• Bells are Ringing (1960): Judy Holliday does it again! A light, fun movie that only makes sense to the extent it's based on a true story. We also got another 1960s dental office. What's with all the dentists in these old movies? I theorize "dentist" is a super-networker character. You don't need to explain why someone would visit a dentist, or why a dentist might know any random person.

  Anyway, Judy's great as always. The all-classic moment in this movie is when Dean Martin asks "Are you psychic?" and she mentally fumbles for a bit before saying "...Yes?" We coulda had Judy Holliday as Sean Spencer, folks.

• The Birdcage (1996): Nothing brightens up movie night like a surprise "Screenplay by Elaine May" credit. The main thing I think could have been improved here is the characters of the kids who are getting married. Right now they're defined primarily by their rebellion against their parents, and it's like watching the romantic subplot of a Marx Brothers movie while the older actors are chewing scenery left and right. But the chewing is definitely entertaining.

  I haven't seen the French/Italian movie this is based on and supposedly May's adaptation was really close to the original, but there's a suspicious amount of The Heartbreak Kid (1972) in this one.

  According to a contemporary interview in The Advocate, Gene Hackman "relished the chance to return to his roots in improvisational comedy." I've seen several Gene Hackman movies and suffice to say that's not where I thought his roots were. But there is a part in this movie where he delivers a long rambling monologue that's not very funny, so maybe? Oh, and in honor of the end of this movie we came up with the perfect drag name for him: Jean Hackwoman. Tip your waitresses!

• Coyote vs. Acme (2026): Saw in a preview at the museum with two of the stars talking afterwards. This was a fun movie that has a couple of really emotional moments and pretty clear signs of studio interference (beyond the fact that the studio killed the movie and we're only seeing it due to a rare win for the "angry nerds on the Internet" community). Whose idea was it to limit Bugs and Daffy to one scene each? Sounds like the nefarious work of a studio that smells a big round Acme bomb and wants to keep their prime assets in reserve for a Super Bowl yogurt ad or something.

  The thing I keep coming back to is what a quisling Foghorn Leghorn is. He responds angrily to racial slights in private, then aw-shuckses away the same slights in public, in the service of selling out his fellow toons. A bit of intentional depth in what's mostly a "don't think about it too hard" movie.

• The Hunt for Red October (1990): Really enjoyable thriller. I was thinking there might be an extra twist vis-a-vis what Sean Connery's character really intended to do with the sub, but then there was a scene where Jack Ryan was putting forth his theory and all the brass were shitting on it, and I was like "well, the protagonist has spoken, that's it for twists." Still a fun film. Gates McFadden has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role as Jack Ryan's wife.

  I think Sumana would want me to mention that Jack Ryan has a bad habit of leaking sensitive national security information when he talks to himself in infodumps. You can fix this plot hole and restore your enjoyment of the movie by simply putting your finger in front of your face to cover Alec Baldwin's mouth, so that it looks like he's doing an internal monologue in voiceover.

• Listers (2025): Watch it on Youtube! A charming documentary about birdwatching, brotherhood, and mistaking the measurement for the thing being measured. The bit that sticks with me is the cautionary tale of the guy who's so competitive that he saw on the news somebody had the biggest Christmas light display in the area, and he got really into Christmas lights just to outdo that guy. I hate to think of what happens when he watches the Olympics. PS: there's a California condor in this movie, one of my favorite birds.
• Knightriders (1981): Like many moviegoers, I watched this on the strength of the awesome poster, and was disappointed by the lack of time travel. Also the movie's way too long. Like a lot of baby boomers (Peter David, J. Michael Straczynski), George Romero has a self-indulgent fascination with Arthurian romance. Maybe if I, too, was a successful director or comics writer, I'd feel the lure of comparing myself to the semi-mythological leader of a team of knights. But more likely Monty Python and the Holy Grail just made it impossible for anyone of my generation to take it seriously.

  After the initial disappointment wore off, I liked the first 30 minutes of Knightriders quite a bit. It was cool to see an old-timey ren faire, the stunts were cool, and Steven King(!) was fun as the strawman rube. But pretty soon I tired of it and the main thing the film had going for it was its out-of-nowhere beef with Bakersfield.

  See, Knightriders is clearly filmed in Pennsylvania and equally clearly takes place in Pennsylvania. But very important to the plot is a real crappy place called Bakersfield, with corrupt law enforcement like you wouldn't believe. In the climax of the movie, the sheriff of Bakersfield is given a swirlie from a soft-serve ice cream machine. So I have to assume George Romero had a bad experience with Bakersfield (understandable) and decided to make it the laughingstock of this long, weird movie. Sometimes they say the location is a character in a movie, but rarely is that character the comic relief.

• Bullet for a Badman (1964): Unremarkable western, to the point I thought maybe I'd seen it before. But no, it's just reusing a lot of stuff from other movies and not bringing new things to the potluck. I can sense the shadow of Shane (1953) looming large over westerns that include kids, even though I haven't seen Shane. Sort of like how I regard Bonnie and Clyde as a mysterious piece of dark matter that abruptly changed Hollywood's orbit in 1967. Anyway, not recommended.
• The In-Laws (1979): Now this one I can recommend. Alan Arkin at his most neurotic and Peter Falk exploiting his Columbo fame to deliver a character who acts the same but thinks totally differently. Falk loves doing this; witness the previous year's The Brink's Job. In fact, you know when he shows up in The Muppet Movie (1979) and tells Kermit a ridiculous tall tale? He's reprising his character from this movie.

  Yeah, just a fun movie overall. There are a lot of great Carter-era comedies that hold up really well but people only know about Airplane! and The Jerk. I'm trying to change that in my small way.

