Mon Oct 02 2023 13:18 September Film Roundup: A few years ago I praised a company I have little positive to say about, Amazon, for keeping alive the tradition of video rental in a video-on-demand world. The medium of film has an enormous midlist and backlist that is culturally important but apparently has has no economic value. The video store used to be the cineaste's low-cost ticket to this endless backlog. Now I'm here to praise another company I have little positive to say about, Fox, for upping the ante by acquiring Tubi.

Tubi has monetized thousands of classic films by giving them the cable TV treatment. Occasional commercials for DoorDash will interrupt your viewing of that 1971 sex comedy, but you can watch a ton of obscure and sometimes good! movies whenever you want, without doing something tacky like resorting to piracy or spending money. I think just about everything we saw this month, we saw on Tubi. Big recommendation if it's available in your area.

• Moulin Rouge! (2001): If you were 15 years too young for Phantom, your ride has arrived. After watching it I said "I bet Rachel loved that one." One text later, here's Rachel's review: "I was obsessed with that film when it came out. It's the same old story though (La Boheme, Rent)." Nailed it!

  I liked the fast-paced bits and thought the rest was boring. But apparently moviegoers in 2001 just weren't ready for a feature film cut like a music video, and there was some Rite of Spring-like unrest at the Cannes premiere.

  When Nicole Kidman gave her first tiny cough, Sumana and I just looked at each other. Nothing needed to be said; this chick is doomed! Susanna (who also saw the movie recently) said she had to explain that to her kids.

  While I'm here... the quote from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in this movie reminded me that when I was in college I saw "Here we are now, entertain us," verbatim, in a book from the 1960s about hosting parties, which I bought from Goodwill. (Ie. "Your guests will arrive and immediately expect your attention, with an attitude of 'here we are now, entertain us.'") I've never been able to find that quote or that book again; it's not the kind of book that gets held in university libraries, which is how old books get into Hathi Trust or Google Books. But I remember it jumping out at me, and I've always wondered if it was independent invention, or if Kurt Cobain also saw that book and swiped the line, the way he took the title of the song from the graffiti Kathleen Hanna wrote on his bedroom wall.

• Phfft! (1954): Even Dreamworks Entertainment wouldn't dare name a movie after a fart noise today, but Columbia Pictures boldly went forward into the Flatulent Fifties. (A well-known nickname for the decade, which is now forgotten, but likely to be revived in a mere 27 years!) Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday were pretty fun as the temporarily divorced couple, but Kim Novak really stole the show with her horny weirdo character. This movie also features a timely warning about dames:

  

• It Should Happen To You (1954): Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon... together at first! In the story of a woman who just wants a totally random thing and won't take no for an answer. This was the highlight of the month, because of its oddball premise and the chemistry between the leads, which is stronger than it would be in Phfft! since they're not playing divorced. Judy Holliday is a powerhouse and it's a huge loss that she died so young.

  In retrospect it is not surprising that the part of Gladys Glover was originally written for Danny Kaye. Gladys is way more stubborn than your average 1950s female lead would be. The traditional "taming of the shrew" section, where the ambitious woman learns to get with the program and settle down, is completely earned for once, because Gladys's ambitions are goofy and she has realized them, far past the point where they brought her any happiness.

  It Should Happen To You includes one of the best negotiation scenes I've seen in a movie:

  "Now, what I had in mind was this: that we share the sign. Then we'd all be happy."
  "I'm happy now!"

  Gotta remember that one.

• Who's Minding The Mint? (1967): Stupid, stupid movie with the '60s look I love. I can't get enough of these beautifully shot, not-that-funny comedies, and they all seem to star Jim Hutton; he was also in The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962). One good thing I'll say about this movie is: it starts off showing Hutton's character committing borderline fraud by exploiting free trials of luxury goods (presumably a new innovation at the time), but this is portrayed as a harmless, lighthearted it-sticking to the man. Rather than the minor character flaw that pulls him, over the course of this movie, deeper and deeper into a very serious federal crime.

  Perfect riff no one will get: "This was the original Dogecoin rugpull." Wait, I can link to the movie on Tubi! Perfect riff is at 1:07:20. You might have to endure a DoorDash ad.

• Man's Favorite Sport? (1964): I've seen sly in-jokes in Rock Hudson movies about the star's homosexuality, but this just seems cruel. In Man's Favorite Sport? Hudson plays a famous fisherman, a respected author of fishing books and model for anglers everywhere, a guy whose claim to fame is his ability to reel 'em in like nobody's business... but he's never been fishing and he hates fish! Of course, the part was originally written for Cary Grant, so I might be reading too much into this.

  Oh, yeah, another problem: the part was originally written for Cary Grant, but it's 1964. Howard Hawks wanted to do a follow-up to Bringing Up Baby, his prior animal-themed screwball comedy. But that was twenty-five years earlier! By 1964 everyone was too old and didn't want to do it and it would have made no sense, so Howard Hawks got Rock Hudson to do a Cary Grant impression (it's terrible) and cast Paula Prentiss in the Katharine Hepburn role (she's all right).

  Although this is funnier and much more sophisticated than Who's Minding The Mint?, it's is ultimately another 1960s sex-comedy train wreck with amazing Midcentury Modern set design. Rated F for some cruelty to stunt fish.

• The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic (2021): In a rare occurrence for me, I watched this movie without knowing the genre, and was pleasantly surprised when what seemed like a slow slice-of-life thing became something very different. (I won't go into specifics; read a review if you want.) Showcases Leonard's golden rule of garnering audience sympathy: you know what your audience is doing right now (watching a movie), so get on their side with a character who also likes doing that. This is why everybody sympathizes with Myrus in Situation Normal, BTW: he loves reading speculative fiction.
• It's Trad, Dad! (1962): a.k.a. Ring-A-Ding Rhythm, but who can resist the idea of reactionaries revolting against something called "trad"? A remarkable document of American soft power immediately before the Beatles counterattacked. These Brit kids are totally obsessed with jazz and American pop culture. Why? Don't make me tap the sign. [Sign says: IT'S TRAD, DAD!]

  The film is a series of skits interrupted by musical numbers, like SNL with more music, but the skits are mostly fun and the music's all right. A lightweight but entertaining debut for... the guy who'd be directing A Hard Day's Night two years later. Sometimes you wonder "whatever happened to them?", and sometimes the answer is obvious.

  I should mention we came to this movie via its star Helen Shapiro; we heard her singing a song on Heardle Decades and really liked her voice. She was so big, the Beatles opened for her! Now that's trad, dad!

• The Lady Is Willing (1942): I have to think this is a misleadingly saucy title for a movie designed to juice ticket sales. The movie poster has a random baby (BABY COREY) on it, and we all know that babies mean sex—if only in a flashback.

  Unfortunately, Marlene Dietrich isn't the right actress for this part—it's more a Judy Holliday sort of ditz part—and the screenplay's not that funny anyway. Its romantic view of how the maternal instinct leads to hilarious kidnapping and tender child endangerment hasn't aged well. Admittedly that makes this movie sound like Raising Arizona, which would have been a pretty cool picture show in 1942, but that wasn't what they were going for.

  Fred MacMurray is all right as the Vulcan-like pediatrician who hates kids... until he comes into close proximity to BABY COREY! Who could have guessed?

Finally, a Television Spotlight from another online streaming service; specifically, Freevee and its Emmy-nominated original series Jury Duty. I started out a reluctant watcher, but was ultimately charmed by the way Ronald, the patsy in this hyper-orchestrated reality show, keeps showing compassion and decency even as he's confronted by one weird reality show twist after another. If not for that anchoring, I would definitely have dropped out. I also appreciated how the last episode is basically a behind-the-scenes documentary.

Mon Sep 04 2023 11:04 August Film Roundup:

• 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt (1964): The traditional film seen a while ago that I forgot to round up until Sumana reminded me. A low-budget sex comedy with a brilliant premise (illicit timesharing of an expensive psychiatrist), some Mamie Van Doren jiggle, and maybe three funny jokes. The sort of film you'd see on an R-rated MST3K.

  The "three funny jokes" thing makes me think there's a lot of these old movies that could be edited down to the length of a TikTok video. It'd be the film school equivalent of those one-page summaries of business books so you don't have to read the book. "But Leonard," you might say, "that only works because those business books only have about one page of real content in the first place. It has to be padded into book form because that's how such insights are sold in modern society." To you I say: I have some bad news about movies.

• Winny (2023): A decent biopic of a piece of software which IMO lionizes developers too much. Maybe that's a side effect of the dramatization because the issues are complex, but if any nation's film industry can make "This approach to law enforcement would criminalize basic research!" exciting, it would be Japan's. Rise to the challenge, I say.
• Free Guy (2021): I saw this movie and it was pretty fun but I really don't have much to say about it because I already said it all in "Dana no Chousen".

