polite All About Jazz describes bassist Bergeron as “one of the most active and innovative musicians working in the field of jazz,” not that I’ve ever seen a review from them that went something like, “Boy, this lazy putz should just quit polluting the airwaves,” you know? I mean, I kid, he’s assembled, as described, an elite group of jazz singers that includes Manhattan Transfer’s Janis Siegel; Deborah Silver, who was Grammy-nominated for her 2025 collaboration with the Count Basie Orchestra, and the appropriately named Kevin Mahogany, whose rich, knurled baritone positively floats over Bergeron’s deftly bowed acoustic bass interpretation of Duke Ellington’s “Sound of Love.” Overall this record feels like a comfortable, casual pair of socks, not a novelty release aimed at bass wonks; the funnest moment is Nicole Yarling’s unapologetically urban rendition of “Audubon Zoo/Iko-Iko,” which anyone with ears will recognize as the Mardi Gras singalong from the 1988 film Rain Man. Plenty to like here. A+

Alden Hellmuth, Tether (Leiter Verlag GmbH Records)

Just to reassure regular readers, no, I’m not turning this into an all-jazz column; fact is, over the past few months I’ve been absolutely buried in new jazz releases — physical copies too, not just empty-brained emails with links to confounding whiz-bang download pages that require a master’s degree in IT just to get to the part where one actually listens to stuff — and at this point I’m feeling guilty that I haven’t been able to get to many of them (there are so few music publications covering jazz nowadays). I wasn’t going to let that happen with this imported 12” vinyl LP, which was Fedexed to me from Germany (do you have any idea how much that costs?); its subject is an avant garde saxophonist with a casual fetish for noise. Ipso facto, this one’s obviously from the more experimental space, but New Yorker Hellmuth is as interested in brain-dazzling melody as she is in Mingus bonking; she goes into a deep, center-of-midtown reverie in “Witness,” the best on board here. Fascinating album. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• July 10 would be a great day for some new albums to appear, and lo, thus it shall be, unto us, and yadda yadda. Yikes, look at all the albums that are coming out this week, I wonder if any of those albums will do something more than get on my nerves, let me look. Well, at least the 80-year-olds are still “rockin’ out,” like they say in Kansas, given that The Rolling Stones have a new one, called Foreign Tongues, which isn’t a strictly bad thing I suppose. I mean, they did turn the studio into a giant party, with people like Robert Smith, Steve Winwood, Paul McCartney and the drummer from Red Hot Chili Peppers dropping in to help out, not that the Stones need any help. For example, on “Rough and Twisted,” a loud, loutish blues-rawk tune that name-checks Muddy Waters in the band’s most Muddy Waters-ish tune ever, the Stones’ singer, whatever his name is, plays harmonica, and it doesn’t suck. I don’t know, I’ve never really cared about the Stones but never actively disliked them either, like, my high school friends who liked them were all confirmed druggies, so I just associate the band with drugs, which is what rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be about, or at least it was until it became a distinctly un-fun genre in which Berklee-dropout guitarists showed off the scant few jazz chords they’d learned in school and sang songs about Trump and being awkward around their exes or whatever everyone’s deal is now. I mean, yes, there’s literally no need for a new Rolling Stones record, but at least they’re singing about cocaine and one-night stands at that age, where most people would just be singing about adult diapers. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? I don’t know, you tell me, America.

• I always get a nice short burst of Facebook un-friendings when I mention that I always hated Queen, like when I state that their News Of The World album was a low point in arena rock that will never be matched. I only mention that because Adam Lambert, Queen’s kind-of-replacement for singer Freddie Mercury, has a new album streeting this week, cleverly titled ADAM, in capital letters, because wouldn’t you if you were him? OK, I wouldn’t either, but whatever, we shall talk about this new album, from the one-time American Idol runner-up, because if we didn’t, the 10 people who’ll be buying the stupid thing might feel abandoned, and I wouldn’t want that. O, what horrors will be on this record, OK, at least it isn’t a bunch of covers like the last one, the first single is titled “UNDER THE RHYTHM,” in capital letters, see what he did there, but it isn’t bad if you like Michael Jackson/Bruno Mars-type singing; it’s very busy and well-done, and this is without a doubt the last time you’ll see this album mentioned in any media outlet, ever.