• Cops vs. Thugs (1975): How much of a movie can you carry with a lead actor who looks really, really cool? The answer is: about 25%. Bunta Sugawara (previously known to me as the boiler operator from Spirited Away) looks like a badass this whole movie, but it's not enough. There are also cool car stunts, which often involve cars driving right up into a crowd of regular, non-stunt actors. Still not enough. A Taxing Woman has the same police-war-room feel and is a much better movie, without the showiness.

  Director Kinji Fukasaku directed a lot of movies with great titles, most notably Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) which is definitely on my to-watch list. Not currently on my list: Hepcat in the Funky Hat: The 20,000,000 Yen Arm (1971), and The Green Slime (1968), which formed the basis for the pilot episode of MST3K!

• K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025): Watched, effectively, on a dare. Sumana auctioned off our Monday morning at a Wiscon charity auction, and the Wiscon-going public shelled out for us to see this movie, while reacting in real time on Discord. Final verdict: it's a fine kids movie. I liked the animal sidekicks. I was totally convinced Celine was going to have a villain turn at the start of act 3, but in the end she was merely misguided. So... well played?

  Except now I'm not sure why Celine was in the story at all if she's not going to have a villain turn. It feels like part of her story was cut from the original screenplay. No doubt because the rising cost of 3D graphics hardware made it impractical to render whatever cool thing was going to be shown on screen.

• Conclave (2024): Sumana has been wanting to watch this since the recent real-world conclave, and we finally went for it. It's a fun political thriller with very little (but not zero) violence. This may fade over time, but I'm finally able to visualize Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci in my mind rather than seeing them as indistinguishable actor-shaped blobs.

  I think they should follow up the success of this movie with a sequel modeled after the super-long conclave of 1268-1271, where the staff starts making things more and more uncomfortable for the cardinals. People are setting up bootleg wi-fi routers, smuggling food in with drones, etc. Could get kind of Ballardian.

• Queen of Katwe (2016): The second in our film festival of movies tied to Zohran Mamdani's life. This one has a cameo from the big Z himself, playing "Student Bookie" in a very 90s shirt. The rest of the movie is a pretty standard heartwarming based-on-a-true-story sports movie. I really liked the ending credits where they paired the actors with the real people they played. It really drives home the fact that there is no villain in this movie; nobody objected to the way they were portrayed. Except, perhaps, the Student Bookie.
• Project Hail Mary (2026): Saw on a date with Sumana, and in honor of her going in without knowing the Big Spoiler, if you don't know it I won't reveal it in this paragraph. But it was excellent. As someone who's created a Big Wacky Spoiler or two in his fiction I thought they did a good job of creating a Big Spoiler that...

  You know what? It's a new paragraph, and the people who wanted to not be spoiled have moved on to the next movie. I'll say it: Rocky is great. A cool design, a great practical effect, a fun character. The scenes without Rocky... I could take or leave 'em.

• We watched some old public domain cartoons by Winsor McKay, inventor of the animated GIF. The best one, I would say, is The Pet (1921), which features both classic kaiju action and the immortal line "Say Doc — my wife as you know is a bug on pets — how can I murder the latest one she's found?"

  Also, this went right over my head while watching it, but The Pet is a pre-Code film and this review points out that, as an entry in the Rarebit Fiend Cinematic Universe, it necessarily makes heavy use of a couple in bed together.

• Cactus Flower (1969): I sold Sumana on this as "like The Apartment but ten years later and not as good." And that is how it starts, but it quickly finds its own groove and turns into something really nice: a movie about two middle-aged people falling in love for the first time. It's a sweet rom-com that just happens to start with an attempted suicide and jokes about infidelity. The rare movie I'm glad Billy Wilder didn't direct, because it's just enough askew from his worldview that he never would have done anything so wholesome.

  BTW, how about that 1969 dental practice? They've got a little darkroom for developing the X-rays. Really cool.

  Bonus Kal Ho Na Ho connection: this film mentions a nonexistent address in Jackson Heights.

• The Royal Tenenbaums (2001): Wes Anderson's Die Hard, the moment he figured out his style and decided to never do anything differently again. I like that style, so I enjoyed this movie. I'll say my favorite bit was the way Etheline Tenenbaum spends years being courted by intense, Wes Anderson geniuses but she's sick of that shit and ends up marrying the accountant.

  Yesterday Sumana and I happened to rewatch the "Wes Anderson horror trailer" SNL sketch and I can now see it's basically just parodying The Royal Tenenbaums. Truly a touchstone.

• That's the only movie proper I watched in March but we also watched a stream of the National Theatre's production of The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Max Webster. It's a really funny play, but if Oscar Wilde was in my writing group I'd tell him "you have a serious problem where all of your characters sound like you, to the extent that all of your famous quips turn out to be lines you put in the mouths of one character or another." And then he'd probably say "Bah, Leonard, you know the price of everything and the value of nothing. —The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter IV"
• Oh yeah, I should also mention we recently watched some midcentury military training films:
  • One Too Often (1950), featuring Jack Lemmon(!) as the Private Snafu-esque knave who keeps gambling with his life while on leave. It's full of the sort of cinematic vocabulary familiar to me from MST3K sthorts, complete with guardian angels who keep bending the rules for ol' Jack... until they don't.
  • Resisting Enemy Interrogation (1944): This film packs a feature's worth of intrigue into 66 minutes, as the enemy use clever interrogation techniques and deductive reasoning to blow our boys out of the sky, like an evil version of Mathnet. Highly recommended as a thriller in the same vein as Eye of the Needle (1981).
  • Undercover (1943): Kinda hamfisted John Ford short where Gallant practices good spycraft and successfully establishes his cover story (Or does he? discuss, men!) Whereas Goofus takes one step across the border and screws everything up. Pretty entertaining, but unlike Resisting Enemy Interrogration I don't think it holds up well as a narrative film.

• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2025): A high-concept sci-fi thriller is periodically interrupted by Black Mirror episodes. I found this uneven in the same kind of medium-budget indie sci-fi way as Chappie. But also uneven in a different way! The repeated time loops and select-your-party opening scene set the expectation that, like Hundreds of Beavers, this universe has strict video-game-like rules. But as we go through the loop, the fabric of reality starts breaking down in a Dickian way until there's no way to tell what's real and what's not. Once reality has collapsed, going back in time won't solve anything, so the movie is moot!

  I did like all the party members in this movie although I sense some major scenes were cut from the film or the screenplay, because two of them didn't get their Black Mirror episode. It was good to see Asim Chaudhry again after Taskmaster.

• An Unmarried Woman (1978): Like Claudine, one of those hidden gem '70s rom-coms that's now forgotten because a) all old movies have been forgotten, b) it doesn't fit the post Nora Ephron rom-com formula. I feel like Judd Apatow tried to give the genre a raunchier spin in the 2000s but I haven't seen any of his movies and if he changed the heading of the USS Rom-Com, it wasn't by more than a few degrees. Anyway, this is a really fun, romantic and somewhat raunchy (by 1970s non-porno standards) movie.

  Saw this on a date with Sumana and we were both primed by modern rom-coms for the psychologist to be portrayed as a comic-relief blowhard, but her advice was actually pretty sensible! Later on we learned from IMDB trivia that the psychologist was played by a real therapist who was improvising a therapy session with Jill Clayburgh. Classic '70s improv/Method acting; I love it. The therapist, Penelope Russianoff, also cashed out on her sudden fame with a tie-in self-help book. Another classic move!

• Blithe Spirit (1945): A Noel Coward play... in movie form? Maybe he figured he was doing his bit for the war effort. It's entertaining, but mostly because of the visual effects and Margaret Rutherford's kooky old crone, the only character who doesn't know she's in a Noel Coward play. The other characters are content to waft timelessly around their country house like the holodeck people in Celine and Julie Go Boating. In fact, I think the holodeck people in that movie are made up to resemble the ghost from Blithe Spirit.

  Coward was pretty cranky about the adaptation of his screenplay and claims the ending ruined the best thing he ever wrote, which a) the movie ending is way better than his original ending, b) if I thought this was my best work I wouldn't brag about it.

• One Battle After Another (2025): An exciting thriller with the huge thematic problem that the first part really wants to take place in the early '70s, and they barely make it look like 2007. I assume this is a requirement of the source material (which I'm reading now and it's hilarious). Would it have cost that much extra to make this a period piece? Then you wouldn't need to add cell phones to the story and then clumsily take them out again. Or just claim the second part of the movie is taking place in 1990 and bluff your way through it, the way Uncut Gems is set in 2012 but any New Yorker can tell it was filmed much later. What am I going to do, post a nitpicky three-hour rant on Youtube? I don't have the time!

  The most thriller-y part of the movie was the exciting middle sequence with Guillermo del Toro. And the part I hope comes directly from Vineland is that the protagonist bumbles through the entire movie having no idea what's happening and no effect on the plot, but ends up saving the day retroactively by having been a loving and supportive father.

• What Did the Lady Forget? (1937): A charming "brassy dame" kind of family comedy goes sour near the end with an act of domestic violence that was acceptable in a 1937 movie but won't fly today. The dame is brassy the whole way through, to the point of becoming a kinda unlikable antihero—itself, a brassy move.

This month the Television Spotlight shines on both versions of Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, a comedian panel show themed as a volatile and often unfair spelling bee. Sumana and I met Guy with the infamous season 2 of Taskmaster NZ and he has the same kind of sinister charm necessary to be a Taskmaster himself, or (as seen here) any kind of game show host. Since the entire New Zealand comedy scene seems to be about as big as Dropout, it was a relief when Guy moved the show to Australia and got a wider variety of... wait, people are showing up in both versions? I just don't know, man.

1. Paperhouse (1988)
2. Grosse Point Blank (1997)
3. Quick Change (1990)
4. Born Yesterday (1950)
5. Sinners (2025)
6. After Hours (1984)
7. The Iron Sheriff (1957)
8. Minbo: The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (1992)
9. The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
10. Claudine (1974)

Paperhouse isn't the kind of film I usually watch, but it was so creative and such a pleasant surprise that I had to give it the nod.

Games

The Crummy.com Game of the year is my new anti-doomscrolling game, Lost For Swords. It's a real hidden gem of tactical positioning. Apart from that I haven't spent much time playing new games. I'm glad Caves of Qud made it to 1.0 though.

Literature

The Crummy.com Book of the Year is Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe. I'm not wild about the plot but the worldbuilding is amazing and he's so damn good at putting sentences together. I've had the tetralogy on my shelf for a while and will probably read the other two books this year.

Runners-up:

• Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. Another banger from another master of sentence construction. The detective novel is a perfect match for Pynchon's sensibility and I'm glad he's found it.
• Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, the original novelizations by screenwriter Shigeru Kayama. The Godzilla-worshiping death cult was an interesting idea that didn't make it into the movie.
• Gaming the Iron Curtain by Jaroslav Švelch. This very readable academic work combines two of my top current interests: old computers and surviving a repressive regime.

My accomplishments

I dunno, not a lot, it feels like. I kept the lights on. I sold a Ravy Uvana story, "People of the Consortium of Worlds v. Rax, God of Misery", to Analog, and it was published in the final issue of the year. Two already published Ravy Uvana stories ("Stress Response", and "Meat") appeared in Chinese translation in Science Fiction World.

