Category: Pop

Take Me To Your Leader, by Neil deGrasse Tyson

(Simon Six, 226 pages)

Aliens are having a moment.

Of course, it could be argued that they’ve been having a moment since 1961, when Betty and Barney Hill, a Portsmouth couple on their way home after visiting Canada, said they encountered a mysterious disc-shaped aircraft near Franconia. Their story is among the most famous of so-called alien abductions.

The Hills, however, appear only briefly in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Take Me To Your Leader, a semi-serious handbook of alien adventures. Capitalizing on the current interest in all things extraterrestrial, driven in part by the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day and the slow drip of formerly classified UAP [formerly known as UFO] videos coming from the government, the book proposes to tell us how to interact with our new alien friends (or overlords) when they come.

Tyson, according to his publisher, is America’s favorite astrophysicist, so you might think he would bring a serious, scholarly bent to the subject. You would be wrong. The book, at times, is more like a BuzzFeed reporter ran a couple of questions about aliens through Claude, and out came this manuscript.

Tyson begins by talking about aliens in popular culture. There have been a lot of aliens in movies and TV shows, probably more than you recall. And as he recounts them, Tyson wonders why they are always so human-looking and predictable, with a few exceptions, like Project Hail Mary.

“Once, just once, I want to see a gray Alien portrayed with a full head of coiffed hair,” he writes.

Humans pride ourselves on our intelligence and imagination, but we probably shouldn’t. Voltaire conceived of aliens 23 miles tall, and astronomer Frank Drake of aliens the size of a pinhead, and Tyson offers 12 archetypes of aliens, but few of us go beyond little green men.

That may be because, as Tyson points out, there is just 2 percent of DNA that separates us from the chimpanzee. He invites us to consider the differences in capabilities between humans and chimps, and then to consider aliens that are 2 percent more advanced than us — or 20 percent. “For all we know, they created Earth as a literal aquarium-terrarium for their own amusement,” as we do with fish, turtles and ants. “Do they know we built their domicile? Do they know we are looking in on them through transparent walls? Do they care?”

And of course, building a world like ours, or the one in The Matrix, is “nothing that a smart Alien couldn’t accomplish in an afternoon.”

Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, brings a wrecking ball to every commonly held notion about extraterrestrials. In a chapter on what alien technology would look like, he concludes that “smooth, rotating flying saucers are not a thing,” because the staid, steady laws of physics are literally universal. He goes on to explore what’s known as Fermi’s Paradox (named for the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi), the conundrum presented by the probability that life exists outside our planet and the lack of actual evidence for it. That lack of evidence should relieve us, given our vast vulnerabilities. As Tyson notes, “The world’s fastest human, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, would be easily caught and eaten by a half dozen different species of mammal predators.” That said, it could also be the case that the evidence for aliens is just not apparent to mere mortals: “We are three-dimensional creatures. Nothing to stop an Alien from living in four or five or more dimensions. If they never deigned to pass through our measly three dimensions, we would never know they were there,” Tyson writes.

So where does America’s favorite astrophysicist stand on all of this? Do aliens exist or not? In his conclusion, Tyson offers his response to an invitation he received to inspect purportedly alien mummies recovered in Peru. In declining, he encouraged the team to publish their research in a peer-reviewed journal and offer samples of the specimens to scientists for analysis. “We do this for findings much less extraordinary than what you have presented. … So it will never be about what I think, it’s about the quality of the data and its verification.” (Reviewer’s note: Scientists later said the “mummies” were dolls made with human bones.)

So until there is a peer-reviewed study of alien remains, he says, “Alien visitations will remain a belief system like any other.”

It’s notable that throughout Take Me To Your Leader Tyson says things like, “Nobody knows how or why that happened.” I’m not sure if it’s reassuring or disturbing that astrophysicists still know so little about the universe, but rest assured, Tyson knows much more than most of us.