  Early in the story, Guy obtains an extra pair of magic sunglasses, but nothing comes of it and it never gets used. Most scholars see this as evidence of editorial fatigue on the part of the redactor as they excised a scene from the film—itself a copy of a parable from the Carpenter Scrolls—in which Buddy gets his own pair of sunglasses.

• Barbie (2023): Very clever and fun. Everything from the actors' body language to the random and inexplicable plot twists indicate that the director is playing with the Barbie franchise the way a child plays with an individual Barbie doll. The normal Hollywood movie beats happen, but the film's so chaotic that an act break acts as a kind of refresher, like the quiet catch-your-breath scene following a chase in an action movie. I do not usually laugh out loud (or LOL, as the handy abbreviation puts it) while watching movies, but Barbie got me several times.
• The Band's Visit (2007): Although I scoff at the traditional Hollywood three-act structure (and just did) I do prefer movies with a through-line. I rarely enjoy the type of film that presents a series of disconnected, nearly stochastic skits, but this one was really fun. I think the unity of time on display gives it a sort of through-line, and the decision to focus on just a couple of the many quirky characters stops it from getting scattershot the way Muppet movies are these days. This was made into a stage musical, but I think the amount of music here is just right: the bulky instruments are basically just big inconvenient pieces of luggage until the final scene.
• Kittu Puttu (1977): DNF, as they say. This was on a DVD Sumana brought back from India and we could not find English subtitles for it anywhere, so Sumana tried translating the dialogue for a while, but it wasn't very rewarding so we gave up. Supposedly there's a split-screen dual role later on, which could provide some gags, or at least cheesy low-budget fun.
• Starman (1984): John Carpenter tries to deliver a heartwarming rom-com, and only reveals the horror movie at the heart of every rom-com. It's like a pre-deconstruction of the Hallmark Channel genre, where the new lover and the creepy stalker and the dead husband are all the same guy.

  I'm always here for a Carl Sagan pastiche and SF that uses the Voyager record as a plot element. And I suspect Jeff Bridges' performance here (for which he got a Best Actor nomination) was an inspiration for Brent Spiner's portrayal of Data. Would I recommend this movie? I dunno, but I always like whenever Carpenter tries something different.

• Impromptu (1991): I reluctantly agreed to watch this Masterpiece Theatre-ass movie because Sumana remembered seeing it on Masterpiece Theatre in 1993 and enjoyed it. Thirty years later, I have enjoyed it too! It's really funny! Hugh Grant is funny and frail; Judy Davis is funny and brassy. I must say that this film has one of the clearest examples I've seen of the old adage that the difference between a happy ending and a sad ending is when you stop telling the story.
• Badhaai Do (2022): A misleadingly humorous poster led us to expect a more comedic rom-com than we got, but this was all right, I thought. Rajkummar Rao continues his trend of being one of this household's favorite actors, partly because of his insistence on only taking non-generic roles.
• The Celluloid Closet (1996): Sumana saw that this was leaving Tubi and I suggested that we watch it for one reason only: so I could confirm my hypothesis that Algie the Miner (1912) is included in the movie but not the book the movie is based on. Well, it is, and looking at that old post it looks like I'd already confirmed this hypothesis. But, a good overview of (among other things) the changing techniques used to circumvent the Hays Code and the effects those circumlocutions had on people for whom they were the only source of representation seen in movies. Sumana pointed that most of the Hays censorship involved approval of scripts, so once the script was approved, there was all sorts of nonverbal stuff you could do when filming the script to get your point across.

  Gore Vidal and Susan Sarandon are a hoot, and Tom Hanks is refreshingly frank about the source of his success: "I have never been one to strike fear into anyone's hearts when I enter the room." Tell that to Sony CEO Howard Stringer, Tom.

Finally, it's a Television Spotlight on Guns & Gulaabs (2023), a crime comedy that recreates the nostalgic (for Sumana) atmosphere of India of the 90s. Which is not that different from rural California in the 80s, so I got a bit of the bittersweet air as well. Gulshan Devaiah is so sinister as the bemulleted jean-jacket assassin in this, that it was a pleasant surprise when we saw him later in the month, pursuing Rajkummar Rao once again as the goofy gay lawyer in Badhaii Do.

The series was a lot of fun and led up to a cool heist, but I don't know about calling it a comedy. Breaking Bad (clearly a big influence) has a lot of similar humor to it, but nobody tags that show as "comedy." A lot of what I think was meant to read as comedy here was actually people making stupid choices, which I don't find all that funny. You can try and make it funny to lampshade a weak plot point, but that's not what was happening here.

Mon Aug 21 2023 10:37 How to (Finally) Follow Instructions: Way back in 2012 I gave a talk about hypermedia and code-on-demand called "How To Follow Instructions". I've always thought of it as my "lost" talk, one that could have been as influential as "Justice Will Take Us Millions of Intricate Moves". I've also convinced myself that this didn't happen because I never put the text of the talk online. Unlike most of my talks, I didn't write the script ahead of time, and transcribing it was a huge/expensive job.

But ten years later, Whisper makes it cheap and easy to do basic audio transcription with a laptop. I've used Whisper to transcribe my talk and edited it into what it should have been. Some of the talk has aged poorly: the same underlying technology that transcribes the audio also makes it possible for a computer to follow some of the human-readable "instructions" I mention in the talk. But I think it was pretty prescient at describing what was happening in the world of APIs and where we've gone over the intervening decade.

Wed Aug 02 2023 17:06 Sock breakthrough!: For about four years now I've been low-key searching for a replacement for my beloved Muji recycled-yarn socks, and I'm happy to report a breakthrough, thanks to another Japanese retail brand, Uniqlo. Here's the extremely detailed report:

The closest match I've found to the old Muji recycled-yarn socks are now Uniqlo's "melange socks"; a mix of cotton (80%), nylon (16%), polyester (3%) and spandex (1%). They don't feel as heavy as the previous champion (Muji right angle pile short socks), and I wore them through a recent heat wave with no problem. They even look like the old Muji socks, with a gradient of yarn colors, which makes me think they're manufactured with the same process.

Uniqlo melange socks are available as short socks and the misleadingly longer half socks. They are a little larger than the old Muji versions, which is okay with me as I always thought the Muji "short socks" were a little too small for my feet. Apart from that, the only real difference is the cotton-dominant fabric mix, where the recycled-yarn socks were mostly polyester.

Thanks to Sumana for dragging me into a nearby Uniqlo; otherwise I would not have found these.

Tue Aug 01 2023 00:23 July Film Roundup: Sumana was out for most of the month, so it was back to my usual tricks of watching obscure crime films from the 1960s and 1970s.

• The Moonshine War (1970): Hollywood studios in 1970 know that audiences crave antiheroes! I like a good antihero but I did not like this at all, possibly because it pitted antihero against antihero. Who do you root for at that point?
• There Was A Crooked Man... (1970): Hollywood studios in 1970 know that audiences crave Midcentury Medieval! Also, antiheroes. I am closing in on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) from both directions and it does seem to be the watershed people say it was. (Haven't seen it yet.) This, by contrast, was an okay Western that is front-loaded with its best scene by far. Just watch the first scene, I'd say. It also has the earliest sympathetic portrayal of a gay couple I've seen, so you could watch it for that. Oh, there's a food fight, too, but it's too cynical to feel fun.

  This film was filmed inside a national park and involved the very careful creation and demolition of one of the biggest location sets ever to avoid ecological impact. Was it really worth it?

• Asteroid City (2023): If you go to see a Wes Anderson movie in the theater and you don't sit in the middle seat, I don't even know why you're going. Everyone else in the theater with me disagreed, which gave me an unobstructed view of all those neatly organized tool racks and tidy diner menuboards. Basically, this was a fun series of sketches with gorgeous typography.

  Asteroid City is also the rare comedy that dares to drive all of the characters crazy during the movie. (cf. Down By Law) The driving-everyone-crazy is obviously inspired by the real-world experience of the pandemic, but I'll take it. However, now that I'm writing the review, a negative aspect of the film is coming back to me, which is that this sucker is layered under so many layers of metafiction and lampshading that it feels like a defense mechanism. Is there a serious point here? Should I be feeling some kind of way or are we just having fun with a live-action Road Runner cartoon? Is this secretly Birdman?

