Only four weekends left in 2024! Let’s make this one count.
This week’s installment of Tap In—the column where GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe weighs in on the most heated online discourse about music, movies and TV, now available in handy newsletter form—is an ode to Out of Time, a deep-cut Denzel Washington thriller from 2003 in which one of the coolest movie stars on the planet lets us see him sweat. In this re-team with his Devil in a Blue Dress director Carl Franklin, Denzel’s a cop, being chased by a detective, who’s also his estranged wife, who he’s still in love with, because she’s Eva Mendes. “You’ll probably never see a scene from this in an honorific awards-show reel,” Tharpe writes, “but it’s the only Denzel Washington movie where he leverages his movie-star charisma to keep the audience on pins and needles over an incoming fax, so maybe you should?”
Speaking of outdated communications technologies: Let’s talk about books! This week we talked to Josh Brolin, former semiretired actor turned megastar of many Avengers/Dune films, whose heart-rendingly personal memoir From Under the Truck (in stores as of last week) toggles back and forth between true Hollywood stories and wild tales from Brolin’s pre-fame/pre-sobriety youth, including his tenure with the Cito Rats, a Santa Barbara surf-punk gang apparently made up entirely of guys with incredible names. (Roll call: “Foolish Mortal, Herb, Dead Ted, No Hand’s Dan, Bomber, Bohawk, Will Mo, T-Roll, the other JB, Twisty Mole, Mozz, Friend of Fat Chick, Hydro, Scott Doobie, T-Shaver, Hawkzane, Wookie Man, Chester the Molester, Dorbo, Galen, Horms, Car Ride Rick, Shark B, Razor Lips, and Feltcher, to name a few.”)
In other book news that is also guys-with-cool-nicknames news: The Brooklyn Public Library’s 2023 exhibit celebrating the life and career of noted Brooklynite Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter has now been immortalized between hard covers as The Book of Hov, available in a special $2,000 “ultimate” edition and an even specialer if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it edition in an etched bronze clamshell, although you can get the regular one for $120. Full of exclusive photos (check ‘em out here) it’ll have the Jay fan in your life singing “Give it to me”—that sweet, that glossy, that archival stuff. Bonus: If you happen to be shopping for a huge American Gangster fan, make this one a twofer with the Brolin book and you just won the holiday.
Meanwhile: We ran down the 30 best games in 30 years of PlayStation history. Pulling Weeds columnist Chris Black eulogized Will Cullen Hart of the legendary ‘90s indie band Olivia Tremor Control. Nami Nori, the temaki spot Pharrell Williams liked so much he became a partner, is opening a new location in Miami, A Real Pain director Jesse Eisenberg is still overthinking everything, Odd Future’s in-house photographer Brick Stowell’s Camp Flog Gnaw photo exhibit about the iconic ‘00s hip-hop crew into a couple of books, and HBO’s Dune: Prophecy keeps getting Dune-ier.
