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"      &amp;quot;Gatsby? What Gatsby?&amp;quot; Few men could ever be so perfectly introduced as Leonardo DiCaprio was in The Great Gatsby this spring, turning around in his tux, champagne raised to his guests as fireworks exploded behind him. And even fewer could have so perfectly pulled off Gatsby&amp;#039;s iconic pink suit.   Long live Pope Francis. It&amp;#039;s probably pretty easy to follow a Pope who looks like Emperor Palpatine and whose resume includes time spent in the Hitler Youth, but Francis hasn&amp;#039;t just surpassed Benedict XVI&amp;#039;s papacy; His Holiness has restored our faith in what a Pope can be for the world, Catholic or not. He&amp;#039;s embraced tolerance and given us a genuine example of what love, joy, peace, generosity, and kindness should look like today.      The moment in Gravity when the satellite detritus hits the space station. And you realize this movie is going to get crazy, and then you realize that the movies really can do what television can&amp;#039;t.        Two beautiful, terrible films. Amid a summer of better movies, Oblivion and Only God Forgives stood out for being so visually stunning that you just stopped caring about what the actors were saying. And that was probably for the best.       The guitar solo on Kanye&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Hold My Liquor.&amp;quot; With rock music sliding precipitously from its dominant spot on the pop landscape and the continued popularity of back-to-basics garage rock among its remaining fans, the guitar solo has recently started to look like an endangered species. Since rap music bears so much responsibility for this state of affairs, it&amp;#039;s ironic that one of the few moments of outstanding guitar heroics to happen this year was on a hip-hop record, when midway through Kanye&amp;#039;s boundary-defying Yeezus its industrial rap template melts down as Ye&amp;#039;s chief musical partner Mike Dean lays into the most searingly transcendental shredding this side of Slash on &amp;quot;November Rain.&amp;quot;      The guitar solo on Haim&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Falling.&amp;quot; Just enough to briefly make us feel like the &amp;#039;70s are back again.      Jonathan Rhys Meyers&amp;#039;s American accent on NBC&amp;#039;sDracula. Bram Stoker&amp;#039;s masterpiece has seen a lot of wacky adaptations over the years, but few that play as fast, loose, and off-the-rails as the series that began running on NBC this fall. Dracula&amp;#039;s a good guy, Van Helsing&amp;#039;s his partner, and instead of being about erotic urges suffocating under straight-laced Victorian propriety, the story is about Dracula trying to fight off an Illuminati-type secret society and convince the burgeoning Industrial Revolution not to adopt petroleum as its primary energy source. Even with so much insanity flying around, Jonathan Rhys Meyers manages to cut through all of it with an American accent (because Dracula&amp;#039;s posing as an eccentric American millionaire inventor, duh) so fantastically phony that it not only has to be on purpose but could even be some kind of political commentary or something. The world&amp;#039;s longest runway. You have to imagine that someone on the Fast &amp;amp;amp; Furious 6 set suggested that the runway in the finale was too long to be taken seriously, even by fans prepared for the ridiculous. But then, after a beat, someone else probably just said, &amp;quot;Fk it, let&amp;#039;s make it longer. Let&amp;#039;s make it way, way longer. Let&amp;#039;s make it so long that people think, &amp;#039;Holy shit, why is this runway so long?&amp;#039; and then figure out how long it probably was.&amp;quot; And they did: Vulture estimates it was around 28 miles, making it the longest in the world... four times over.  Hoods up. It was too hot to be wearing a hoodie anywhere in America back in July, but that didn&amp;#039;t stop thousands from donning Trayvon Martin&amp;#039;s signature attire \u2014 hoods up \u2014 in a simple, silent protest of the George Zimmerman verdict that said more than anyone ever could by looting or lighting a trashcan on fire.       &amp;quot;An answered prayer!&amp;quot; We agree that sports announcers often use too much hyperbole. Every game isn&amp;#039;t the Game of the Century, and every play isn&amp;#039;t the best we&amp;#039;ve ever seen. But when Auburn&amp;#039;s Chris Davis returned a missed field goal 109 yards for a walk-off touchdown to upset No. 1 Alabama in the Iron Bowl, you knew you were watching something that you will absolutely never see again.       Greta Gerwig dancing. In Frances Ha. For Arcade Fire. And generally.      A true Song of the Summer Battle between &amp;quot;Get Lucky&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Blurred Lines.&amp;quot;      Drake&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Started from the Bottom&amp;quot; dance. The whole point of Drake&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Started from the Bottom&amp;quot; and its accompanying video is to make sure everyone knows that as unimaginably famous and successful as he is, the rapper/singer is still a regular guy at heart. While it doesn&amp;#039;t entirely achieve that goal \u2014 his lyrics about the struggle of early-morning call times during his Teen TV Star period aren&amp;#039;t exactly universally relatable \u2014 his goofy dancing throughout the video helps considerably. It&amp;#039;s the kind of song that makes people want to get dumb, and it&amp;#039;s nice to know that he gets it.      &amp;quot;How do you lose a rocket launcher?&amp;quot; White House Down was worlds better than Olympus Has Fallen in the admittedly limited DC-under-siege genre, so much so that action-film expert Daniel O&amp;#039;Brien argues it deserves an induction into the Die Hard franchise. And honestly, it was better than at least three of those films.  