• The French Dispatch (2021): Yes, I came out of Asteroid City and needed more Wes Anderson, I'm not ashamed to admit it. This held together a lot better than Asteroid City, possibly because the sketches were well-defined by the framing device. Recommended.
• After the Fox (1966): I came for the Peter Sellers heist, I stayed for the film industry parody, but I didn't enjoy either one a whole lot, so I don't recommend you come for either. The Neil Simon screenplay has some great gags, including the final shot, but there's so much stuff in between the gags that I think this one is best left in the vault. So instead of going into detail I'll highlight two of the less famous actors:

  First, I was really struck by how much Victor Mature's role in this movie reminded me of that ingratiating fidgety character Martin Short is always doing. I don't know what part of this is intentional but it feels like there's something there. Second, I want to put a word in for Martin Balsam, a "that guy" character actor I first saw in the MST3K Mitchell episode. I've seen him in a couple other things since and he's always solid. I think this is the first comedic role I've seen him in and he does a good job as the one reasonable guy in an insane situation. In our house we call this the Mikey Day role, after all the SNL sketches where Mikey Day is the straight man who spends the whole sketch saying "What is happening?" in an ever more exasperated tone.

• How to Steal a Million (1966): 1966 was just a year for mediocre heist movies. Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole wanted one too, and they got this one. The best thing I'll say about this one is that the basic premise—hiring a fake art thief to steal a fake statue to avoid an insurance examination—is nice and twisted; even Coen-ish, if the Coens were in a playful mood.
• What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968): Taken in the cinematic context of the time, this is old Hollywood desperately trying to win the youth back over by saying that beatniks aren't cool, cutting your hair and getting married is cool. But the youth have already seen Bonnie and Clyde and there's no going back. Nothing special. However, taken in the context of our time, this is a mind-blowing comedy about the incompetent government response to an epidemic.
  

  OK, call it whatever you want. Beat by beat, the plot reveals one echo after another, including some now-sinister moments as America's cutie-pie Mary Tyler Moore does her best to infect everyone in New York City with the virus by sabotaging masks and encouraging large gatherings. If I had to explain the existence of this movie I'd point out that both of the screenwriters probably had childhood memories of living in large cities during the 1918 flu pandemic.

  Characters who are obvious parodies of J. Edgar Hoover aren't uncommon in movies from this period; Dom Deluise has his J. Gardner Monroe in this film, but there's also Sheldon Leonard in The Brinks Job, who plays a laughable buffoon named "J. Edgar Hoover." Mayor John Lindsay, now largely forgotten, is the reason so many movies of the period are filmed in New York, and his feeding hand gets bitten by a (from our perspective) disproportionate number of filmmakers. But What's So Bad About Feeling Good? dares to take on the true power broker, depicting a virus-infected Robert Moses pastiche and his proposal to tear down the New York Stock Exchange and replace it with a playground.

  The trained toucan in this movie was cute and had good comic timing. And finally, I have to say the movie has a point. There was a lot of bullshit in the 1960s counterculture, and although What's So Bad About Feeling Good? is soaked in the same cultural cesspit and not equipped to make an effective critique, it does at least notice the problem.

• The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976): I don't usually have this problem but I couldn't see George Segal as a womanizing card sharp in Gold Rush California. I kept seeing him as his laid-off aerospace exec character from Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), giving this movie the appearance of a surreal midlife crisis. That said, this was a decent Western/rom-com, a mix of genres that would never be greenlit as a movie today but makes perfect sense in the experimental 70s. Not great, but I don't watch movies no one remembers looking for "great." (It's fun when it happens, though.)

  Goldie Hawn is fun in this and I'm starting to get the feeling that she should have gotten more quality comedic roles than she did. I also wanted to note that this movie resurrects a Western stereotype last seen in Wagon Master (1950), by portraying Mormons as stern, disapproving Puritans who really love music. There's also a Jewish wedding in this movie. Not a movie that ignores the presence of religious minorities in the Old West, is what I'm saying.

• Boeing Boeing (1965): Not a crime movie, unless sexism be a crime. I've seen movies that never get better than their first scene, but the best part of Boeing Boeing is the title. Most of the movie is a static shot of a room with people running in and out of the doors... wait a minute... yes, this was based on a play. And not a good play. Pretty dull all around. To say some good things: Thelma Ritter's all right, and Jerry Lewis is bearable (a noteworthy occasion around these Film Roundup parts). And the idea of someone's philandering plans being thrown off by advances in aviation technology is at least theoretically funny.

I'll leave you with an animation I made from What's So Bad About Feeling Good?. I like to think this shot is an homage to one of my favorite film shots of all time: Brigitte Helm as the robot winking at the camera in Metropolis.

See you next time...

Wed Jul 05 2023 13:00 June Film Roundup:

• Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005): Sumana reminded me that we saw this a long time ago and I didn't Round it Up, so it gets pride of place in this month's edition. This film has a great premise—I'd say almost timeless. The only restriction is whether the censorship regime allows it. You might be able to get away with it in 1925, and you could definitely do it in 1975—it's not that much different from Fun with Dick and Jane (1977). But this story would have made a better film in 1975 than in 2005. It could work in 2005 but only if it had a much smaller budget, just enough to pay its pretty leads.

  Basically my issue is that the bigger this film gets, the more it becomes like a generic action flick and less like a darkly comedic rom-com. The fight scene where the Smiths are destroying their yuppie house while trying to kill each other is about the level of slapstick violence I was hoping for.

• Rope (1948): A filming gimmick lets Hitchcock distract the audience from how gay this movie is, but modern audiences won't be fooled. Making us watch a big chunk of the movie with a coffin blocking the action? Nice try, Hitch, we're not terribly disturbed by that either. Now, if this film starred the Five Nights at Freddy's gang? Jumpscares galore!

  I have to say, Jimmy Stewart's character is kind of wishy-washy. He seems totally serious about his Nietzschean philosophy until he's faced with a single, obvious real-world implication, and then he immediately crumbles and starts sounding like the Hays Code. Either he should have just been making over-the-top cocktail-party chatter (in which case his character arc makes sense, and the movie becomes a commentary on Alfred Hitchcock's sense of humor), he should approve of the murder once he learns about it, or he should berate the two murderers for killing another ubermensch instead of one of the lesser specimens of humanity.

• Our Nixon (2013): Soundless home video of the Nixon White House (seized by the Feds during the Watergate investigation) is matched with the videoless recordings of Nixon's secret home taping system, creating that audiovisual brew we call a "movie". I don't know how well the two match up a lot of the time, but there are some stunning just-backstage shots, and I'm always a sucker for "contemporary documentary made from footage that got stuck in a government vault for 40 years"—see Apollo 11 (2019) for more Nixon-era excitement.
• The Preacher's Wife (1996): A fun remake with good songs. I sensed a little bit of The Angel Levine in the way Denzel Washington's angel character is wistful for his pre-death life, and a bit of Wings of Desire in his love for the sensual pleasures of street food. I was struck by how little theodicy you have to do in these lighthearted spiritual movies. Near the beginning, Courtney B. Vance's preacher has a moment of Job-like aggravation at the horrors of the world, and from then we're emotionally on board with an all-powerful God giving light supernatural help as long as He can maintain plausible deniability.

  It doesn't really fit with the rest of the movie, but I liked Dudley's angelic handbook that includes information on how to use Windows 95. I can't remember if the handbook was present in the original, but it feels like a palimpsest, offering a glance into either the original movie or an earlier draft of the screenplay.

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023): The whole time I was thinking "this pacing's a little weird", and then the pacing got very weird and it turns out this is only half a movie. This has happened to me before but it was the Lord of the Rings movies and I knew what I was getting into.

  As entertaining as the visual spectacle was, I have to question whether a multiverse based on a character defined as a rebel and an outcast would cohere around the cliche of the fortress run by a Bond villain with tons of obedient henchmen. I hear people make good money (well, bad money) making very long Youtube videos where they complain about this stuff, but you know that's not my style.

  It was cool to see some Jeff Koons sculptures get destroyed, a la Constellation Games. Sometimes the family stuff would get boring, and I'd just remind myself that this is a movie for kids. Enjoy it, kids! The nostalgia clock starts now!

• The Great Train Robbery (1978): This film provides value for money by turning the preparations for the heist into a series of mini-heists. You could do a fractal heist story in which every step of the heist preparation requires another, smaller heist, recursively. In fact, that's a good way to enjoy those dull dramas where nothing much happens: you're actually seeing a complex series of nanoheists.

  I wouldn't want to live there, but I love the look of the 1970s-studio-film version of Victorian London. (See also The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.) All that facial hair and crushed velvet. You see it in the indoors scenes in westerns of the period, as well.

• Hobson's Choice (1954): When we were watching Ted Lasso Sumana really hated the character of Rupert. He's an unsympathetic character, you're supposed to dislike him, but Sumana has a visceral and vocal dislike for that kind of sexist, manipulative blowhard. We brainstormed an ending for Ted Lasso in which Rupert dies in the most humiliating, un-masculine way possible: shitting himself to death while straining to open a jar of Marmite. At his funeral, Bex delivers the touching eulogy: "He loosened it for all of us."