My procedural work appeared in Output, edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort.

I now work full-time at Bookshop.org and in 2025 I worked on a couple big projects, primarily the ebook store and reading system.

Thanks to the deadlines of my writing group I finished three new stories: "The Spare", "The Arcade, The Marble, The Door", and "We're From The Help and We're Here to Government". The Constellation Speedrun is still sitting around waiting for me to get an agent. I've got two new novel ideas but it's a struggle to get anything on the page.

• Samurai Shifters (2019): Like Shall We Dance? I've been looking for this one for a while ever since I missed it at the 2019 Japan Cuts festival. Finally got a chance to see it and... it's all right. A fun and goofy take on a samurai flick, mixed with too much overt sentimentality for my taste.
• The Perfect Furlough (1958): Dames, dames, dames! Who doesn't love 'em? The boys up at the Arctic research station sure do, especially that hot tamale they've discovered crashed in an ancient alien spacecraft. Va-va-voom! ... Wait, I've gotten this movie mixed up with The Thing (1982).

  Anyway, dames. This movie's got 'em, and it's even a bit wholesome in a comedically sexist 1958 way, since Tony Curtis is lusting after his real-life wife. But even as the actors on screen went through their shenanigans and mixups that could have been avoided with some basic communication, I couldn't stop thinking about the Arctic research station and the stir-crazy flyboys we see in the first part of the movie. Even if you don't go full The Thing, there's got to be a more interesting movie there.

• Hundreds of Beavers (2022): Saw it on the big screen at IFC and in doing so discovered that Hundreds of Beavers is on its way to becoming a Rocky Horror-type cult film. Well-deserved, I say. It's always fun to be in a theater full of people who can't stop laughing.

  In my original #💯🦫 review I complained that the first 30 minutes of the film are "an aimless mess of laughs" and that's true if you haven't seen the movie before—i.e. it's still basically true. But this time I can see the aim: the first 30 minutes are the movie's tutorial. Sort of like in What's Up, Doc? the first act is there to show you that this movie operates by Looney Tunes cartoon logic. That's why you have rabbits at the start of the movie even though they don't play a big role later on: rabbits are the tutorial animal.

I'm pointing today's Television Spotlight on Pluribus, the beautiful and depressing show where they give Vince Gilligan Apple TV money. I recommend Pluribus, but having completed the first season, I think you can wait a while to get into it. It goes at its own rate, and the two-year-or-longer wait while they write and film the second season is really messing up the pacing.

This month Sumana and I also watched the 2002 PBS reality miniseries Frontier House, and had a good time watching people put up log cabins and mow hay. Pretty interesting to watch people from the dial-up era talk about getting away from the distractions of modern life. It was ever thus, I guess.

• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) One of those post-Bonnie and Clyde films that defies conventional notions of story structure. Save the cat? There's no cat here at all! Just senseless violence, though fortunately depicted with spectacular stunts rather than gore effects. I loved the train robbery scenes, loved the language-barrier bank robberies when BC&tSK move to Bolivia. I dunno what's up with the bicycle scene or the bouncy Henry Mancini tune, seems tonally inconsistent, but that's the New Hollywood for ya.
• Claudine (1974): A really nice romcom with good attention paid to character development, especially Claudine's oldest son. James Earl Jones is great as the love interest. The scenes with the social worker go alongside the unemployment office scene in Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) as satirical indictments of the now-dismantled welfare state.

  I've mentioned before that I often go to the Museum of the Moving Image looking for hidden gems, films I've never heard of but which turn out to be something really special, and Claudine is one of those for me.

• Please Turn Over (1959): When it comes to double entendres, this is of those postwar British movies that wants to have it both ways. (Nudge nudge, wink wink.) It's absolutely loaded with phwoar, but the phwoar is smothered in layers of framing devices so that nothing dirty actually happens. It's a movie, guys! We know it's fiction. It's a lot of cinematic work to go through just to show a woman en deshabille.

  Halfway through Please Turn Over, safely ensconced in framing devices, the actors get to do some Unfaithfully Yours-style acting and play the polar opposites of the milquetoast characters they established outside of the framing devices. This is the most fun part of the film... except, I would argue, the ending. That's where Jo's parents tell her that although she has slandered them and her entire town, ruining everyone's reputation, they're proud of her for getting her novel published. Now that's supportive!

• What's Up, Doc? (1972): Peter Bogdanovich, man, what a director! When he wants to make a drama, he makes a boring slice-of-life thing like The Last Picture Show that wins all the serious awards. When he switches to comedy, he knocks it out of the park with this and its immediate follow-up Paper Moon, which are among the funniest movies I've ever seen. You've got to admire that level of talent.

  I saw What's Up, Doc? at the museum and it was pretty much nonstop laughs from the audience. It includes a car chase that's so funny it took a good three minutes before I noticed "this is a car chase in a 20th-century Hollywood comedy, those are boring" and another two minutes until I actually got bored. Unfortunately, it kept going for like three minutes after that. Apart from that, a stellar movie that accomplishes something normally thought impossible—recapturing a dead genre of film without emplying revisionism, nostalgia, or ironic distance. This isn't even a period piece: it's a real screwball comedy set in 1972. It's great stuff. Barbra Streisand really elevates the comedy, a phenomenon I've dubbed "the Streisand Effect."