• Release the kraken of hamburger jokes, because it’s a new album from famous burger-eating human Jack White, called Frozen Charlotte! Now, my guess is that the music on this album will be Led Zeppelin-esque, because isn’t it always, but this human Ronald McDonald is at the “One Never Knows What I’ll Try Next” stage of his career, so this may just be heavy metal versions of 1930s polkas, so let’s just do the dutiful and find out. Yup, nope, “Dollar Bill” pilfers the drunken guitar noodling of Zep’s “In My Time Of Dying,” you get the idea, right, let’s move on.

• And finally it’s fashion model/actress/singer/future ex of Robert Pattinson Suki Waterhouse, with Loveland, her third album. Single “Back In Love” regurgitates the breathy, amateurish sound of Aughts bands like Au Revoir Simone, I don’t care for it.

Featured Photo:

Robins Hood

A look at some of the tales of Sherwood Forest

The newest Robin Hood is a vibe.

In The Death of Robin Hood (rated R, in theaters now), Hugh Jackman takes the broken-down old Wolverine of Logan and goes like a hundred times more grizzled and dark with the outlaw Robin. Now an old old man with hair and beard that are completely out of control (his kingdom for a headband and some conditioner), Robin is, as he explains in the movie’s opening moments, not the heroic rob-from-the-rich economic equalizer of legend. There was no great love Maid Marian, there was no giving to the poor, and if he fought a sheriff or a bad guy here and there it was incidental because he fought, and killed, a lot of people — to include the person he soliloquies all this to, one of the many relatives of someone he once murdered who has come for vengeance.

But he does have one buddy, the equally bad Little John (Bill Skarsgård), who seeks him out to help with his own vengeance situation. Seems that years earlier, John killed a man and b asically stole his identity and his farm. Since then, Little John has been Edward, married to a good woman named Margaret and father to little Margaret (Faith Delaney). Except now the real Edward’s family has kidnapped his family and wants to take back his/their land. He asks Robin to help him get it back, which he does, with exactly the bloody results predicted.

Because he is super old, Robin is severely injured during the battle and John takes him to recover at an island priory, run by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer). In his weakened state, Robin is quiet and still enough to find himself comforted by Brigid’s care and the safe haven she has created on the island.

But like, kind of a bleak safe haven because everything about this movie is pretty bleak. (Also bleak but pretty. Props to the cinematographer, Pat Scola, according to IMDb.) And bleak is the vibe this Robin Hood is all about — bleak like the unforgiving winter wilderness, bleak like the idea that people will always prefer a legend to the truth, bleak like a church farm run by a prioress with a superbleak past, bleak like a very grizzled old man vacillating between feeling the awful weight of his crimes and having no problem committing more of them. That that guy is Robin Hood is fine, whatever, but I don’t know that it necessarily adds anything to the story it’s telling. And it’s telling that story kinda slowly — the runtime is listed as two hours and three minutes but it feels longer than that.

The performances here are great — Hugh Jackman as a man who can’t really deal with the things he’s done in his life, Jodie Comer as someone determined to create a peaceful life from a horror-filled past. And the movie looks amazing. Just don’t go in expecting a lot of merry swashbuckling.

The lack of classic Robin Hood-ing in this latest Robin Hood movie had me seeking out other Robin Hood content.

MGM+’s Robin Hood series premiered its first season of 10 episodes in November 2025 and it’s been renewed for a second season, according to Wikipedia. I’ve seen the first four episodes and I do like that this one orients itself not around the Crusades but around the tensions between the Norman invaders who have taken positions and land from the Saxon colonized. I don’t know how historically accurate all this is, timewise, but whatever, I appreciate the new take.

We meet Rob Locksley (Jack Patten as an adult) when he is a boy and his dad, Hugh (Tom Mison), is still angry at having his family’s lands and mansion taken away by Normans. Hugh is strongarmed by the Sheriff of Nottingham (Sean Bean) into taking the job as the, like, hall monitor for the forests, keeping poachers from taking the “King’s deer.” As the years go by, Hugh puts effort into being kinda bad at his job so he doesn’t have to go around arresting his Saxon neighbors. But, by the time Robin is all grown up, Hugh’s permissive approach to poachers and the grudge he still holds toward the Norman Lord Huntington (Steven Waddington) who took Hugh’s house leads the Sheriff to go along with plans to arrest Hugh for treason. Robin’s grief quickly leads to some outlaw behavior that has him hiding in the woods with Little John (Marcus Fraser), Friar Tuck (Angus Castle-Doughty) and other only mildly merry men.