Regardless, when it comes to aliens and alien culture, this is a thin and often frothy take on the subject. You can do better with Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s The Ghost Lab, published last year. C —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Take Me To Your Leader, by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Album Reviews 26/06/25

Pussy Riot, CYKA (self-released)

It was quite a surprise for me to find that this was the Russian protest-punk group’s debut album, given that they’ve been playing well-publicized shows, pulling all sorts of anarchic stunts and getting arrested for 14 years now, but yes, that’s what it is, the first proper full-length from Moscow’s answer to the Dead Kennedys, after a fashion (most of the band members are in exile nowadays at the behest of Vladimir Putin for all the rabble they’ve roused). In a way, it qualifies as world music, of a certain bent: While many Americans are accustomed to protesting our own government’s actions in the Middle East and such (at least online) this is a, well, almost refreshing view from another world entirely, where citizens — especially mindful, news-junkie types like these girls — are in a permanent, rabid state of outrage over events in Ukraine. It’s a striking juxtaposition if you’re an American who’s spent a lot of time on Twitter/Bluesky et al. over the last few years. Lots of angry Poppy-like caterwauling goes on here, of course, but the band had a lot of help from different corners of the industry, which led to some unexpected results, such as the sexy TLC-like cooing in the “Putin-guested” title track. In the no-surprise department, Avenged Sevenfold volunteers their nu-metal weaponry to “Candy Dopamine.” A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Tesla, Homage (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

In the moment I’m writing this, I couldn’t name one song from this Sacramento, California, ’80s-hair-metal band if I had to save a million kittens, so luckily I don’t. I threw it on this week’s list because it seemed timely, given that Tesla Inc. owner Elon Musk just became America’s first trillionaire-on-very-flimsy-paper, and wisely enough the band leads off their home page with an announcement that they are indeed the band, not the automaker. Anyhow, they’ve actually been more of a bland-tasting mainstream rock band than anything else, which is the chart where they’ve historically made some dents, but for everything they do that sounds like Black Crowes there’s some room-temperature hard rock that’s in the vein of Europe and that sort of thing. They’re big into the Stones and Beatles, not that you can tell much from the cover songs they recite on this record; Supertramp’s absolutely awful “Give A Little Bit” gets a reading that replaces the original’s falsetto with the nasal bleating of an annoying nitwit like the dude from Buckcherry. Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” gets a particularly revolting turn, which was where I tapped out on this nonsense. They’ll be in Gilford at the BankNH Pavilion on July 24. C —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Moving right along with this totally forgettable year — or at least we’d like to forget it for five minutes, but the amount of alcohol required for that level of psychic anesthesia would bankrupt most countries – the next jumble of albums will come out on June 26, so we must talk about them, I’ll take an adequately barrel-aged tequila straight up please, with a nice lime wedge! Oh, but first, it’s time once again to remind musicians who are in local bands and want to get reviewed by me in this multiple award-winning newspaper section that the only sure-fire way to contact me is by messaging me at my Facebook and/or Twitter/Bluesky thingamajigs, at the addresses mentioned elsewhere on this page. The only thing I ask is that you include a graphic of your album/EP/mixtape cover and a brief “biography,” that is to say a description of your act, any interesting factoids, the official release date of your record, and, most importantly, who you are and where your band/act is based, meaning what specific town. I know I’m repeating myself, but in the old days, that used to be a no-brainer, like, bands automatically sent “press kits” with their albums, but nowadays, with the rise of things like Banksy and Burial and all sorts of other popular figures pretending not to want any recognition (any way we can stop that yet, pretty please with sugar on top?), it’s like pulling teeth for us art-scene journos to get straight answers to our basic questions, and it’s massively, massively annoying. For example, if you’re from Nashua, New Hampshire, don’t jump in my messages saying “my band is from the Boston area,” because it gives me a skin rash. Be concise, tell me why your act is awesome, and for extra points tell me whom you think your band/act sounds like. The easier you make my job, the more nice I will be to your album-or-whatever on this page, that’s how this works. I mean, not to brag, but I get about 300 emails a week from bands and publicists seeking press for new records, and given that I like to sit around eating Fig Newtons and watching Netflix documentaries as much as you do, you should keep in mind that there are always 300 other bands — some of them famous! — that want the publicity if you don’t. I am here to help you, same as how I am here to let people know that British folktronica lady Beth Orton has a new album coming out this Friday, titled The Ground Above. You may know Orton from the Aughts era, when she was something of a techno “It Girl,” collaborating with Chemical Brothers and such. The album’s title track features Orton singing rather badly over a sublime trip-hop beat in the vein of Portishead. She’ll be at the Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, Mass., on Sept. 19.