  I did find one part of the movie hard to read initially: I didn't get why Judy is so cruel to Eunice. The movie itself isn't cruel to Eunice—she and Howard achieve a Billy Wilder-esque mutual cheating arrangement and she ends up with Max from The Muppet Movie. Then it clicked: Judy is Bugs Bunny, and Eunice is her Elmer Fudd. I spent the whole movie thinking Howard was Elmer Fudd, but he's actually... a really big carrot, I guess?

• Hopscotch (1980): Yes, a film I saw a long time ago and forgot to review. It wasn't that memorable, to be honest. In particular I don't think I ever felt like Walter Matthau's character was in danger.
• Truck Rascals (1975): This was entertaining enough but it felt a little bit... high-budget. The fight scenes and vehicular stunts were suspiciously well-produced for what I'd assumed was a random B-movie comedy. Then I did my usual post-film investigation and found that there were ten of these movies produced by Toei and released in a four-year time span! I guess the CB radio craze made everyone a bit truck-focused in the 70s.

  Between this and Tampopo and Supermarket Woman I feel like I'm getting a glimpse at a hidden Japanese trucker culture that only shows up in movies. I don't remember any highly customized trucks or restaurant brawls from my trip to Japan, although there was a poster at a rest stop asking you not to park your compact car into a parking space intended for a bus. Exactly the sort of thing a "Compact Car Rascal" would do.

  Anyway, the movie's fun, but I don't think I could handle nine more in the series since Wikipedia says they all have the same plot. I have watched a ton of Fast and the Furious movies though, and those don't have any plot at all, so who knows?

• Joysticks (1983): Surprisingly, this 80s sex comedy about arcade games is not a good movie. The most enjoyable things about it are all bad things. Like the very first scene, where I was thinking "it doesn't look like they got a permit for this" and yes, they were just filming a movie with topless nudity in the middle of an LA street.

  Then there's the brief flight of fancy where the arcade owner (who's not sleazy enough to be funny and not emotion-y enough to be sympathetic) claims to the town worthies that his arcade is no den of sin, but a place of learning where he teaches computer science to underprivileged girls, creating new opportunities for women in STEM. The chalkboard behind him has a flowchart of the sort you'd draw if you'd looked at a book about data processing several weeks ago.

  The games themselves are filmed well, and it's pretty cool to have a tournament machine where the competitors must control a joystick that's as big as they are. But... the only joke in this supposed comedy which I would classify as "funny" is the way King Vidiot's groupies mutter the Burgertime song in unison as they shuffle around like zombies. That's, like, a Futurama-level joke.

• Paperhouse (1988): A child's magical drawing powers are rendered horrific and grotesque by the fact that kids can't draw for crap. This was a really pleasant surprise, not only in the clever concept and the Tiny Art Director-esque set and prop design, but in the screenplay's sympathy for the way everything seems emotionally huge and super important when you're a kid. Anna's dad shows up as a horrifying slasher-movie monster in the dream world, but in real life he's just a normal father who's absent and a bit distant.

  In possibly the greatest movie endorsement in cinema history, first-time actress Charlotte Burke never appeared in another film because (via the director via IMDB trivia) "she really loved Paperhouse so much, that she never wanted to do anything else and was done with acting."

• Minbo: The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (1992): Saw it with Sumana as part of our gradual Jūzō Itami catalog watch. This is a really didactic movie, in that it is structured to train you, a random civilian, how to deal with blustery yakuza. This means that there's a lot of wimpiness in the first part of the movie as the characters find their bearings. Eventually it picks up though and you get some good solidarity as the entire hotel staff, from the cleaning women to the Uncle Pennybags-looking chairman, stand together. Sumana posted her thoughts on the film to Metafilter.
• Tree of Life (2011): I admit I wanted to not like this movie. It's such a pretentious concept. I wouldn't have watched, except I wanted to get out of the house and that's what was playing at the museum. But... it's pretty good! I was engaged the whole time, even though most of the scenes would sound really slow if I were to describe them to you. The dinosaur scene, in particular, really moved me in a way I'm not sure how to articulate. (Not the plesiosaur scene, plesiosaurs aren't dinosaurs.) I was also getting an Omega Point vibe from the ending, which is... underutilized in film, I would say.

  I also love that they brought Douglas Trumbull out of retirement for one... more... job. Although I don't think this movie came up when I saw him in person at the ST:TMP screening in 2020. Disjunct audiences, I guess.

• A League of Their Own (1992): Forgot to review this when we watched it, and that was so long ago I don't think I can do a really detailed review. This was fun, though. Lots of star power, the look of that distinctively 1990s version of the 1940s... it's a feel-good classic! Come on, you probably watched this movie before I did, you know how it goes.
• After Hours (1985): Remember how "computer" used to be a job that people had? Well, Paul, the main character in this movie, is a word processor. You can hear him shout it near the end: "I'm just a word processor!" As such, Martin Scorsese has some pre-Wolf of Wall Street fun lovingly panning through Paul's midtown office with all of its cool 1985 technology. (I'm guessing those are dumb terminals connected to an on-site mainframe.) But then Paul decides to go out and have some nighttime fun in the Big Apple, and his trouble begins.

  Overall this was fun; I was thinking it would be a fast-paced picaresque trip through Soho, but it went slowly back and forth between just a few different locations, adding layers of complexity to the characters each time.

  I'm reminded of Very Bad Things (1998), a comedy that has a similar relentless focus on everything going wrong, which I really disliked when I saw it on a free student preview ticket. After coming out of the theater having enjoyed After Hours I wondered if I just wasn't in the mental space to enjoy a comedy as dark as Very Bad Things.

  But After Hours, although dark, isn't misanthropic. When the worst thing in this movie happens, the community rallies. When someone incorrectly thinks Paul is a burglar, the community rallies again (admittedly, by forming a lynch mob and hunting him down). It's much more positive. My point is that Very Bad Things still sucks, 27 years later. I'll never forget!