  Unfortunately(?) that's not how Ted Lasso ended. But Hobson's Choice does fulfill the desire to see that kind of character exposed as a buffoon and humiliated, and it throws in another crowd-pleaser, assuming Sumana is in the crowd: a woman who doesn't care about oppressive societal conventions and either manipulates or ignores them. A fun film overall.

And now, a Television Spotlight brought to you by the letter M:

• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Sometimes a show is cancelled prematurely and has to hustle to tell its story in its final season. Sometimes it gets that other season after all and the true final season is awkward and extraneous, like Babylon 5, or Arrested Development. Sometimes it says "screw it" and spends the final season goofing off, like Star Trek: Enterprise. Mrs. Maisel does a really good job telling two seasons worth of story in one season; making heavy use of flash-forwards, quickly shunting off characters who became too expensive due to their actors starring in a Best Picture winner, and using impressive but cheap-to-film set pieces like a low-budget stage show and a Friar's Club roast. Characters get their arcs completed and Midge completes her transformation into Joan Rivers. It works.
• The Muppets Mayhem: Very much on the kid side of Muppetainment, but with a few deep cut references thrown in for the adults. (Meet the Feebles, of all things, and is that a reference to the instant-classic SNL skit at the end?)

Fri Jun 02 2023 12:55 June Film Roundup:

• The Thomas Crown Affair (1968): Like many crime movies of the 1960s, this film starts with a tense, exciting heist executed by characters about which we know nothing. In fact, we barely see any of those characters again. It's great stuff, because the characters we do meet aren't super exciting. Their archetypes are fun—bored playboy versus sultry insurance investigator—and I did have a good time while I was watching the movie, but looking back at the end of the month, it's not more than popcorn. Not even the despair of American noir or the French New Wave crime films are present.

  I guess the lesson to take from this movie is that if you're setting up a stochastic crime wave, you won't be able to vet your heist team as fully as you ought to. Food for thought!

• Major League (1989): I was amazed at how similar this film is to Ted Lasso. You might just say, that's how sports movies are, but I've seen at least three sports movies, including sports movies of the "coach teaches players to be better men" variety, and none of them are nearly this close. The setup is the same, the mustache is... pretty similar. Case closed! The inspiration is clear.

  This was before rom-coms were quite so woman-focused, so the romance subplot—a vanilla rom-com right down to the decoy boyfriend—fits in with the macho, raunchy comedy of the rest of the movie. Overall, the film is... okay. I've spent a few enjoyable days in Cleveland and it was good to see the city again.

  I first encountered Corbin Bernsen as Shawn's dad on Psych so it's fun to encounter him in his leading-man, pre-"main character's dad" phase. He's always got an understated comedic exasperation in the characters he plays.

  This is more of a personal connection, but James Gammon in this movie looks and sounds exactly like my uncle Garry did in 1989. Uncanny!

Speaking of which, let's do a Television Spotlight on Ted Lasso, which just concluded. Overall, really solid and funny. It got a little self-indulgent in the third season, but its self-indulgence mostly took the form of long character studies of characters we liked (Rebecca), or at least had grown not to dislike (Jamie).

However there is one big exception: Nate's third season story arc. We spent quite a lot of time with Nate after his heel turn at the end of season two, and if season three was Nate's season, it would have been justified. But all those leisurely studies of other characters created a major pacing problem with Nate's arc, making it drag on until he made an undramatized face turn near the very end of the show. This violates my storytelling motto: show, or tell, but do one or the other, for gosh sakes! We weren't shown this dramatic moment in Nate's life, nor we were told anything about the mental processes that led to a very consequential decision. For a show that enthusiastically wears its emotions on its sleeve, this pulling back felt very strange.

PS: Trent Crimm 4evah. Breakout character of the show. Fun IMDB fact: Crimm actor James Lance also played Richard, Daisy's boyfriend in Spaced, way back when.

And finally, a rarely seen Live Theater Showcase, starring Khan!!! The Musical!. I saw this play twice during May, and really enjoyed the mix of Trek fanservice and deep musical theater cuts which I only get thanks to reading the Playbill recaps of Schmigadoon! that explain all the references. The show is closing this weekend, but we're talking The Wrath of Khan here, so we're likely to see one remake after another over the next few decades as everyone in off-Broadway tries to recapture the original magic.

Probably my favorite gag is the way the actor playing Spock maintains Vulcan posture and body language even while tap-dancing. And the first song is a great Starfleet recruitment pitch. ("Our socialistic, low-key atheistic, both futuristic and anachronistic Starfleeeeet!") It's that kind of show.

Mon May 01 2023 21:40 April Film Roundup: Sumana was out of town for Pycon, so I saw a few films from my "Sumana probably won't like this" queue of movies from the 60s and 70s.

• The Drowning Pool (1975): Paul Newman is an actor I only recently discovered. He did all his big films before I started watching movies, or (in most cases) was born. So, like Marilyn Monroe, I mainly experienced Newman through the medium of a low-fidelity black and white picture of him used in a commercial context. Well, he's lots of fun, charismatic, charming, and he's the second-best thing about The Drowning Pool. The best thing is that the climax of this tense noir thriller is an epic slapstick set piece. The whole time they were setting up the pieces of the set piece I kept thinking "Are they really going with the slapstick? That's so awesome/tonally jarring!" It was as if the flashbacks in The Godfather Part II showed Vito Corleone carefully assembling a giant banana cream pie. Recommended, I guess?
• A Guide For the Married Man (1967): I'm kind of angry at this movie for not having the courage of its Billy Wilder convictions. Ed spends the whole movie teaching Paul how to cheat on his perfect wife Ruth without getting caught. It seems like good, practical advice, I wouldn't know. Ed keeps mentioning how highly he thinks of Ruth, and how cheating discreetly is the best way to protect her feelings.

  At the climax of the film, Paul's fumbling, jowly Walter Matthau attempt at infidelity is foiled when Ed is noisily discovered in the motel room across the court, cheating on his own wife with... some blonde. C'mon! He should have been cheating with Ruth! It's so obvious! Do I have to do everything around here?

  As you can tell, loosening Hollywood restrictions are on full display in this film. Nowhere is this more visible than the set design. Since this is a bedroom farce, we see a whole lot of bedrooms, and most of them follow the traditional Hays Code rule of separate beds. However, it's now the swinging 60s, and you are apparently allowed to do one scene where two people share a bed without one having one foot firmly on the ground. Sort of like how PG-13 movies today are allowed a single F-bomb. They use a double bed for that scene, as well as for a joke about tearing up a bed looking for something, which prefigures Gene Hackman's paranoid search in The Conversation.

  Includes a huge number of celebrity cameos, plus one cameo that wasn't known to be a celebrity at the time: a nearly silent role for Majel Barrett. As a bizarre bonus, all of the celebrities are credited as "Technical Advisers," not their character names, leading to IMDB quotes page entries like this:

  Technical Adviser: Joe?
  Technical Adviser: Yeah. Hi, baby.
  Technical Adviser: Hi, honey.
  Technical Adviser: How are the kids?
  Technical Adviser: Fine.
  

• The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975): When I was watching this it didn't seem nearly as funny as I was expecting, but in retrospect it was pretty funny; just more of a character study and less of the wacky Jack Lemmon farce I was expecting. In fact, if you squint this could be a crime-and-grime sequel to The Apartment (1960).

  Did you know that Peter Falk played the lead role when The Prisoner of Second Avenue was nothing but a humble Neil Simon play on Broadway? He couldn't appear in the film because he was busy doing Columbo. Just one of the many interesting facts I learned from David Koenig's behind-the-scenes book Shooting Columbo.

Now, it's time for a Spring Television Spotlight, highlighting interesting episodic serials we've enjoyed over these cold winter months:

• Poker Face (2023-): You know I love Columbo, if only from the paragraph I just wrote. Poker Face is designed to bring back everything good about Columbo, and it delivers: the class warfare, the convoluted coverups, the physical tics and gimmicks, the 70s font, and polite good triumphing over rude evil. Of course, it's 2023 and you can't have this kind of cop show feature an actual cop, so you also get a lead character who isn't even supposed to be solving these mysteries; she's just that nice. This opens up the best innovation of all over the Columbo formula: the retroactive insertion of Charlie into the story via flashback.

  See, Lieutenant Columbo doesn't show up until there's been a murder. This makes logical sense and avoids Murder, She Wrote-esque suspicions that he is some kind of murder magnet, but it also means the cat and mouse between him and the villain of the week takes a while to get started. In Poker Face, you see the villain set up and carry off the killing as usual, but then you see the same events from Charlie's perspective; she was there the whole time, conveniently just out of frame, ignorable and ignored. It probably takes the same screen time as the getting-to-know-you phase of a Columbo, but the viewer is pleasantly occupied the whole time, recontextualizing everything they saw up to that point.