Colbert basically calls his bosses pricks. After MTV president Van Toffler pulled Daft Punk from an already scheduled and sponsored performance on The Colbert Report ahead of the 2013 VMAs, the Comedy Central pundit used six minutes and every weapon in his arsenal to humiliate Toffler, MTV, and ultimately Viacom, which, wait, yes, also happens to own Comedy Central. It was the smart man&amp;#039;s version of &amp;quot;Fk you!&amp;quot; with a hint of &amp;quot;Come at me, bro!&amp;quot;  The first sixty seconds of Alpha House. Bill Murray shouting &amp;quot;Fk me, Francis!&amp;quot; as he hurries to get ready after realizing he forgot to turn himself in to the Department of Justice is easily the best part of Alpha House so far. But Bill Murray is pretty much the best part of everything he takes part in (see: Zombieland), so this surprises no one.   Everything about Emily Ratajakowski. Need for Speed Rivals (Playstation 4). Launch titles for a new video-game console are usually terrible. And yet in mid-November so many of us marched out gleefully and threw down $399.99 for a day-one Playstation 4. What delights awaited us? Why, a half-dozen glossy PS3 ports and two first-party duds. But there was one title to emerge that proved itself worthwhile: Need for Speed Rivals, umpteenth iteration of the long-running street-racing franchise and the first game by new developer Ghost Games. Against incalculable odds, Need for Speed was actually good \u2014 maybe even great. Unlike so many of its overblown peers, the game is utterly simple \u2014 you drive around as either a cop chasing a racer or a racer outrunning a cop through a sizable open world \u2014 but therein lies its genius. The core mechanics are so inexhaustibly satisfying, so plainly addictive in the way so many older games are, that it almost single-handedly justified the purchase of the new system. That&amp;#039;s something to be excited about.  The realization that Chris Farley is alive. And immersed in the role of his career as the real-life mayor of Toronto.      Paul McCartney&amp;#039;s epic, career-spanning two-and-a-half hour Bonnaroo set. Which blew minds and left every eye wet with joy in a way that only a real Beatle can. If you were there and &amp;quot;Let It Be&amp;quot; or the George Harrison-dedicated &amp;quot;Something&amp;quot; didn&amp;#039;t make you well up, you should probably consult a therapist.  George Clooney&amp;#039;s revelation that he spent his Nescafe spokes-money on a satellite to spy on a human rights-violating dictator and his army. Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon.The publication of a new Thomas Pynchon novel used to be an event of extraordinary rarity and significance, like a literary Halley&amp;#039;s Comet or a film by Terrence Malick. These days, it seems, Pynchon&amp;#039;s pace has gotten more prolific, which means we get novel number-eight just four years after the last, his &amp;#039;60s surf-rock odyssey Inherent Vice (soon to be a major motion picture, naturally). And, what&amp;#039;s more, with celerity has come accessibility: Bleeding Edge, much like its predecessor, is a rather breezy read, whizzing through the usual modern-world paranoia and conspiratorial intrigue and coming in under a cool 477 pages. Still, the prose remains as muscular as ever, and it&amp;#039;s a joy to follow his sentences as they wind into those curlicues.      Jurassic Park 3D. Film fans of a certain age doubtless wore through their well-loved Jurassic Park tapes, peering out at the velociraptors from behind a shield of clasped fingers, hurriedly rewinding to re-watch the goriest bits. Most of us have had its every beat memorized since infancy. The news, earlier this year, that Spielberg&amp;#039;s prehistoric opus would soon have a superfluous third dimension shoehorned in for a forthcoming Blu-ray release seemed at first like sacrilege: How dare they muck about with a modern classic, perfect as is? Well, as it happens, Jurassic Park didn&amp;#039;t gain much in its upgrade to digital 3D, but it didn&amp;#039;t especially lose any of its natural appeal either \u2014 and, on the bright side, the event gave occasion to revisit the film once more. The studio probably banked on dupes like us anyway. For the chance to see a childhood favorite on the big screen for the first time since the early nineties, we&amp;#039;d gladly pay the surcharge. Call it a nostalgia fee. Whatever the price, it was clearly worth it.      James Franco describing the American Dream in Spring Breakers. Hilarious. And if you were weaned on MTV Spring Break, eerily accurate.  Pharrell&amp;#039;s 24-hour &amp;quot;Happy&amp;quot; music video. 2013 was, of course, an all-around stellar year for Pharrell Williams: He worked on the score for the hugely successful animated film Despicable Me 2, contributed to the anticipated debut LP from Azealia Banks, and produced and guested on Daft Punk&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Get Lucky&amp;quot; and Robin Thicke&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Blurred Lines,&amp;quot; maybe the two most popular singles of the summer. Naturally, there was only one thing left for Pharrell to do to cap off the year: release a single of his own. The result was &amp;quot;Happy,&amp;quot; a fine song in its own right. But, perhaps not wanting to be outdone by the songs he produced for other people, Pharrell bestowed &amp;quot;Happy&amp;quot; with a music video like no other \u2014 one that lasted 24 hours. &amp;quot;24 Hours of Happy&amp;quot; can be viewed online in full, and it&amp;#039;s really something: one street dancer after another working it to the looped beat from one hour to the next, replete with guest cameos from the likes of Steve Carell and Jimmy Kimmel.  This passage from Rachel Kushner&amp;#039;s The Flame Throwers, after the Italian artist is taken by his father to witness a violent strike at a tire factory: &amp;quot;But why? Sandro asked much later, after Roberto had left for his university studies. Because you are going to be an artist, his father said. And it was important to establish that you aren&amp;#039;t suited to anything else. That&amp;#039;s what artists are, his father said, those who are useless for anything else.&amp;quot; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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