• For some reason, whenever I hear the name Chanel Beads I always think of taking a bubble bath, do you think that’s dumb, my sense of self-worth hinges on your answer. It’s the stage name of New York indie dude Shane Lavers, whose new album Your Day Will Come includes the cool, sparse, percussive dance(ish) track “Police Scanner.” He’ll perform at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept. 13.

• I’ll just assume you know Aughts-indie favorites The Strokes; they release their newest LP Reality Awaits this Friday. What I heard of it was all fine, of course, starting with album opener “Psycho Sh-t,” made of their usual edgy, angular Romantics-meets-Interpol ingredients.

• Lastly we have The Pretty Reckless with an album called Dear God, whose title track sounds like Ani DiFranco trying to be Nine Inch Nails-ish, please make it stop. —Eric W. Saeger

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

Space!

The summer movie frontier?

Who doesn’t love summer movie space aliens?

(Spoilers ahead — I don’t really know how to proceed without a little bit of secret-spilling.)

It is perhaps a mild spoiler to say that Disclosure Day (PG-13, in theaters now), directed by Steven Spielberg, is about extraterrestrial beings. It is maybe a bigger spoiler to say the movie is specifically about what happens as the existence of those aliens goes from being a secret held by the government for some 80 years to being something that a wider group of people, perhaps even the whole world, knows.

As we see in trailers, TV weatherperson Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is suddenly capable of speaking an unEarthly clicky language, which she breaks into during one of her live broadcasts. Margaret’s moment of on-air strangeness leads her to fear she’s had a medical issue. But we see the reaction that footage of the episode gets from a secretive quasi-government agency run by Noah (Colin Firth), who is already scrambling the troops after one of his tech guys, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), made off with some highly classified video footage. And we see the reaction of a group led by Hugo (Colman Domingo), who seems to be directing Daniel in his heist. As Noah’s people chase Margaret, who doesn’t understand why she’s suddenly a wanted woman any more than she understands why she can suddenly read everyone’s thoughts, and Daniel, the two seem drawn to each other. Fairly early, we learn about the big secret Daniel is so desperate to get out to the public when he shows his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) some of the stolen footage starting with, bestill Fox Mulder’s heart, the Roswell crash in 1947.

I think we’re supposed to be watching basically regular people being pulled into this big secret — how would they handle this information, how would they react to learning the part they are playing, do they think the world can handle knowledge of aliens? There are moments that exemplify this: Jane talks to a nun played by Elizabeth Marvel and they weigh the meaning of aliens, the reaction they’d expect the world to have.

My problem is that these conversations frequently can’t break off the page to feel like a real conversation, these people never quite feel like real people to me. Emily Blunt feels off-key here. It’s as though she was given too many notes about exactly what tone to strike and ends up feeling like two or three character ideas smooshed into one person. Josh O’Connor, meanwhile, feels like he’s just hitting the one character note, just a lump of doe-eyed Big Emotion. Colman Domingo is maybe doing something interesting — isn’t he always? — but it feels like it’s from a different movie. And Colin Firth is just serving up angry British authority, take it or leave it, no side of fries.