  Like the original Columbo, this pushes a mystery-lover's intellectual buttons without actually being a mystery at all. Once we discovered that this was part of the formula, Sumana and I started playing the "where is Charlie?" game in the first part of the episodes, trying to find her in the lacunae of the narrative.

  If I had to complain, I'd say the season finale really bit off more than it could chew; maybe it was originally longer and it got edited down.

• Hello Tomorrow! (2023-) Beautiful visuals kept us coming back for yet another entry-level story about a con artist who's caught feelings and is now in over his head. Everyone looks great, the acting is good, and Alison Pill brings her trademark insane smile. Recommended, even though you could just watch it with the sound off.
• Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023) Now that it's over, I'm comfortable saying this is the weakest Star Trek series so far. It never had a great season, and it was too arc-driven to have standout episodes. It had a few outstanding ideas, mainly around using the Borg and positronic androids to explore the fuzzy edges of identity in a networked world, but there'd always be some boring Romulans or previously unknown child or Chosen One narrative to bring it down. It was more successful as a character study and a fanservice nostalgia trip.

  As a final complaint, I'm annoyed how huge, entirely relevant, interesting things would just get Memory-Alpha-holed between seasons when they switched showrunners. Where's Dr. Jurati in season 3? Really seems like she could help with this problem! I'm not just being an annoying Star Trek nerd: they came up with a really good idea for the Borg in season 2 and then immediately went back to the same-old same-old. Sumana sent me an appropriate meme for this situation. Anyway, the best treatment of the Borg continues to be found in Star Trek: Door Repair Guy.

  Actually, let's end this on a positive note. My three favorite breakout characters from Star Trek: Picard: Agnes Jurati, Cristóbal Rios, Liam Shaw. All of them staying true to the Star Trek tradition while also bringing in character traits we haven't seen much of.

Tue Apr 04 2023 22:36 March Film Roundup:

• Guarding Tess (1994): Watched this in a previous month and forgot about it. Don't blame me; just as the credits rolled, a guy from New Jersey passed by my window and shouted "Fuhgeddaboudit!" What could I do? It was post-hypnotic suggestion. Anyway, I remember it now. A fun movie with Nicolas Cage trying out a more buttoned-down persona—in fact, excessively buttoned-down in a very intense way. I really think this goes off the deep end into thriller territory in act three, but you can't have this kind of Hollywood movie in 1994 without it either turning into a romance or a thriller, so would I rather it be a romance? You bet I would! A May-December romance between Nicolas Cage and Shirley MacLaine sounds great!
• The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953): Way too long, and indifferently edited. Great Dr. Seuss props, but the cinematic vision seems to be "build sets for a German Expressionism musical and then shoot non-musical scenes on it". Possibly this is an effect of selection bias, since a lot of songs were filmed and then cut, leaving a still-too-long film that's no longer much of a musical.

  There's a really weird thing visible in an early chase scene that later on turns out to be easily explained—it's a prop that's out of continuity. After cutting most of the songs, someone took a long chase scene from the end of the movie and spliced it into the beginning, just to pep up the beginning with some more action. That's the kind of movie this is: scenes don't need to be in any particular order. I didn't like it in The Last Picture Show and I don't like it here.

• Brewster's Millions (1985): Some books get lots of movie adaptations because the books are really famous, like Dracula. Some books have no movie adaptations at all, like Constellation Games. (Call me, Spielberg!) And then there are books like Brewster's Millions, which has been made into thirteen movies and two plays without the book ever being super famous. It's just a great, simple premise for a comedy that transcends time and culture. In fact, one final version of this movie could be made as humanity transitions to a post-scarcity economy. Who am I kidding, post-scarcity just makes this concept more interesting! How can you possibly spend a million dollars when nobody needs money anymore? The comedic premise is immortal!

  Miscellaneous notes: this is the kind of movie where characters break out into applause just because someone spent a lot of money. From internal evidence in the screenplay, I believe the John Candy part was originally written for Dan Aykroyd. And see Sumana's blog post on the definition of an asset to get a feel for what it's like when we watch movies.

  Finally, my preferred Brewster's Millions strategy would be to buy the rights to works of literature and then put them in the public domain. In fact, I've already done this, with the original Brewster's Millions—you're welcome.

• Dinosaur 13 (2014): A bit of a letdown after watching the director's astounding and similarly-named Apollo 11 (2019). I felt like this film picks the most severely wronged parties in a story featuring bad behavior from everyone, and treats them as uncomplicated heroes. I admire the restraint in not blowing the budget on bad CGI animations of dinosaurs.

  One interesting glimpse behind some curtain or other: they interview the guy from Sotheby's who ran the auction for Sue, and he talks a lot about wanting to make sure the skeleton went to a good home, rather than ending up in a private collection. Dude, you're running an auction, the highest bidder is going to get the skeleton, it's pretty simple. What exactly did he do? Negotiate the McDonalds sponsorship to boost the Field Museum's bid? Surreptitiously kick undesirable bidders off of the conference call?

  N.b. this is also the kind of movie where people applaud when someone spends a lot of money, though here it happened in real life.

Fri Mar 03 2023 17:10 February Film Roundup:

• Love in Space (2011): Gives you more for your money by cutting between four different rom-coms going simultaneously. This was fun, except the astronaut couple are incredibly incompetent in un-astronautish ways, which really took us out of the story. Simple solution: they're not really astronauts! They're wacky space pirates who stole a spacecraft and don't know what they're doing. Problem solved, the movie is fun again.

  In related news, I do not believe the Love in Space Wikipedia page that any portion of this movie was shot on the International Space Station. You can see the Hong Kong wire work in the microgravity scenes. But that's one of those assertions like the supposed ARPAnet reference in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, easy to make and difficult to dispel.

  This is a good time to mention (or rather, there will probably not be a better time to mention) that I've now seen the 1985 episode of Benson ("Scenario") that supposedly has an ARPAnet reference, and it doesn't have one either. There is someone using a computer to communicate with the Department of Defense, which is pretty close, but the ARPAnet isn't mentioned, no IMPs are seen, and they clearly got the whole idea from Wargames.

• Dirty Dancing (1987): You know I love the midcentury Catskills resort lifestyle (in media, probably not in real life), so this was a lot of fun. Very reminiscent of Footloose, with Jerry Orbach excelling in the John Lithgow role. He really switches between "I'm a doctor and I've got to help this patient without being judgemental" and "I'm a dad and I'm going to be very judgemental about my daughter's choices."

Wed Feb 01 2023 18:26 January Film Roundup:

• Pathogen (2006): This was entertaining, though I'm grading on a huge curve here since the director was a teenager (she's now a non-teenager horror writer and director). The actors differed dramatically in talent, with some bringing real creepiness to their scenes and others not convincing me that knew the camera was on.

  I love a good zombie attack in a store, partly because it serves as an inadvertent document of consumer culture at the time and place the movie was made. There was a scene in Father of the Bride that needlessly took place in a Vons, but I loved the trip back to 1990s California. Could have used some zombies, though. Take note, filmmakers!

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966): You know what's so far removed from our current-day context that it's no longer entertaining? The comedies of Plautus! Their stock characters and farcical scenarios are simple and dirty enough to entertain modern audiences, but the language and cultural barriers are so big that it's easier to write something new that conveys the same feel. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum does a great job of starting over, using the "remake" logic that would become more common starting in the 90s: pick a bunch of the most memorable moments from the original and jumble them together.

  I saw this film in high school, which means that about as much time elapsed between its release and my first viewing as between my first viewing and my second. I remembered that it was pretty funny and that "Comedy Tonight" is a great song, but it didn't register to me how well the film captures the squalor of antiquity; everything's gross and the food is crawling with flies, and through it all people are just trying to live their pathetic little lives. I find it creatively inspiring.

  Of course, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum embeds 20th-century American attitudes about what's funny and what you can joke about, so the clock has already started again. For instance, that incredibly long chase sequence at the end needs to go. It makes a Roman chariot race look like the Indy 500 (i.e., very boring to watch). Also the pointless harem girl dancing. The male love interest is very Zeppo-ish, and I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a joke, but it ain't funny.

  PS: Sumana was very pleased to discover the referent of a clip from the ST:TNG/Reading Rainbow crossover where Michael Dorn steps out of his dressing room in Worf makeup and says "Stand aside; I take large steps."

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967): More 1960s musical adaptation fun, featuring sumptuous midcentury modern sets and Robert Morse Jerry Lewising his way across them. Good satire, good songs. Ending is kind of a cop-out but they get a good song out of it. Ends with an LBJ impersonator, which I feel like you rarely get in movies amidst the many Kennedies and Nixons. Good fun overall.
• Rancho Deluxe (1975): I was excited because I misread the description of this movie and thought it starred Jeff Bridges and Sam Elliot, which would make it a Big Lebowski pre-meet. In my defense, who casts Sam Waterston in a western? Louis DiGiaimo, casting director of Rancho Deluxe, that's who.