Meanwhile, in London, Huntington’s daughter Marian (Lauren McQueen) is in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine (Connie Nielsen) and is pining for Rob, who she spent some time with before troubles flared up. The core cast also includes Priscilla (Lydia Peckham), the daughter of Nottingham, who is the frequent star of the episodes’ comically unsexy sex scenes. They feel very “check out our sex scene, we’re prestige!” without feeling particularly necessary or fun.

This whole show feels expensive-cheap. Like, this isn’t made on a dime — the actors’ costumes fit and the sets are good enough. But there is an inch-thick feel to the world and to the characters. It reminds me a bit of the 1990s and early aughts syndicated shows of the Xena Warrior Princess ilk, but grayer lighting and none of those shows’ lack of self-seriousness.

The June 15 episode of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast reminded me of the existence of the 2010 Ridley Scott-directed Robin Hood(on HBO Max, and available for rent or purchase). Rereading my review from the time, I liked it fine then and — like hosts Joe Reid and Chris Feil on the podcast — I might like it even more now. Russell Crowe plays Robin Longstride, the character who eventually becomes Robin Hood, and Cate Blanchett is Marian. They have nice chemistry and have some genuinely funny scenes together. There are some very Ridley Scott battle scenes, some nice business with Robin and all the guys who become his Merry Men and excellent villains in Mark Strong and Oscar Isaac, who at moments almost seemed to be mixing in a little Sir Hiss from the 1973 animated Robin Hood (Disney+, as well as rent or purchase). Fun is being had while a story is being told and I can totally forgive whatever bits of Gladiator it seems to be mixing in.

Over on Prime Video, you can find 2018’s Robin Hood starring Taron Egerton in the title role, Jamie Fox as a sort of Little John-esque character and Eve Hewson (who showed up in the recent Disclosure Day) as Marian. While 2010’s movie, like 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, goes for some sense of historical realism, 2018’s movie is set in a kind of alternate medieval era where armor looks more like bulletproof vest and there are touches of steampunk and, I don’t know, Megalopolis? This movie more than others really goes for the “Robin Hood equals Batman” comparison with some very Bruce Wayne and Batman universe story beats. Ben Mendelsohn plays the villain Sheriff of Nottingham/personification of the U.S. War on Terror — this also feels like an Iraq war movie, weirdly. It is sometimes surprisingly dark and sometimes a “good entertainment while you fold your laundry” level of fun.

While you’re over at Prime Video, check out 2022’s British production The Adventures of Maid Marian, which has real scrappy student film energy, with some Party City-looking costumes and “the glue is not quite dry on that” sets and a few “we cast this guy because he owned one of the cameras” casting choices. That said, I kind of had fun watching it? Marian (Sophie Craig) has spent the last three years hiding out at a nunnery, pretending to be a novitiate, while waiting for Robin (Dominic Anderson) to return from the crusades. When he does come back, they quickly learn that the former Sheriff of Nottingham (Bob Cryer) has returned, with a plan to kill Robin Hood and take back his office. Craig doesn’t have much to work with but she does a watchable job with what she’s got. This is a light B movie for when you are in a light B movie mood.

Speaking of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (rent or purchase), that movie kind of rides the line between B movie touches and big blockbuster production. Kevin Costner’s performance is exactly as remembered — he remains a weird choice for the style of playfulness and charm the role seems to need. The appearance of Christian Slater certainly takes you back to the early 1990s but Alan Rickman’s performance remains a mustache-twirling bit of goofy fun.

Featured photo: The Death of Robin Hood.