For every “that’s an interesting idea” the movie has many story elements that are unnecessary, don’t fully make sense or don’t feel like they were developed beyond the idea stage. A running subplot throughout this movie is that international tensions have the whole world on the brink of war. We see people hoarding gas and buying out supermarkets. This element is maybe meant to heighten tension or underline the destructive tendencies of humans or some other thing I just didn’t get. For me, though, it was one of the extra accessories that Coco Chanel wants you to take off before leaving the house.

There are elements of the chase that are fun and well-constructed, though the movie is never as energetic as its most John Williams-y of John Williams scores seems to want us to think it is. I feel like there are ideas here, things that could have gone in either a more popcorn fun direction or something that felt more like a stripped down gritty sci-fi adventure reminiscent of 1970s Spielberg. For me, though, the movie never pulled together into something that was either a thrilling ride or a compelling thought experiment.

A few days later I rewatched that 1977 grittier Spielberg sci-fi: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (available for rent or purchase and streaming on Peacock). In many ways, this is the spikier, low fi version of Disclosure Day. We get many of the same elements — strange occurrences, the “what’s happening to me,” a chase with officialdom — though there is more chase and a shorter timeline in Disclosure Day. Characters played by Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon see clearly not-from-here crafts flying in the sky and come away from the experience with thoughts of Devil’s Tower National Monument stuck in their heads. Desperate to figure out what they’ve seen and what they’re experiencing, the two unwind — first Dreyfuss’s character as he scares his family (including his wife played by Teri Garr) and then Dillon’s character when her young son, seeing brightly lit “toys,” runs after a UFO and is abducted. I highly recommend this double feature — I think I had more fun thinking about Disclosure Day after watching Close Encounters. The movies are, as your serious film academics might say, in conversation with each other and are both interesting reflections of their times.

I also used the outer space theme of Disclosure Day as an excuse to catch up with March release Project Hail Mary (PG-13, available for purchase). Based on the Andy Weir book, Project Hail Mary is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the team who wrote and directed The Lego Movie and wrote the animated Spider-Verse films, with a screenplay by Drew Goddard, who also wrote Weir’s other book-to-film, The Martian. This movie is exactly as good as all those names promise.

Ryan Gosling here is, similar to Matt Damon in The Martian, the one person working alone for a good chunk of the movie. He plays Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher who is also a molecular biologist and has been kicked out of standard scientific work for some kooky ideas about the conditions required for life to develop. Luckily, Eva Stratt (an excellent performance from Sandra Hüller) is in the kooky ideas business. The head of an international scientific project, Eva is trying to figure out astrophage, a substance that is traveling from Venus to the sun and appears to be dimming the sun’s light. Scientists all over the world are working on the project and she calls Grace in to study a sample of the astrophage gathered on a recent space mission. We watch as Grace joins the project to try to figure out what astrophage is and how they could possibly reverse the potentially world-ending effects it’s having on the sun.

All of this is viewed in flashback as Grace, in the movie’s present, wakes up to find himself alone on a space craft with no memory of much of anything — who he is, where he is, why he’s there, why a robot is trying to shave off his extremely long beard.

Similar to The Martian, Project Hail Mary is a movie of questions and whiteboards and smart people tackling small problems with duct tape and plywood in order to get the information needed to tackle bigger problems. It is optimistic in its view of science and people doing science — this isn’t callous tech-dinguses trying to figure out how to monetize some crappy thing that nobody really needs anyway. It’s people, all curious and fallible, working together, across borders and language barriers, to figure things out with the ultimate aim of saving the world. This might be my favorite brand of save-the-world adventure movie? No magical stuff or superpowers, just middle-aged nerds who can mock things up with Home Depot supplies. This movie does everything right — Gosling’s performance, space visuals, showing people thinking through things and showing Gosling working out a puzzle by himself that includes a really solid vocal performance (by James Ortiz).

Featured photo: Disclosure Day.

Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Grand Central Publishing, 389 pages

By her admission, Ember Agni was a weird kid. For fun, she liked to bury things in her backyard and then dig them up over time to analyze the stages of decomposition. Like other children, she had a “penchant for dirt,” but her play had a purpose: observing history in the process of being made.