In news of TV Spotlight, Sumana and I have caught up on "For All Mankind", Ron Moore's second TV show about how you should never install the software updates. We're enjoying the alt-history even though its treatment of the Internet got really weird in the fourth season. I will say I like the "this space base is really cramped and we're starving/going crazy" setups better than the "there are a lot of people on this space base and we're causing soap opera drama for each other" setups, but they are switching back and forth between them pretty reliably as humanity expands through the solar system.

• Grosse Pointe Blank (1997): Every scene in this movie made me happy. It's not the tightest screenplay, it's got a lot of minor characters and backstory that aren't relevant to the plot, and you don't need the feds at all, but all of it is fun and I'm glad they put it in. If the screenplay was really tight it wouldn't fit the emotional mood; you'd expect something more action-forward like Die Hard.

  Old video game watch: as soon as I saw the Doom II arcade game in the convenience store I thought "this prop that had to be created specifically for the movie does not bode well for this convenience store in a film that both critiques and celebrates action-movie violence." Maybe not in those words.

• Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935): On a slow evening I picked this movie for the obvious Lebowski connection reasons. This 61-minute film felt more like a serial than a "movie", though such distinctions were still fuzzy in 1935. Gene Autry plays a character named "Gene Autry" which I guess implies that the evil dad in this movie is his actual dad?

  I dunno. The whole thing makes very little sense, but the music was good, and in that respect it sets the tone for the entire "singing cowboy" genre. I would judge the old movie racism level in this one as medium, but I think their heart was in the right place?

• Parade (1974): The scene: Jacques Tati is in movie jail after Playtime cost one gazillion francs, so he turns to sources of foreign funding. By this point—his final film—he's reduced to doing his nightclub act for Swedish television. There is some astonishing juggling in this movie, and some more of Tati's philosophy that we are all little kids playing dress-up and pretending through life. But as for the rest of it... "mime of sporting events" isn't even a comedy category anymore, and for good reason.
• The Phoenician Scheme (2025): Love the graphic design as always. The madcap, sketchlike quest plot keeps things moving. But in classic "Leonard goes in imagining the movie he wishes he'd made" style, the trailer made me believe that the titular scheme was to unite the greater Middle East into a recreation of the ancient Phoenician civilization, a scheme that would naturally have great-power geopolitical implications and lead to a lot of violent pushback. But actually this film takes place in an alternate universe where the Middle East has already been conveniently unified into a single* country as of the 1960s, allowing Wes Anderson to make his usual goofy Wes Anderson film without it getting all heavy and topical.
• Ocean's Eleven (2001): There is a Merry and Pippin in this movie. In fact, this movie's almost beat-for-beat the same as Logan Lucky (2017) which I saw first and like better. It's not bad by any means, just not as good as Logan Lucky.
• Superman (2025): I've remained aggressively normcore about superhero stuff even as it takes over more and more of pop culture. My takes are the most middling ones you can imagine. I liked Iron Man (2008) and then I thought the trend went out of control. I think Batman is goofy and that Batman stories should lean into the inherent goofiness. And when it comes to Superman, my tastes are simple: I want to see a powerful, well-intentioned person wrestling with the fact that enormous power and good intentions aren't enough to solve every problem. Suffice to say that this movie delivered.
• Ruggles of Red Gap (1935): Definitely not a B picture. Charles Laughton mixes a feel-good American immigrant story with a helping of humorous British culture-clash snobbery. Ruggles is a great character, someone who can deeply believe both "All men are created equal" and "Blood will tell". The book is on Project Gutenberg if you want more of that style of humor.
• Ragtag (2023): I have a fondness for films that are supercuts of clips from other films. Though it's becoming really easy to put such films together without doing any substantive creative work, so as a viewer you gotta be careful. In The Afterlight (2021) the idea was to show the same kind of scene from many different movies. Here it's more like stretching video out, playing it back and forth, turning cinema into something closer to an animated GIF.

  Also like The Afterlight, Ragtag was born of a director deciding to watch a ton of movies during lockdown. And presumably torrenting them all because how else are you going to get all that footage into Final Cut Pro? Hey, I'm not judging.

• Born Yesterday (1950): Continuing our Holliday holiday with this lighthearted tale of political corruption. I hypothesized this in an earlier review, but Holliday's character in this one is a direct antecedent to Elle in Legally Blonde: a smart person who's never had to be smart before. Really enjoyable.

• The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956): Another film where Judy Holliday brasses her way into getting what she wants because she's worth it. Her film persona is often described as a "ditz". I haven't seen Born Yesterday, whose title implies it has something to say on the issue, but I feel like that's not quite right, or maybe the meaning of "ditz" has changed over the years.

  I feel like "ditz" implies a level of absent-mindedness, like Lucy Ricardo. But so far the distinguishing feature of Judy Holliday's characters is that they believe women are equal to men. Not in an overtly militant way, just always acting from a position of equality with all other human beings. The world throws a lot of bullshit in their path to try to dissuade them from this attitude, but they ignore or plow through it. A more recent version of this character might be Elle from Legally Blonde (2001).

  You could say that this belief is fine in 2001 but naive in 1956, and Laura in The Solid Gold Cadillac is pretty easy to manipulate, which I guess is where "ditz" comes from. But since these are feel-good comedies and not the real 1950s, Laura's stubbornness wins through and she is proven correct. So really, she has an accurate view of the universe in which she lives.