Album Reviews 26/07/02

Ow! Live at The Penthouse, Johnny Griffin and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis (Reel To Real Records)

It’s summer in New England, when we hardscrabble Yankees regroup and take a look at things we may have missed over the past year. My problem is that so many albums get dumped into my virtual and non-virtual mailboxes that I tend to run years behind, which means a lot of releases never get the attention they deserve, case in point this one, which originally streeted on Record Store Day in 2019 as an exclusive, and then in standard form a couple of weeks later. Put simply, it’s a master class in hard bop jazz, spotlighting two amazingly gifted tenor saxophone players; it really show-stopped my music-listening life the first time I heard it and it’s become a staple in my car over the past couple of months. Recorded live over two nights at the Penthouse jazz club in Seattle in 1962, it features both guys (who were dubbed the “Tough Tenors” for their fast-motion interplay) in peak form, blazing (in an uncharacteristically gentlemanly way, as opposed to the one-upmanship observable in their other Prestige Records outings) through such improv-begging tunes as Count Basie’s “Tickle Toe,” at mind-boggling speeds. Advanced post-bop is everywhere here; if you buy one vintage jazz record this year, this should be it. A+

Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams, A Very Unusual Head (Storm Kings Records)

Like I always say sometimes, if you can’t make the Who’s Who, try for the What The Hell Was That, where these guys are situated comfortably with a bullet. At first glance I was expecting steampunk: stovepipe hats, facial hair courtesy of 1971, suits louder than Godzilla after stubbing his toe on a school bus, etc., but this 30-plus-year veteran crew of upstate New Yorkers is usually found at folkie festivals, which makes sense, given their sound, but only a little. More accurately, their trip is usually described as “hillbilly Pink Floyd,” and when I found that out I was filled with dread (you all know what a jerk I am about Floyd, and obviously everything about these guys screams joke band). But whattaya know, opening tune “Beez (I Know Where The Beez Have Gone)” is very listenable and really very epic; if there was anything you liked about Dark Side Of The Moon, it’s distilled here. No, I’m being serious, the sound is very big, even when it gets a little weird thanks to the presence of hayloft/jackass instruments like ukuleles, melodicas, flutes and theremins. This is simply a great band of songwriters who happen to dress like Randy “Macho Man” Savage. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• OK, the summer’s already moving along too fast; the next new-CD Friday is this one, July 3, the day before this country’s 250th birthday, which means that everyone you know will be spending their time gathering together dangerous quantities of liquor and fireworks, not thinking about buying albums, but new albums will come nonetheless, and you can listen to them, while you shoot off fireworks, safely drunk, unless you hate George Washington! According to Metacritic, which has been proving itself increasingly worthless of late with regard to telling me about new albums, there are only two, but Google’s AI (the one everybody’s already using for free, which means it’s totally destined to win the AI wars, which will bankrupt companies like Microsoft and Oracle and bring on the Apocalypse, but not to worry, because something-something) found several more! The most “important” album comes from 58-year-old British hard-rock band Deep Purple, and it is titled SPLAT! Now, I don’t know how these fellas are even still alive, but I’m certain I’ll be impressed by their ability to keep up with the times and street a record that sounds fresh and innovative, let’s go find out! Yes, yes, the new single “Guilt Trippin’” is basically the same thing as their 54-year-old song “Space Truckin,’” except that 80-year-old singer Ian Gillan is trying to sound funny, like Butthead from Beavis and Butthead, so if you enjoy hearing five 80-year-old men pretending to be a joke band, I highly recommend that you consider purchasing this album!

• Two weeks ago, Happy Mag reported that Madonna wanted an “extortionist’s sum” to fund her biopic Who’s That Girl, and not even Netflix would pay for it. Says here that the script, which she wrote herself, would demand a blockbuster budget, so it’s on hold until further notice, meaning it will probably never happen, which is a bit unfair I suppose; as Happy observed, “[A Bob Dylan movie] gets [a gigantic budget]. Bruce gets one. Michael gets one. But Madonna? Apparently the industry forgot who invented half of pop culture.” Well, as far as I’m concerned — and not to minimize the fact that women are treated horribly by the music industry — I’d remind the Happy writer that we already had a Madonna documentary in 1991, titled Truth Or Dare, whose most non-boring moment was when she pretended to barf when Kevin Costner appeared backstage, but either way, Madge has a new album out this week, called Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, which harkens back to her space-disco days, with hypnotic progressive-house elements, random sexy whispering, etc. It’s fine.

