This week, everything was just a Super Bowl ad, the Oscar race stayed controversial, and it was the week when the Mona Lisa was on the move.
Here's what NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to — and what you should check out this weekend.
Silo
I love Silo on Apple TV. I've watched two seasons in real time and haven't gotten lost or anything — I get a lot of joy from it. It's about a world with 10,000 people underground in a silo. They're a community that is underground with all these different floors. It's self-sufficient. They have a generator, they have agriculture. They're all down there and they don't know why. They've been down there for generations. It's about figuring out how these people got there and what is above ground? If you say you want to go outside, they send you out. The idea is that when you go out, bad things happen to you. So you don't want to go out. Or maybe you do. It's just good TV. — Ayesha Rascoe
Riley Kiley Reunion
This week, the band Rilo Kiley announced that it's getting back together to play its first show together in 17 years. That show is going to be at the Just Like Heaven Festival, and the band is hinting that there is going to be more touring to come. Rilo Kiley is the band led by the great Jenny Lewis, who worked with the Postal Service (the band, not the mail carriers) and has had a wonderful, fruitful solo career. For those of us who love Rilo Kiley classic records, especially The Execution of All Things and More Adventurous, both of which somehow came out more than 20 years ago, this is big news. The first thing I did upon hearing the news was crank up the Rilo Kiley song "Portions for Foxes." While it is not the happiest song in the world, it absolutely, unmistakably still rules, which in and of itself makes me very happy. — Stephen Thompson
Johanne Sacreblu
Johanne Sacreblu is a short film available on YouTube that is a satiric response to the film Emilia Pérez. The latter is a film that purports to be about Mexican culture and the transgender experience, made by a bunch of cisgender, French people who didn't seem to do a lot of research. This response film is made by a Mexican trans woman named Camila Aurora who just flipped the script. Johanne Sacreblu purports to be all about French culture, even though no French people were involved in making it. Johanne Sacreblu is a trans heiress to a baguette making dynasty who falls in love with Agtugo Ratatouille, the trans heir to France's largest croissant making corporation. It's in French and Spanish, and most of the French is in a very heavy Spanish accent. But you don't need to speak the language to get it because there's nothing but the cheapest, broadest, most insulting French stereotypes. Every character has a curly French moustache painted on their face. There are lots of berets, scarves, and black and white striped shirts. Two people show up who have the jankiest Ladybug and Chat Noir costumes — those are French animated superhero characters. I love that this is a response to Emilia Pérez, to the glibness of that film, to its sense that it doesn't owe anything to the people whose story it's purporting to tell. Its response is not an outrage, but in cheap gags it points out how broad, silly and fatally incurious Emilia Pérez is. — Glen Weldon
More recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter
by Linda Holmes
I'm so glad that the remarkable film Sing Sing is finally available to watch at home. It was one of my favorite films of 2024, and I'm a bit heartbroken that while it got some well-deserved Oscar nominations, it wasn't nominated for best picture.
Even if you're not particularly a Saturday Night Live partisan, and even if you're already feeling a little overwhelmed by the nostalgia around the show's 50th anniversary, check out the first seven or eight minutes of the SNL music documentary that ran this week. It's a mashup for the ages, brilliantly curated by Questlove (who directed the documentary).
If you are a member of the fan club of documentaries about scams (as you know I am, if you've been reading this newsletter for very long), know that Hulu now has the first episode of the documentary series Scamanda, about Amanda Riley, who – and it's always really something when you hear yourself say this – allegedly had cancer. But ... well. She's incarcerated now. The series is based on a podcast I listened to, and I can confirm it is a heck of a tale.
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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