Overrated/Underrated: Pop culture’s best and worst
There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week. Times staff writer Chris Barton offers his take on what’s up and what’s down in music, movies, television and just about anything else out there that is worth considering.
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UNDERRATED André Holland in “Moonlight”: Already familiar for his scene-stealing work in Showtime’s “The Knick,” Holland is a standout among the beautifully nuanced performances in Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight.”
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After seven years, you get a chance to know somebody.
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UNDERRATED Teenage Fanclub’s ‘Here’: Now 10 albums in, this Scottish band is one of music’s quiet constants since bursting on the alternative radio landscape with the feedback-laden power-pop of “Bandwagonesque” in 1991.
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UNDERRATED The return of Tracey Ullman: Like a sort of sketch comedy equivalent of Cindy Sherman, Ullman has built a career on sharply inhabiting and impersonating a wide variety of characters.
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UNDERRATED A Tribe Called Quest’s “We Got It From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service”: In a year full of improbabilities, what were the odds of this hip-hop group releasing new music this good after 18 years and the recent death of founding member Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor?
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UNDERRATED Viggo Mortensen in ‘Captain Fantastic’: This 2016 indie, about a father raising six kids off the grid in the impossibly idyllic Pacific Northwestern wilderness, shines as a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for a certain outdoors-oriented mind set, which almost makes up for its over-the-top moments and underwritten characters.
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UNDERRATED Our post-legalization future: Amid the ongoing fallout and speculation surrounding the results of this last week’s election, one of the real shifts that lie ahead for popular culture will come from the recent legalization of marijuana for recreational use in California and three more states.
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UNDERRATED Ben Mendelsohn in ‘Rogue One’: This December we’ll start getting some idea of just how many storytelling tangents the original “Star Wars” trilogy can support, but at least the casting in the first of the many spinoffs looks promising.
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UNDERRATED ‘High Maintenance’ on HBO: For fans of this former Web-only favorite who wondered whether the absurdist-leaning series could make the leap to premium cable, worry no longer.
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UNDERRATED Lakeith Stanfield in ‘Atlanta’: Donald Glover’s new series on FX deserves every bit of its acclaim for its detail-rich, patiently drawn storytelling.
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UNDERRATED John Rothman in ‘One Mississippi’: A character actor who has been seen in the likes of “Damages,” “Synecdoche, New York” and various cogs in the “Law & Order” universe, Rothman is maybe the most magnetic figure on this new series based loosely around the life of comic Tig Notaro.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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UNDERRATED ‘Demon’ (2016): This story of possession is misleadingly presented as just another scary movie, but its horrors venture somewhere far deeper.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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UNDERRATED The Tragically Hip: If you’ve heard of this band, chances are it was from a Canadian friend who asked — probably rather politely — that you give one of their albums a listen.
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UNDERRATED “The Nightly Show”: Larry Wilmore, we hardly knew you — at least in the context of late-night TV now that this “The Daily Show” counterpart has been canceled by Comedy Central for, among other things, failing to generate enough “shareable content.”
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UNDERRATED The Olympics: Yes, the International Olympic Committee may be only marginally less shady than the recently indicted FIFA.
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UNDERRATED Jeff Parker’s “The New Breed”: Familiar to indie music fans for his bent, flinty guitar lines in the intricate framework of category-defying post-rock band Tortoise, Parker shifted to warmer, funkier ground for his latest release this summer.
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UNDERRATED David Mitchell’s “Slade House”: A rare testament to the positive uses of social media (see this week’s Overrated section), this 2015 novel from the writer of “Cloud Atlas” rose out of a Twitter experiment and grew into what may be the most chillingly inventive beach reads of the year.
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UNDERRATED ‘Mustang’ (2015): An Academy Award contender for foreign language film last year, this Turkish import recently added to Netflix feels especially poignant in the wake of the recent unrest in and around Istanbul.
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UNDERRATED Henry Threadgill’s “Old Locks and Irregular Verbs”: A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music earlier this year for the album “In for a Penny, In for a Pound,” this saxophonist-composer released this album earlier this year, and it offers an inviting primer to the odd-angled musical structures that made him one of the most influential jazz artists today.
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UNDERRATED Galactic’s “Coolin’ Off”: Maybe best known outside of music circles as the band that once helped get Wendell Pierce’s character into a bit of trouble in David Simon’s HBO series “Treme,” the New Orleans group Galactic made an auspicious debut with this album.
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UNDERRATED Samira Wiley: In the name of not running afoul of the perpetually spoiler-averse culture of the Internet – by the way, Walter White dies in the end -- let’s not speak of anything noteworthy that might or might not have become of Wiley’s character Poussey Washington on Netflix’s “Orange Is in the New Black.”
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UNDERRATED ‘The Enfield Haunting’ on Hulu: It’s not clear why ghost stories are always enhanced by the leftover wardrobe for “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” but it’s been proved again in this three-episode miniseries.
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UNDERRATED ‘Angie Tribeca’ on TBS: With every network searching for its own ratings-gobbling antihero, you sometimes have to appreciate a show so gloriously and unabashedly in pursuit of pleasure.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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UNDERRATED Don Hertzfeldt: A one-of-a-kind blur of skills in his own right, Hertzfeldt has written, directed, produced and animated his deceptively simple, undeniably beautiful short films for going on 20 years.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
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There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week.