• Next is Anton Pearson, guitarist for U.K. band Squid, which is, according to the band’s subreddit, “focused on post-punk, jazz-rock, ambient and krautrock,” meaning they’re, you know, totally unfocused, not that that’s always a bad thing. Pearson’s debut solo LP, Driving Through Belgium, is ambient stuff; I listened to two tracks, one that was cheesy Daedalus-type stuff, and another that sounded like an electric shaver getting pressed against a stainless steel pot; I’d cite the song titles but I already forgot them, mercifully.

• And finally we have Atlanta rapper/producer Ken Carson with his newest album, Xperiment, a 22-track affair that lays melodically competent AutoTuned rhymes over rage-y, distorted, experimental beats. I would give you the deets on one tune in particular, but given that all he’s made available for preview is a collection of snippets, I assume he couldn’t care less about my desire for exhibiting any journalistic professionalism whatsoever, bravo.

Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me

Jessie’s version

Toy Story 5 returns to fun

Summer is kids-in-the-movie-theater-air-conditioning time and Toy Story 5 offers a fun, very solidly built family moviegoing option.

I was a little apprehensive about Toy Story 5 (in theaters) largely because Toy Story 4 (streaming on Disney+ if you’re a completist)felt to me like someone at Pixar having an empty-nester, career-change crisis and trying to work it out with the toys. Toy Story 5 feels much more like an episode of Toy Story with our familiar characters having an adventure — with of course, the occasional Pixar gut punch.

Here, Jessie (voice of Joan Cusack) takes the lead of the story. She is the sheriff of the now elementary-school-aged Bonnie’s (voice of Scarlett Spears) toy room and one of Bonnie’s favorite toys to feature in her wild adventures. But these adventures just feature Bonnie and her toys — she is shy around other kids, most of whom seem to spend their“play” time on devices rather than with toys. Seeking to help their daughter break out of her shell, Bonnie’s parents buy her a Lilypad (voice of Greta Lee), a kids’-iPad-like toy with a vaguely M3gan-esque aggressively positive voice. The girls in Bonnie’s dance class all hang out on their Lilypads, playing games together in the morning. Lily is determined to help Bonnie make friends with them, learn the emoji-based inside jokes and give up on lame old toys. But Jessie knows that Bonnie needs a friend with similar interests to really connect and isn’t willing to let Lily take over.

Eventually, Jessie and her horse Bullseye wind up out in the world, running into new toys including earlier generations of tech toys that have been just as discarded as their analog brethren, including Smarty Pants (voice of Conan O’Brien), a toilet training toy. Meanwhile, Woody (voice of Tom Hanks), thinking Jessie needs his help, shows up at Bonnie’s room about the time Buzz (voice of Tim Allen) realizes that Jessie is missing.

Even though this is basically Jessie’s story, Buzz gets some nice bits of running story: with the recent marriage of Forky (voice of Tony Hale) to his plastic knife wife Karen Beverly (voice of Melissa Villaseñor), Buzz wants to propose to Jessie. And, in the movie’s opening scenes, we see a shipping container of next-generation Buzz Lightyears wash up on an island where they activate and try to figure out their mission. These scenes, which are intercut with the central action of the movie, bring a nice cartoon-antics quality to this movie. For all that the movie deals with some big issues — toys battling screens for the attention (and affection and imagination) of kids, kid-on-kid bullying facilitated by those screens, the idea that the screens are pushing kids to act grownup too fast — most of the movie is able to do this while still being lively and kid-fun, not just adult clever. The result is a movie with beloved characters that is truly enjoyable for everyone in the family.

Looking for more kid-friendly fare this summer? Here are some of the PG-rated movies slated for summer release:

• Minions & Monsters The next entry in the Minions universe opens July 1.

• MoanaDisney is going to keep making these unnecessary live-action adaptations, I guess. The Rock returns as live-action Maui on July 10.

• Paw Patrol: The Dino MovieNo job too big, no pup too small — Aug. 14.

• The Magic Faraway Tree A live-action adventure based on the books by Enid Blyton opens on Aug. 21.

• Coyote vs. Acme Trailers suggest a Who Framed Roger Rabbit?-like blend of live action and the Looney Tunes characters. See it Aug. 28.

Featured photo: Toy Story 5.

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