So of course she became an archeologist, but a frustrated one. When we meet Ember in Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins, she is sleepwalking through her life: stuck teaching faceless students at a university where she’d intended to work for only a few years before returning to the field; stuck in a marriage to a man whose interests and goals seem to grow more distant from hers every day.

But as Ember begins a new semester, a letter arrives from a former student. It informs Ember that the writer, named Ish, has found an artifact, and “It’s as we hoped. Intact. Good condition. A few thousand years? It’s hard to pinpoint. Two? Three?”

And with that, Ember’s world is upended, as the missive tantalizingly dangles a different life, one in which she might finally be able to get funding for an archaeological dig that frees her from the drudgework of the university and from her increasingly tense marriage.

The dig, she believes, has the potential to explode existing narratives about the origins of humanity, which is not a small thing. And yet, also not a small thing, I struggled mightily to care.

That’s because Ember is the worst kind of protagonist: the unlikeable one. We’re told early on that she is “not well liked at the university. By anyone: students or faculty or administrators.” She is hard on her assistant, hard on her husband, hard generally; in part because she’s miserable because of decisions she has made, in part because of her difficult single mother, now dead, “embittered, vain, endlessly critical Ola, who had never hesitated to remind her daughter how costly being a parent was.”

That parenting helped turn Ember into someone who was ambivalent about being a parent herself, which is a problem because her husband, Jerome, finds his joy on the homefront. The difference between the two of them is illustrated by the care he puts into a garden in their backyard; she hasn’t so much looked at it in months. Jerome wants children; Ember wants professional success. She’d made that clear when they met, but he’d thought she would change. To Ember, it is Jerome who is changing. He had, she observes, “become increasingly rigid over the years. Unimaginative. Boring, in fact. By association, she was becoming boring also, as if his desire for the banality of procreation and home improvements and a back garden was leaking into their union, and further, into her.”

The arrival of the artifact that Ish found, however, sends Ember charging down a new path of discovery, one that will reunite her with an important woman from her past and raise questions about her culture’s beliefs about what the societies that came before them. To her this dig is everything, andwe realize early on that the title of the books, Ruins, represents not just Ember’s professional focus but also other aspects of her life.There is nothing subtle about this.

More subtle is the gradual unpacking of mysteries — minor ones, such as the nature of Ember’s relationship with Ish, and major ones, such as the genesis of the “Pre-Crisis” civilization and a “Thermal Epoch” that has occurred. The novel is intentionally vague about where and when it is set; Ember lives in a “Commonwealth” that is most certainly not Massachusetts. And indeed, what we know about Ember’s society we are invited to doubt: An excerpt from her unpublished manuscript says, “The endurance of any given historical narrative is never a function of its factual accuracy but rather, of its utility to those who perpetuate it.”

As is noted in every podcast and article about Ruins, this is a novel that suffers from spoilers, making it difficult to talk about the plotting in detail. Suffice it to say that Brooks-Dalton, whose previous novels include The Light Pirate and Good Morning, Midnight (the basis for the film The Midnight Sky), has described Ember as a “polarizing” woman and the novel as “a rumination on how we uncover, interpret, and teach about ancient civilizations.” Those naturally interested in such things may find it fascinating. For those of us who aren’t, Ruins presents a challenge to remain engaged, even with a consciousness-altering plot twist. B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Album Reviews 26/06/18

Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes (Atlantic Records)

Said to be the last album from the ’90s ska-punk/reggae-rock juggernaut, this one has Sublime’s fan base more interested in debating whether or not this-or-that lyrical theme is focused on former lead singer Bradley Nowell, who died from a drug overdose in 1996 and left the band a hollowed-out husk of itself. As some have observed, this stuff does sound like it came from an AI bot programmed to make up a bunch of new Sublime songs, which is pretty low for a band that hasn’t produced any new material in 30 years. Indeed it does sound a lot more polished than the music that launched them into the happy-grunge stratosphere and portrayed them as an antidote to the doomer vibes of bands like Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots and all those guys. Nowell’s son, Jakob, handles the vocals here, which adds to the disposability of tunes like the Red Hot Chili Peppers-inspired title track and “Can’t Miss You,” which reads like Andy Grammer trying dancehall on for size. Utterly useless, for completists only. C

Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me (Epic Records)

Sixth full-length from this R&B/hip-hop-diva Californian, who’s sort of becoming the Jeff Ross of random national talent reality shows. She started out on YouTube, after which she won the 2004 season of America’s Most Talented Kid with a rendition of Christina Aguilera’s “Keep on Singin’ My Song,” and then finally broke through in 2010 apparently because she failed to make the top 24 on American Idol (I can’t explain it either, don’t ask). Since then she’s been the titular Masked Singer on that show, mentored a group of American Idol contestants in 2024, etc., always showcasing her belt-it-from-the-mountaintop singing style for the benefit of the few people who still watch that kind of stuff. For this one, though, she’s all about the ’90s, or at least the asphalt-soul ’90s made famous by quasi-R&B street-pop groups like TLC and Salt n Pepa, which is, um, marketable thinking on her part, let’s just say. Whatever, she’s content in her skin here, warbling conversational lyrics in a style that went extinct when the new millennium arrived, but its comfort-food feel will appeal to cul-de-sac-dwelling suburbanites, etc. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• June 19 is the next “Here, Have Some Random Albums” Friday, and so random albums will be coming to your favorite streaming service, the one you pay for by allowing it to schlurp money out of your bank account every month only because for some reason you’re too paranoid to rip songs from those “YouTube To MP4” apps because some of them are obviously heavily infected by hackers, and yet you trust that Pandora or SoundCloud or whatever will never get hacked by the approximately 12,693,881 MIT undergrads who are at this very moment determined to hack your chosen “trusted music platform” so they can steal your credit card to buy disposable laptops for the darkweb, have you changed any of your passwords in the last nine years, I sure hope you have, you really should. But in positive news (a Constant Reader said my column of two weeks ago was full of positive energy and it made him smile, but I’d caution not to get used to this kind of nonsense), Canadian trio Rush played their first live shows in Inglewood, California, and my social media feeds would absolutely not shut up about it, so I looked at some of the video, and yes, replacement drummer Anika Nilles took one small step for womankind by adding a few of her own touches to the sadly departed Neil Peart’s professorial drumming tricks. That was expected, let’s just say, but what really tugged at people’s heartstrings was her wonderment; she looked like a kid who’d hit the winning homer in Game 7 of the Little League World Series. Now, as a lifelong cynic, of course, what I’d like to know is which fusion and prog-rock drummers refused the offer to join the band; I’m sure there were a few who laughed them off as a glorified version of Styx or a less-capable Yes (you may recall I’d suggested Will Kennedy of The Yellowjackets), but past that sort of rather grim fascination, yes, she “nailed the fills” and whatnot. But anyway, to business, let’s kick off this week with the final album from San Francisco-born folkie Tucker Zimmerman, who died in January at the age of 84. Dream Me A Dream is the new album; the title track is a mawkish bluegrass-tinted affair that saw Zimmerman’s voice reduced to an ineffectual croak, but some people do dig that stuff.

• Canadian producer/musician/idiotic-looking-hat-addict Daniel Lanois couldn’t just give his new sleepy instrumental album a title that would make it easy for me to find one of its songs on YouTube; no, instead he titled it Belladonna Nocturne because he already put out a sleepy instrumental album titled simply Belladonna in 2005, so it’s like, his thing, man, and he also knew it’d force me personally to use extra brain cells to fool the YouTube bot into finding something from this new album instead of the 2005 one. “Warp Sustain” is pretty cool, incorporating some dark, quite noisy elements into its wispy Enya-esque dramatics.

