Wings (multiple music formats, 2025)

McCartney’s latest legacy project is this 32-track overview of the second band McCartney was in.  I am a huge fan of Wings, and if you are, too, you don’t need this collection.

For new fans, it gives a good selection of tracks.  The strangest thing is the running order.  Different iterations of the band and back-and-forth in time. For that reason, I am not looking to buy a physical copy of this.  I already have all of the albums and there is no new re-mastering of tracks.  The companion insert material might be interesting but I am looking forward to reading the oral history of the band instead.

I’ve gotten tired of so many things being released with minor differences in each released.  This has vinyl, bluray, 2-CD, and single CD versions.  I’ve heard that the bluray release, which should have excellent fidelity, is disappointing.

If you’ve got access to a streaming service, go ahead and give this a listen, but save your money for something else!

Only Murders in the Building (S5, 2025, Hulu)

Note: this is commentary on all of Season 5, so there are Spoilers!

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This is my wife’s favorite show on television, and we’ve been watching since we tried Hulu at season one mainly to see the show.  I was unsure how the gimmick was going to hold up, but here we are with a season six announced and no real downgrade in the quality of the show. But do I have things to say? Yes!

They tried to give Steve Martin’s character some kind of “b” story for growth but the testosterone thing was very hit-or-miss.  Martin Short is a loveable cringe to watch but I wonder if things are on the horizon for his marriage to Meryl Streep to be dissolved. There just seemed to be notes of unhappiness there for him. Selena Gomez did a fine job this season but I worried about her health as she really slimmed down. I read she’s recently married so I hope it was from a good place as she is beautiful either way.

Guest stars this year were a mixed bag.  Dianne Wiest seemed out of place even given the character. Tea Leone was given a scattered character and gave a scattered performance. (Her character’s adult sons were one of the bright spots of the season.) The billionaires were funny impressions, most of all Renee Zellweger’s not-Martha.  Keegan-Michael Key was another without a lot to do, but he did prove important to the season.

They seem locked into a ten-episode format which is just long enough to develop a good murder mystery with some twists, but not so long that it needs padded episodes.  The standout of the season for me was episode two, “After You.”  It really gave Lester a showcase episode while moving the plot significantly along.

The main thing that bothered me at the end of the season was showing Dianne Wiest’s character as having achieved the dream of living in the Arconia, but it looked to me like Mabel’s squatter apartment.  Does this mean that Mabel has a new place? I hope this is quickly addressed.  The biggest bright spot was one of the sons dating Howard–I hope there’s a fun way to keep seeing this develop.

It’s always a tricky thing when a hit show travels, so we will see what happens to the gang in London (and how long they are there) for season six.

Batman Resurrection by John Jackson Miller (2024)

I thank the deals service BookBub telling me about this one, as it came up  on sale a couple of months ago.  The book takes place very soon after the end of the events of the first Tim Burton Batman movie (1989). If you are familiar with what DC has done with the rebrand of the property as “Batman ’89” (to distinguish from Adam West as “Batman ’66”) this book is adjacent but not related to the comics works published by DC using the Burtonverse.

Miller is a skilled tie-in author (I’ve enjoyed his Star Wars books) and I think he got the vibe of the characters and performances from the movies. This was not hard to read and better than many of the prose superhero novels I’ve consumed.

The best thing about the telling here is that Batman is still pretty new and he is still testing out some of his “wonderful toys”.  That’s not a side that we often see, and as a long time fan I enjoyed it immensely.  Miller is filling in the space between the  movies Batman and Batman Returns.

The book went on sale because he wrote another one, so I will be looking for that one to also go on sale once it’s been a while.  Worth picking up.