  This movie has a 6.3 on IMDB, which is mediocre at best, but most days I'd rather watch a 6.3 movie from the 1970s over a 7.3 from the last ten years. Rancho Deluxe has a decent neo-western idea, the plot way more complicated than the comedy can support, lots of nice location shots. Ultimately nothing mindblowing, except...

  There's a lengthy scene where Jeff Bridges and Harry Dean Stanton engage in pothead-level mind games with each other while playing Pong in a bar. The scene is shot so you see the game of Pong with the actors reflected in the monitor, making it perhaps the world's first Let's Play, and showing William A. Fraker developing the skills he would later use on Wargames. Simultaneously, the soundtrack features probably the only Jimmy Buffet song that mentions Pong.

• Fun with Dick and Jane (1977): Hey, look, a movie from the 1970s with an IMDB rating in the low sixes. Sometimes when preparing these reviews, I look at Roger Ebert's review of the same movie, and then regret it because he's just got the movie dead to rights and I can't think of much to add.

  In this case, Ebert points out that the first half of Fun with Dick and Jane is biting social satire, as the privileged attitudes of the George Segal/Jane Fonda yuppie couple collide with the cruelty and bureaucracy of the American welfare state. Then the satire fizzles out and it turns into a silly crime comedy that's about as satirical as Breaking Bad, albeit much funnier. I would recommend this one, there are a lot of good jokes, but there's a lot of untapped potential here.

  In my role as unofficial content note provider for old movies, I feel obligated to point out that this movie has brief, pointless blackface; and a Taxi Driver-like sequence of unexpectedly tolerant transphobia. In my role as raconteur of my own personal experiences, I want to mention that I was very excited when Dick and Jane parked their murder car outside the famous Tower Records on the Sunset Strip, a place I remember visiting (though not regularly) to buy CDs. But then we see them rob some other random record store! I guess they couldn't film in the Tower; a big disappointment.

After writing that I decided to look up what Roger Ebert thought of Rancho Deluxe: He hated it, and I can't find much to disagree with, but I still had a good time.

Wed Jan 11 2023 12:02 The Crummy.com Review of Things 2022: Here we go, another year gone and I'm no wiser than before. But I do have some quality recommendations for you!

Books

2022 was a year where I read a few really long books rather than a lot of shorter ones. Here are my top three of 2022:

• The Power Broker by Robert Caro
• Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes
• Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Live Events

The big live event for me in 2022 was seeing Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster in the Music Man revival. It's my favorite musical, as I've surely mentioned here before, and seeing a live professional production live of it a real bucket-list event. We're not going to end up like that sap in The Apartment!

I also did more museum outings and whatnot than I did in 2021, and even took a trip to California to see my family, for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

Film

As usual, Film Roundup Roundup is up to date with 21 new recommended motion pictures among the ones I saw in 2022. My top ten for the year:

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
2. Local Hero (1983)
3. L.A. Story (1991)
4. Glass Onion (2022)
5. Roxanne (1987)
6. The Lost City (2022)
7. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
8. The Afterlight (2021)
9. Stalag 17 (1953)
10. WarGames (1983)

Games

The Crummy.com Game Of the Year is I Was A Teenage Exocolonist. Other games I enjoyed in 2022 include ZERO Sievert, The Barnacle Goose Experiment, and Vampire Survivors. Of our daily games, the ones I most look forward to playing every day are Framed and Artle.

My accomplishments

Ugh, don't ask me about The Constellation Speedrun right now. It will be done eventually. I am working on it today, and this blog post is but a procrastination measure. 2022 saw publication of four of my short stories (see previous post) and I finished three more: "Or Current Resident", "A Place for Monsters", and "Expert Witness". I also wrote two Yuletide fics. Not what I'd hoped, but not too bad.

Thu Jan 05 2023 08:27 The Procedure Sign: My bad-dystopia-SF parody "The Procedure Sign" is out in Issue #16 of Etherea Magazine, a steal at USD $2.

Tommy stared at a blank concrete wall painted hospital green. He heard the hot-air hum of a projector starting up behind him. He squished his eyes closed, but the headband gave him an electric shock that jolted them open.

I did not expect to ever sell this story, because its satire skates so close to the edge of being simply bad. "The Procedure Sign" was directly inspired by an item in the ancient Strange Horizons "Stories We've Seen Too Often" list:

A mysteriously-named Event is about to happen ("Today was the day Jimmy would have to report for The Procedure"), but the nature of the Event isn't revealed until the end of the story, when it turns out to involve death or other unpleasantness. [Several classic sf stories use this approach, which is one reason we're tired of seeing it. Another reason is that we can usually guess the twist well ahead of time, which makes the mysteriousness annoying.]

More seriously, the story was also inspired by the experience of my own mysterious Event: being baptized into the LDS church when I was eight. Assuming the story has any real emotional edge, that's where it comes from.

Wed Jan 04 2023 14:04 Our Morning Games: In the year or so since Wordle became very popular, bringing along with it the more general online game model of "everyone gets the same quick game every day". Since then, Sumana and I have curated a set of games that we play together most mornings over breakfast. Many games have gone in and out of our list, and I figured the start of a new year was a good time to make some recommendations. I hope you find some fun with any or all of these:

• Framed: guess a movie from increasingly obvious stills.
• Artle: guess an artist through their artwork. I find this one very educational.
• Globle: guess a country via distance from other countries. This also has a new "capitals" variant.
• Flagle: guess a national flag as the arithmetic sum of other flags.
• Subwaydle: guess the trains taken on a trip through the NYC subway system (also available for a few other cities). This is mainly a Sumana game because I don't like the weird, convoluted routes it comes up with, as if for a spy trying to shake a trail.
• OEC Tradle: This was originally "guess the country from its exports" but it's currently going through US states.
• There are a lot of variants of Heardle (now owned by Spotify), which is basically "Name That Tune", but we enjoy Heardle Decades and TMBG Heardle (originally a Casey Kolderup project).

There are also two slower-paced games that we don't necessarily play every day:

• Redactle: guess the Wikipedia article by filling in blacked-out words.
• After spending a while playing Wordle, Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, etc. we spent quite a while with no Wordlelike in our rotation. (I actually have a separate post in draft form for those who are into the N-ordle series of games.) Recently we picked up Squareword, which can be played just like Wordle but which adds a surprising depth of strategy to the formula if you want to take it slower.

Mon Jan 02 2023 15:53 December Film Roundup:

• Paddington 2 (2017): Watched based on an in-movie recommendation in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. It's fine. Fun kids movie.
• Moonstruck (1987): More fallout from Massive Talent, though this time taking the form of "I've been wanting to watch that Nicolas Cage movie." A rom-com from before the formula was fixed in the 90s, with a tighter focus on the other family members and a little less on the main couple. In fact my favorite part of Moonstruck was the interlocking stories it told of different romances in different stages of life. Olympia Dukakis is great in this, and John Mahoney is a pleasant surprise.

  There's always a sacrificial or decoy boyfriend in these movies, and I always feel bad for the guy. The most pitiful victim of this trope is Bill Pullman's character in Sleepless in Seattle, whose disqualifying problem is serious allergies. The guy has trouble sleeping! He's practically your title character!

• Glass Onion (2022): A fun addition to the franchise. The setting was a lot less interesting than the cool old house in Knives Out, but the obnoxious douchebags were a lot more colorful and fun.
• A Christmas Movie Christmas (2019): A big missed opportunity. Sometimes when I can see a better movie conceptually near the less-good one that got made, it's understandable what happened: the better movie would have cost a lot more or taken longer to shoot or required better actors. But a Christmas romance parody doesn't need a bunch of expensive Zucker and Zucker one-off gags. You could shoot it in the same time and budget as a regular Christmas romance, with the same equipment and sets and actors. The magic is all in the screenplay.

  This screenplay starts off really promising, but it loses its way quickly and we just get a cornier than usual Christmas romance with an extra dose of creepiness. That was possibly a commentary on Christmas romance movie creepiness, but it's hard to say for sure--again, a screenplay problem. The good news is that the space of concepts used in Christmas romances inhabits a vague public domain, so nothing's stopping people from ripping off this idea and doing five new Christmas romance parodies every year until someone gets it right... and then ripping it off ten times a year.

• Made in Heaven (1952): We watched this after Sumana's Wikipedia browsing turned up the old British "flitch of bacon" tradition/incentive for marital harmony. Like a lot of old British traditions, the flitch trial fell into disuse until it was revived in a Victorian-era work of fiction, and like a lot of old British movies, this is a cheesy farce where people scheme about cheating on their partners and evading postwar rationing. Everyone in this movie is stupid, and the higher-status they are, the stupider. As opposed to the Ealing comedies where everyone is smart but the high-status people are too smart for their own good. Recommended, but only in hopes that a better, modern comedy will be produced to take its place as the champion of bacon rom-coms.
• Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941): Yes indeed, here he comes, played by Claude Rains. This was based on the same play that became Heaven Can Wait (it also has a sequel and a second 2001 remake with Chris Rock). It's a cool concept but how many of these do we need? I'm concerned that we're about due for another one.