• Pond is a band from Australia that still makes albums, unlike the American band named Pond that was from Oregon and got signed to Sub Pop Records, which led to their getting signed to Sony Records, which of course led to their breaking up when Sony let them go broke so they could write off the loss on their taxes. The title track from new LP Terrestrials is OK for a (dated-sounding) college-rocker, a blend of Supertramp and, oh, I don’t know, Hives.

• And finally we have Hull, U.K.-based BBC darlings Life with their newest album Abstract/Natural. Advance single “The Dollywaggon” is worth checking out if you like ’80s art-rock and Sex Pistols, it’s the best thing I’d recommend this week.

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

Com! Rom! and more

A look at Office Romance and other streaming fare

I like a rom-com that doesn’t skimp on the com.

Office Romance (R) is a movie written by Brett Goldstein (best-known perhaps as the gruff “he’s every-[bleeping]-where” Roy Kent on Ted Lasso) and Joe Kelly, whose writer/co-creator credits on IMDb include Ted Lasso and Detroiters. Despite being a Netflix release (on June 5) this movie is of theatrical release quality with a sensibility that hits a nice middle space between expected rom-com beats and the kookier sense of humor of those involved. And, in case years of superstardom and the Affleck of it all have caused you to forget, Jennifer Lopez is actually pretty good at kooky.

Here she plays Jackie Cruz, the CEO of Cruz Air, who has successfully guided the company but is still called “Gordita” by her father, Jack Cruz (Edward James Olmos), the airline’s founder, during meetings with a board of directors that is tepid on her leadership. When expansion plans lead to a frivolous lawsuit by a competing airline, Jackie meets in-house lawyer Daniel (Goldstein), asked to handle the case when the company’s head attorney (Bradley Whitford, clearly having fun doing the most) is sidelined due to a breakfast burrito mishap. Daniel and Jackie very quickly realize their mutual attraction but, in the face of the company’s “zero tolerance for intraoffice dating” policy, they know they can’t act on it. So, of course, they get drunk on a work trip and wind up in bed. The no-dating policy is really only part of the obstacle to their romance, most of which is silly, but Goldstein and Lopez have nice romantic chemistry and even better comedy chemistry as a duo involved in romance-tinged goofiness.

For me the movie’s MVP is Betty Gilpin, who plays Jackie’s extremely pregnant assistant Sydney. The role has that “early aughts Judy Greer role” vibe but Gilpin brings her specific brand of delightful lunatic intensity. Betty Gilpin is always the MVP — whether she’s intimidating Goldstein whilst in labor, as she does here, or playing a colonial era woman whose desire to escape spinsterhood leads her to marry a man who is possibly in league with the devil on a plague-ridden island (watch Apple’s Widow’s Bay, a weird-fun horror series in which Gilpin has an excellent one-episode appearance).

Office Romance is a goes-down-easy movie that seems to have put fun first — offering solid comedy along with its reality standard romance.

Elsewhere in the streamingplex is Miss You, Love You (TV-MA, streaming on HBOMax as of May 29). Allison Janney is Diane, a woman grieving her husband who just died after a battle with Parkinson’s. She is putting together his funeral and, while she’d like her son to help her, what she gets is his assistant Jamie (Andrew Rannells). With the exception of a little Bonnie Hunt here and Oscar Nunez there, this movie is mostly Janney and Rannells talking to, talking past and dealing with each other in the days leading up to the funeral — so much so that I assumed this was the adaptation of a play. It doesn’t appear to be — it was written as a screenplay and directed by Jim Nash, probably still best recognized from his role as the dean on Community, according to Wikipedia.

Though Diane and Jamie’s relationship seems straightforward — she’s a new widow, angry that her son has sent an assistant instead of coming to care for her himself, and he’s the assistant sent, like it or not — both of their backstories are more complicated than that.