• Three Ages (1923): Sort of a proto-History of the World, Part I but I didn't like that movie very much either. Some slapstick, a couple of great stunts, a soupçon of 1920s racism. There is a laugh-out-loud joke right at the end, but does this film really need to be four reels long? You're just making more work for the preservationists, Buster.
• Full of Life (1956): We're surely going to watch every Judy Holliday movie, so this won't dissuade me, but she wasn't very wacky in this one. It turns out her all-too-brief career is not an uninterrupted streak of inspired comedy chaos, and thus this was only kinda enjoyable.

  Apparently the screenplay was toned down from something more "frank", so you're left with a kitchen-sink dramedy that's extremely tame by today's mega-frank standards. Whereas The Solid Gold Cadillac still feels fresh, and It Should Happen To You feels maybe even more transgressive than before in its portrayal of low-stakes feminine obsession.

"He's in love with Daisy," said Jordan, with as much certainty as if she'd added the tags and written the content note herself. "Maybe Tom," she hedged, "but Tom's an asshole. Daisy's nice enough." This belief of Jordan's — that Daisy was any less obnoxious than Tom — was the first of many alarms I missed as I dropped like a flipped coin on the unalterable trajectory of my relationship with her.

Available for cheap as an EPUB or PDF!

• Sinners (2025): This movie has one of the best individual movie scenes I've ever seen. If you've seen it you know which scene. It's a transcendent standout in what is otherwise a pretty good monster movie. A little crowded, maybe. I liked the first half (talky setup) more than the second half (monsters) but I think that's how I feel about horror movies in general.

  Fun monsters, though. The vampires in Sinners are very zombie-ish, and seem to have some kind of hive mind, which makes them pleasingly Borg-like and also feeds into their creepy Manson Family thing.

• The Great Waldo Pepper (1975): Here's a fun trick: watch this movie and then watch The Right Stuff (1983). They're very similar movies, but film nerds still remember The Right Stuff and nobody's ever heard of this flick, even though it's a big Robert Redford action spectacular. That's because Star Wars happened in 1977 and changed moviemaking, and now nobody makes this kind of movie anymore, they only make Right Stuff-type movies. Waldo Pepper is full of amazing, ill-advised live aerial stunts that don't feel as exciting as they must have pre-Star Wars.

  Bonus: I can't think of another movie that makes you look at the title of the movie for as much screentime as this one does, because it's painted on the side of Waldo's biplane. This film is famous for coining the unforgettable catchphrase, "There's Waldo!"

• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016): Speaking of Star Wars, you dig that Andor season 2? Good stuff. We did a Rogue One rewatch and it really highlights how much better Andor was than even good Star Wars movies. Rogue One feels like a rough draft now. Great art direction as always.

• Johnny Dangerously (1984): The first 30 minutes of this movie are really, really funny; a nonstop gag assault in the style of Airplane!. Then the plot happens, and the comedy kind of loses momentum. It's still pretty funny though, and if you're one of the few living people who still watches old gangster movies you'll appreciate this long-overdue parody. I do think this movie would have been more successful if it had come out in the mid-1960s, but Hollywood was in one of its periodic "comedies don't need to be funny" phases.

• Midnight Diner (2014): Kind of saw this one out of order. I thought the TV series came afterwards but looking at Wikipedia I see that the series and movies are intermingled. Oh well!

  Though this wasn't the only thing the movie was going for, I thought it was at its best in scenes like the opening one, achieving a cozy feeling of being in a quiet restaurant with colorful characters from different walks of life. It's a bit anthology-ish, and felt hit-and-miss in a way that I think bodes well for just watching the TV show.

Since this was a short one, I'll also mention that Sumana and I have been watching a lot of the now-on-hiatus ABC show "Holey Moley," which features a real sports anchor commentating an infernokrusher miniature golf tournament. It's a real "America: The Good Parts" kind of show: a celebration of different kinds of people with diverse skills, who can improvise in ridiculous situations and are willing to charge headlong into seemingly impossible problems. The contrast between the fine motor control necessary to sink a putt and the broad slapstick involved in running up a glycerin-soaked ramp never gets old, or at least it hasn't yet.

I'll start by tooting my own horn, because why not. I had two stories published in 2024: "Expert Witness" (A Ravy Uvana Story) in Analog and "The Blanket Thief" (cozy fantasy) in the Winter 2024 issue of Baubles From Bones. You can hear me read "Expert Witness" on the Analog podcast.

I gave a talk at PyCon US, How to maintain a popular Python library for most of your life without with burning out", and I was honored with the Python Software Foundation Community Service Award. I wrote two as-yet-unpublished stories in 2024, "A Tomorrow Problem" and "Cause of Action" (both in the Ravy Uvana universe).

Now, on to things not created by me. The Crummy.com Game of the Year is Balatro, a game that doubles down on the part of roguelikes I enjoy the most: the clever creation of wacky, game-breaking combinations from randomly presented choices. Honorable mention to Slice & Dice, the roguelike I have on my phone to stop myself from doomscrolling.

Other games of note: Animal Well and Baldur's Gate 3. I was really into BG3 and played it exclusively up until the point of my Japan trip, but when I came back the spell had been broken and I can't get back into it to finish it.

The Crummy.com Book of the Year is Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks. The story of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park has been well told, but I'd never before considered the parallel story of the people creating codes for Allied intelligence to use. This memoir was a fascinating look into bureaucratic infighting; logistics nightmares; the simultaneous invention of one-time pads; and the difficulties of trying to give cryptographic training to a rotating cast of strong-willed characters who, Wikipedia will tell you, frequently do not survive the war.

I spent a lot of 2024 reading comic crime novels for research. I read a bunch of Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books (Drowned Hopes stands out but I don't recommend that as your first one), Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, Kyril Bonfiglioli's art scam trilogy (I tried to watch Mortdecai (2015) but couldn't get through the first friggin' scene), and the first three of Sarah Caudwell's academic/lawyer murder mysteries.