  Admittedly, in 1977 I would have said "Do we really need to go here again?" and then the Elaine May/Warren Beatty version would have blown me away. I feel like the characterization of the trainer is done better in the 1941 version, but the most crucial dramatic issue--a character dropping dead in the final act for no good reason--is handled even worse here. A reason is given for the death, a reason that really ought to result in significant changes to everyone's behavior, but nope, everyone just ignores it. It's like they noticed the problem in the screenplay and patched it with duct tape. Anyway, this was fun for its genteel 1940s approach to death, but I'm on team Elaine May 4 life.

Sun Jan 01 2023 18:44 Yuletide Reveal!: Now it can be told! I wrote two stories for Yuletide 2022. The one for which I anticipate more interest is The Practical Boyfriend: A Post-Scarcity Rom-Com. This is a brand new Constellation Games bonus story, the first one in ten years, depicting the meet-cute between Tetsuo Milk and Ashley Somn at the beginning of the contact mission. Guest starring Curic and You'll Only See Kis Echo!, a character you've forgotten about. It's got laughs, romance, and Tetsuo designs a game!

As a fan of high-quality 2012 releases, I'm sure you also enjoy Subset Games' FTL, a death-in-space simulator that inspired certain bits of Situation Normal. Now I'm closing the circle with an fanfic called Try, Try Again, where I used the gallows-humor style of Situation Normal to tell a story in the FTL universe.

Wherever you find yourself today, I wish you a happy new year, and happy reading and writing!

Fri Dec 23 2022 09:07 For Your Consideration: If you're looking to catch up on stories published in 2022 so you can fill out your Nebula or Hugo nominating ballots, you've come to the right blog post. Here's are the stories I had published this year, conveniently sorted in descending order of "plausibly might win an award":

• "When There is Sugar" (Diabolical Plots) - Sweet science fantasy story about resilience in the aftermath of war.
• "Two Spacesuits" (Clarkesworld) - SF mystery where Internet rabbit holes go weird.
• "The Scene of the Crime" (Clarkesworld) - Space opera time travel story about labor relations.
• "Stress Response" (Analog November/December) - Space opera silliness where exactly the wrong person goes into space and it works out fine.

There's a chance a fifth story will be published this year, and I'll mention it in an update here, but it's going at the very bottom of this list, since I wrote it as a parody of bad SF. Makes me laugh every time, though.

(1) Fri Dec 16 2022 16:10 When There is Sugar: Diabolical Plots has my latest story, "When There is Sugar". A touching fantasy story about baking and teaching with a decommissioned military robot.

The oven hissed as it turned rain to steam, moving less than a living thing would, but more than an oven ought to move.

“I suppose you should come in,” said Berl. It was a royal gift, and well-meaning, if a little patronizing.

This is my pandemic baking story, written in the depths of despair, a time now known only as October 2020. It came from Sumana's request to write a sweet story about a robot oven, as opposed to the grimdark-lite atmosphere of Situation Normal, which was about to be published. I think I did a good job, but Sumana still holds out hope for a gentler, more Bob Ross type of robot-oven story.

Thu Dec 15 2022 18:31 My RSS!: Since listening to KUSC in college I've been a fan of the old BBC radio program(me) My Word!, an ur-quiz show with a focus on chin-stroking erudition, shameless bluffing when erudition fails, and cornball shaggy dog stories. About ten years ago my fandom took a big hit when the BBC stopped pouring decades-old My Word! reruns down whatever transcontinental pipe eventually got it broadcast on American radio stations' streaming websites. But recently I discovered a large cache of episodes uploaded to the Internet Archive in 2020, including a bunch of episodes I'd never heard. Jackpot!

I really wanted to get this cache turned into an RSS feed so I can listen to episodes alongside my podcasts. Kevan's Fourble service can do this pretty easily, and in fact it already has, but what I'd really really like is an RSS feed that incorporates the information about broadcast dates and shaggy dog stories found in this particular item's carefully written description. That will dramatically improve the usability of the "podcast" and allow me to listen to the episodes in rough chronological order, rather than alphabetically according to the first vocabulary word lobbed at the panelists.

This is, in fact, a job for The Syndication Automat, a project I created in 2004, the semi-early days of RSS. Back then it was sometimes necessary to employ vigilante justice to make RSS feeds for websites that didn't have them. This was actually the original use case for Beautiful Soup!

Of course, hard times soon struck the Automat as every website got its own RSS feed, RSS feeds themselves were ditched in favor of Twitter and Facebook, and then Twitter and Facebook melted down, leaving us with nothing. (I'm extrapolating a little here.) 2009 was the last time any of the Automat's old feeds were updated. But podcasts still stand, the cockroaches of syndication, so it makes perfect sense to bring back the Automat one more time to host The Doubly-Unofficial, Partially Chronological "My Word!" Podcast Feed. Painstakingly hand-crafted by a script I painstakingly hand-crafted to deal with tons of edge cases like "two shows that use the same vocabulary word" and "shows where the filename doesn't precisely match the vocabulary word" and "shows where the general era of the show is known but not the exact broadcast date". I took care of all that stuff; all you have to do is listen.

If you just want to make a podcast out of the MP3 files in an Internet Archive item, and not do any other processing, you can use my very tidy, edge-case-free Python script, which depends on the modules internetarchive, feedgen, and pytz

from datetime import datetime
from feedgen.feed import FeedGenerator
from internetarchive import get_item
import pytz
import sys
import time

def utc(dt):
    return dt.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)

class IACollectionFeed(object):
    def __init__(self, ia_item, destination_url):
        self.item = self.fetch_item(ia_item)
        self.feed = FeedGenerator()
        self.feed.link(href=destination_url)
        self.feed.description(self.item.metadata['description'])
        self.feed.title(self.item.metadata['title'])
        for file in self.item.get_files():
            if file.format != 'VBR MP3':
                continue
            self.add_entry(file)

    def fetch_item(self, ia_item):
        return get_item(ia_item)
                 
    def add_entry(self, file):
        entry = self.feed.add_entry(order='append')
        entry.id(file.url)
        entry.title(file.metadata['name'])
        mtime = utc(datetime.fromtimestamp(int(file.metadata['mtime'])))
        entry.updated(mtime)
        entry.enclosure(file.url, str(file.size), "audio/mpeg")
        return entry
        
    def __str__(self):
        return self.feed.rss_str(pretty=True).decode("utf8")

           
if __name__ == '__main__':
    print(IACollectionFeed(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2]))

To generate a fast and cheap version of my DUPCMW!PF, I'd invoke the script with this command line:

$ python roughdraft.py bbcmyword https://www.crummy.com/automat/feeds/myword.xml

While producing this post I discovered that not only is there another, smaller, differently organized collection on the Internet Archive, but there's a significantly larger (but less well described) archive on RadioEchoes, which also has an even bigger archive of My Word!'s inevitable but lesser companion, My Music!.

Fri Dec 09 2022 14:22 November Film Roundup: One of the biggest months for Film Roundup yet! I'm including a movie from early December, but that only makes it slightly larger!

• Ballet 422 (2013) - At first I thought this was just a random documentary about a random guy, but it seems Justin Peck is the hot young thing of ballet choreography. Nice twist at the end. I enjoyed the focus on the logistics of setting up a ballet performance, especially the costume design. Don't think I didn't notice how licensing concerns shaped what parts of the performance we see!
• Now You See Me (2013): A fun heist movie that's utterly undone by an insistence on having an unguessable twist ending. It's unguessable because it's stupid! Just go with one of the other possibilities; we don't know which one it is! It was fun to see the pre-condo 5 Pointz show up in a movie.
• Reign of Fire (2002): Unlike Now You See Me, this movie makes no sense from the get-go, and it's better for it. Still not a good movie, but at this point in history it's enjoyable to see an action movie that's not based on a preexisting media property. They tried to make Reign of Fire into a media property but failed, probably due to a wyvern's curse or something cool like that.

  After watching this film we discovered that Sumana and I pronounce "wyvern" differently; she says it sort of like "given" and I say it more like "my turn." Although the so-called dictionary sides with me, I prefer Sumana's pronunciation, so that's the way we say the word in our household. Also because of this movie we say "wyvern" a lot more than we used to.