“I like seeing Allison Janney like this” was a thought I had early in the movie, by which I think I meant I like seeing Allison Janney just acting, just doing the work as a smart, articulate woman without some other bit of daffy business stacked on the role. Her performance here is precise — you understand immediately who Diane is and then get to know her in a way that deepens that understanding. Janney and Rannells play off each other well, both when the characters are getting along and when they’re fighting. It’s really enjoyable to watch even if it’s watching people move through varying stages of grief.

The Home is also sort of about grief — is a not completely untrue thing a person could say about this oddball horror movie that allegedly was in theaters last summer and is currently streaming on Hulu. The Home stars Pete Davidson, of all unlikely people, whose character, Max, comes to work at a retirement home as part of a community service sentence for doing socially conscious graffiti. Max immediately begins seeing and hearing strange things as he gets to know the residents including those played by John Glover and Mary Beth Peil (Grams from Dawson’s Creek, among her many credits). For the movie’s first half, Max sort of ambles through increasing creepiness and gore, both real and (possibly) in dreams, responding somewhat like his Chad character from the Saturday Night Live sketches (fun fact: there actually was a Chad horror movie sketch and it features John Mulaney — it’s fun!). Then Max begins a campaign of obsessive observation of the residents with a series of hidden video cameras and breaking into spaces he shouldn’t go, quickly followed by a left turn into Bonkersville.

There is a world in which all of that, especially the turn into Bonkersville, could have been a wild Malignant-like ride of horror tropes and operatic goofiness. But it doesn’t quite get there; it has some “huh, that’s a fun idea” beats but can’t pull it all together into something that transcends its weaker moments.

For a look at a story in a retirement living situation that does transcend its bumpier elements — and, frankly, the reason I’m talking about The Home at all — check out The Boroughs. This eight-episode Netflix series also has something strange happening at a retirement community — the New Mexico-set The Boroughs, which feels similar to The Villages in Florida, and its full-time care facility The Manor. (This show was the reason I thought “maybe?” when coming across The Home.) In The Boroughs, Boomers drive golf carts around a resort-like setting and engage in day drinking and promiscuity. In the nearby Manor, those with memory and cognitive difficulties wait at prop bus stops and peacefully serve each other yarn-filled mugs of “coffee.” But in both places, the settings feel a little too gentle and the staff is a little too aggressively positive. The why of it all is imperfect but the stacked cast makes the show worth sticking with: Alfred Molina as the newest resident; Jena Malone as his daughter; Alfre Woodard, Clark Peters, Denis O’Hare and Geena Davis as his neighbors, and Bill Pullman, Ed Begley Jr., Anna Deavere Smith, Jane Kaczmarek and Mary McDonnell making appearances. It is, as many reviewers have observed, a murderers’ row of performers who absolutely make everything they’re given at least 30 percent better. Skip The Home and watch The Boroughs.

Also streaming on Hulu is In Cold Light (R), which Wikipedia indicates had some sort of release earlier this year. This movie is, as the title indicates, chilly and didn’t feel fully developed but I enjoyed it for the downbeat crime & family drama it is. Maika Monroe plays Ava, vibrating with barely contained rage, sadness and fear at all times. Just released from prison, Ava tries the law-abiding citizen route for like a minute before she tries to return to the drug business she ran with her twin brother Tom (Jesse Irving). She quickly learns that there are new players and finds herself plunged into a war featuring a dirty cop and unreliable allies. (And Helen Hunt, perhaps auditioning for something in the neighborhood of the Annette Bening role on Paramount+’s Dutton Ranch. If so, she should get it. She is solid. Also, meanwhile, Dutton Ranch is a hoot.) The heart of the movie is the difficult relationship between Ava and her father Will (Troy Kotsur, Oscar-winner for CODA). Their scenes offer a reminder that, whatever Covid-era baggage we attach to CODA aside, Kotsur deserved his Oscar and that, while I mostly know Monroe from the The Hand that Rocks the Cradle remake and the weird 2024 horror movie Longlegs, there is definitely something there with her.

Featured photo: The Other Bennet Sister

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