The First Echo

“Us,” the energetic dance track from global superstar and (current Las Vegas resident) Jennifer Lopez, came out earlier this yearand has been on heavy rotation on certain 2018 summer playlists (okay, mine), but it’s her other track, “Dinero,” that is heating up faster than you can say “collaboration with DJ Khaled and Cardi B.” The stylish black-and-white music video, directed by Joseph Kahn, was shot not too long before I hopped on a quick flight to Sin City earlier this summer to catch Jennifer Lopez: All I Have, the sensational show inside Zappos Theater at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino. The trip was also a birthday treat for my New Yorker mother, who was turning 70 and has loved J.Lo ever since the Bronx native dropped her 1999 debut album, On the 6, and smoldered alongside George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight 20 years ago. “She’s so beautiful and can do no wrong,” she once told me. “And that butt!” Therefore it made sense for me to nurture my mom’s girl crush a…

First thing’s first: Elsie Fisher is, at the risk of sounding trite, a revelation.

She is the young actress starring in writer-director Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, a teen dramedy unlike any we’ve seen on the big screen in recent memory. It may also be the first (and best) movie about Gen Z that could very well resonate across all demos.

Fisher plays 13-year-old Kayla, a girl on the verge of a major transition: graduating from middle school to high school. And every awkward, humiliating, joyful, devastating, and mundane moment leading up to that is captured and conveyed with such gorgeous poignancy and tender nuance.

Burnham, mostly known for his stand-up and YouTube past, proves himself here as a keen observer of adolescent life in the late 2010s. Welcome to a world of sniffing markers, shooter drills (look out for a scene that is simultaneously funny, jawdropping, and heartbreaking), and adults pathetically attempting to dab and use words like “lit.”

It doesn’t take long to easily se…