Also of note: the manga Yokohama Station SF, The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, old issues of the trade publication The Soda Fountain, and the really funny The Husbands by my friend Holly Gramazio.

• The Iron Sheriff (1957): Above-average western focusing on the psychological stress of being the only sheriff in town but having a major conflict of interest during an investigation. A little bit of noir and mystery in there. Good stuff.
• The Quiller Memorandum (1966): George Segal as a spy? I was dubious. But the sort of spy he plays is the kind who pretends to be a doofy backslapping George Segal American, which made for some fun interrogation scenes. Was it really an act, though? I have serious doubts about Quiller's tradecraft, like when he sets up a timed explosion without making sure he has a clear escape route. Also, I don't think he ever writes the titular memorandum.

  Great location shots of 1960s West Berlin, similar to what you see in Assignment K but in a better movie.

• Quick Change (1990): Saw this on a date with Sumana and we both loved it. Like Working Girl and Something Wild, this is one of those excellent 80s comedies that have slipped through history's cracks despite having big stars and big laughs. They could be considered rom-coms, but they don't fit the Nora Ephron formula which has persisted to the present day. And they're not designed to appeal to teenage boys who are now middle-aged, like Big Trouble in Little China or Ghostbusters. But man, this is a great movie, full of minor characters who get their time to shine. I've been seing Jason Robards a lot in his "handsome leading man" phase (A Million Clowns, Once Upon A Time In The West) and it's good to see him still getting work in his "crusty police chief" era.

  While discussing this film with Sumana afterwards I had cause to look at the Film Roundup Roundup films for 1990, and I hereby propose that Quick Change, Mo' Better Blues and Gremlins 2: The New Batch are all taking place at the same place and the same time. IMDB trivia backs me up: "The bank was located at 101 Park Avenue, just across the street from 100 Park Avenue were Gremlins 2 was filmed." Quite a busy weekend at 40th and Park!

  IMDB trivia also says that Ron Howard turned down the chance to direct because he couldn't find a character to root for in this movie. This explains Ron Howard's directorial style as much as the Ron Howard/Billy Wilder anecdote explains Billy Wilder's. PS: if you're stuck, you can always root for the punctilious bus driver. He's just trying to keep the city running!

• Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024): A fun movie, but I wish they'd come up with a brand new villain. Instead they brought back Feathers McGraw, who's enjoyable, but I think this trend of creative people mining their past triumphs is getting a little worrisome. If we must mine the past for Wallace & Gromit villains, why not bring back the stop-motion monstrosities from the Peter Gabriel "Sledgehammer" music video? Just throwing out ideas here.
• Thirty-Day Princess (1934): With a title like that you'd expect this to be a Lifetime original from 2015, but with a screenplay credit for Preston Sturges you'd expect it to be better than that, and it is. A Prince and the Pauper-type screwball farce with a pretty long automat scene. Cary Grant hasn't got The Voice down yet. It's all right.
• The Last Married Couple in America (1980): George Segal and Natalie Wood are always fun but this was more successful as a time capsule than as a comedy. Also, I have to point out the shadow hypothesis that this movie never dares to mention: Jeff and Mari may actually be causing their friends' marriages to break up, draining their compatibility energy to keep their own relationship afloat. I think this is a really strong possibility, given that at the end of the movie they're able to destroy another couple's marriage just by spending five minutes alone in a room with them. The power of their love vampirism can't be overstated.
• Inspector Ike (2020): A "loving parody", as they say, of 70s detective shows, which is also a decent Columbo-style mystery. I really enjoyed this because... well, it's a goofy version of Columbo. Nuff said. Can't wait for Poker Face season 2? Check this out. I do wish Aparna Nancherla had a bigger part, but it feels like a "I'll do one day of filming as a favor" kind of part.
• One, Two, Three (1961): Rewatch with James. Still a hilarious movie, an all-time great at making me laugh. Almost 20 years after we first saw this film, Scarlett's "Well, bye!" is still a common reference in our household.
• It Happened Tomorrow (1944): The strange sequel to It Happened One Night. A fun light fantasy story, with the fantasy element being slightly more fantastic than It's A Wonderful Life. I thought the most fun part of this movie was its illustration of how an artifact from the future swiftly ceases to be interesting or valuable once your timeline catches up with the time of its production. It's not from the future anymore!
• Batman Returns (1992): I wasn't expecting this, but this is way better than the 1989 Batman, and it's completely down to Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's a movie all about the villains, with Batman himself being almost absent. Batman (1989) was also all about the villain, but with an annoying amount of time dedicated to Batman himself.

  The Batman Returns screenplay doesn't really need Batman at all, though the marketing surely does. This could easily be the story of Catwoman and Penguin attempting to team up and then destroying one another. When he is on screen, Michael Douglas has the same blasé attitude towards the part which he'd display (I have to admit) to greater effect in Birdman (2014).

  I didn't know Christopher Walken was in this, but he Walkens his way through this movie and it's a treat. One of the most Tim Burton-compatible actors. Speaking of Burton, I've seen enough of his movies now that certain aesthetic choices are repeating. I guess I'd classify him as a wackier version of David Lynch? He really puts his id on the screen, but not in a way that's terribly hard to figure out. Spirals and stripes; the guy loves spirals and stripes.

  And I just realized this while writing this Film Roundup: the scene in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl where they're tracking the gnomes through the sewers is a clear reference to the part of Batman Returns where Batman is tracking the penguins through the city streets. The UI is the same and really, the penguins in this movie should've used the sewers. Good call, Feathers McGraw.