• Weird (2022): A fun musical biopic that becomes increasingly unhinged until it finally sides entirely with the "pic" over the "bio", but as cool as Weird Al is, do we need this movie and the much funnier Walk Hard? Need or not, we have them both.
• Six Degrees of Separation (1993): I really don't know what this movie is trying to say. Some movies scold you for watching them, but this movie scolds you for something the characters and the screenwriter are doing but you're not! The dialogue was great, which makes sense since this is an adaptation of a play.
• WarGames (1983): A pleasant surprise, a hacking movie where the hacking feels naturalistic and real. This movie had a real (and not entirely positive) effect on cybersecurity policy, from the time when policy was determined by making a movie and hoping Ronald Reagan watched it. The third-act mad scientist is not really necessary, but I have to admit his lair was pretty damn cool. The clueless parents are also fun.
• Wedding Banquet (1993): Another enjoyable New York immigrant rom-com. I really enjoyed the big party; it feels like they had an actual party once they finished filming, since they'd already rented the space. Or maybe they filmed the party, I don't know if that's plausible logistically, but it seems easier to actually have the party since you're not going to have to do a lot of retakes.
• Wyrm (2019): This movie chosen partly because of its name, as we were in the grips of wyvernmania. A fun indie film with a vaporwave aesthetic and an aggressively awkward Napoleon Dynamite feel. Just as I said "I hope we don't spend the whole movie on this premise," the thing I was afraid wouldn't happen til the end of the movie happened, and the movie started focusing on the aftermath. So, great timing.
• John Wick (2014): We watched half of this movie before deciding the cleverness/gruesome violence ratio was way out of whack and giving up. I'm kind of interested in the third movie where John apparently picks up a book at the 40th Street research branch of the NYPL, but just that scene.

  OK, I've watched that scene on YouTube, so I'm good now. It looks like they actually filmed the action scene on location, as opposed to Ghostbusters where the Rose Reading Room is real but the stacks are in a set in LA. I have to deduct one point, though, as NYPL employees are seen not wearing their employee badges.

• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988): Now here's a movie that doesn't care that you can guess the twist: it just keeps you guessing when the twist will be sprung, Hitchcock style. Fun performances from everyone, and an extra bonus twist at the end which we did not guess. That's the other secret to great drama, BTW: spring the twist the audience was guessing as soon as they guess it, then hit them with another.
• The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022): Adaptation (2002) is one of those pre-Film-Roundup films that I didn't review in NYCB, but I remember it fondly and have occasionally returned to it for comparisons. This movie practically demands a comparison, as it takes the most comedic parts of a fairly serious comedy and uses them as fuel for an infernocrusher romp. A lot of fun.
• The Train (1964): We watched Andor, the Star Wars series for people who think Star Wars is silly. (That's right, a Television Spotlight embedded in this movie review! What will I think of next?) It was really good, so good that we started looking into its cinematic inspirations, like this movie and the next one. The Train is a counterheist movie, with the thrill and pacing of a heist but with the theft being carried off in broad daylight and the heroes responsible for stopping it—without damaging the goods, which gives it an air of those fight scenes where Jackie Chan is juggling an expensive vase. I went in hoping something a bit more like The General, but maybe that's true of every film I see.
• Stalag 17 (1953): The most violent Billy Wilder film I've seen, but it's still got plenty of space for banter. Specifically the masculine jocularity found in military pocket guides, which is a perfect match for Wilder's style. There's also more space for slapstick than in a typical Wilder movie. The wartime setting allows for a happy ending while still letting Wilder get his ultimate wish of making a movie where almost every character fails to fulfill their dream. Highly recommended.
• Father of the Bride (1991): I remember writing an article for my high school newspaper decrying the state of Hollywood comedies, with this movie being Exhibit A. I said this unfairly, based on the trailer, without having actually seen the film, and having no real sense of the cinematic traditions I was supposedly hearkening back to. Now that I have seen the film, I'd like to offer a crucial correction: I was actually talking shit based on the trailer for the 1995 sequel to this movie. Everything else I remember is accurate.

  This is a character-driven comedy which gets its humor by putting bland characters in moderately aggravating circumstances—the scourge of mediocre comedies then and now. It's especially noticeable because it stars Steve Friggin Martin and Diane Friggin Keaton, in the same year Martin does the hilarious L. A. Story. That's the clearest example of "one for you, one for me" I'm aware of. The best thing I can say about this is you don't often see a rom-com from the perspective of someone who's not a party to the romance.

  I kind of feel bad slamming Father of the Bride because it's not terrible, just kind of a nonentity. It's not terribly funny, and it's sentimental in a way that requires a lot of humor to balance it out. Roxanne, for example, was great, because its love story was intertwined with an over-the-top farce. Who's going to uphold these standards, if not me? I've been fighting this rearguard action for almost thirty years and I'm way too invested to stop now!

Sun Nov 27 2022 18:05 ████: Like today's algorithmic creativity tools, many NaNoGenMo projects take as their grist the results of other peoples' creativity and hard work: years, even centuries of work. My own In Dialogue and Amazon Prime are manipulations of public domain texts, and for Alphabetical Order and Brutus and Cassius, at the close of the scene I took the entire English literary canon as my input. Linked By Love mined thousands of books for their back cover copy—by far the most difficult part of the book to write. For 2022, I've created a NaNoGenMo work that reuses no one's text but my own.

████ is a blackout piece made from the text of my unpublished novel, Mine. I've redacted every word that shows up in one of my two published novels, Constellation Games and Situation Normal. You'll see lots of names, places, technical terms, odd digressions on Cleopatra and zucchini, punctuation, and (I assume) typoes. That's it.

This is an appropriate source text since Mine is a story about people preserved as the things around them are erased, and then juxtaposed without context. But really, I could tell you it was about anything and you'd have to believe me... for now.

Mon Nov 07 2022 07:43 Stress Response: As promised, the November/December issue of Analog includes "Stress Response", a Ravy Uvana story in which Judicant Uvana helps a young human who went into space believing it would be a big, fun adventure... and who still believes that at the end of the story! Have fun!

The big change I made after my writing group critiqued "Stress Response" was explicitly explaining why the stress response happened; no one got it and without that crucial piece of information the story feels like watching someone else's vacation slides. Many, many times my writing group has told me "Leonard, you need to explicitly explain the thing instead of expecting us to figure it out."

Two more stories of mine are coming up in Analog: "Meat", the first Ravy Uvana story I ever wrote; and "Race to the Bottom", a flash piece that explains why everything is so terrible. Both coming out next year, I guess? I've deposited the checks!

Fri Nov 04 2022 21:37 October Film Roundup:

• The Man from the Diner's Club (1963): Who says product placement is new? This movie is product placement. Gets a decent amount of comedy out of the concept of credit cards, some out of super inaccurate models of how 1960s computers work (Desk Set is way more forward-thinking), and there's a whole gamut of pratfalls and physical comedy. A fun watch overall. IMDB trivia spreads rumors that the film was originally intended as a Jerry Lewis vehicle, and Danny Kaye is maybe a little too old for this shit, but I just can't believe Jerry Lewis in any kind of white-collar profession. Even when his character's rich, like in The King of Comedy, it's clear he got rich being a clown.

  Sumana recently showed me an old Mad About You episode where Jerry Lewis plays a billionaire, but it's very unclear how this "billionaire" acquired his wealth because he never shows any business acumen; he's always goofing off at his desk, trolling people and buying social media sites and so on. You see how Jerry Lewis has taken over this review of a movie he's not even in? Ludicrous.

  The poster slogan for this movie is "You'll be hanging from the laffters at the funniest picture since money went out of style!", and I want to register that you can reuse this slogan when making comedies in a post-scarcity society. I may not live to see if, but I know it'll happen one day.

• The Cutting Edge (1992): A fun film that combines the two cinematic obsessions of the 1990s: Howard Hawks-esque hate-to-love rom-coms, and athletes playing the wrong sport. More training montages and less actual figure skating than Yuri on Ice kept me from getting sports bored. One of the rare films that suffered the "surely the Soviet Union will still exist by the time out movie comes out" problem.
• Gorky Park (1983): This film did not have that problem. I liked the police procedural elements but once the political conspiracy is revealed it seems relatively penny-ante, though I guess that too is realistic. The sets (indoor and outdoor) are great and there are a number of excellent comic relief characters, including Ian McDiarmid as a nutty professor.
• Titanic (1997): The film I felt like I'd seen, but I'd really only seen a big chunk of the first, less interesting half. The epic runtime of Titanic makes more sense if you see it as two movies: an upstairs-downstairs romance followed by a Miracle Mile-esque thriller of betrayal, personal cowardice and societal collapse. That second movie is really compelling, the first movie I found a little dull, but I admired how it carefully shows you everything that's going to be destroyed in the second half.
• The Afterlight (2021): The film with no IMDB page, and the first once I saw in the theater (at the museum, natch) since Gravity in March 2020. There are certain scenes that get written into one screenplay after another, certain shots that are reused verbatim across the history of film, and this movie mashes a lot of those up into something that can get pretty hypnotic. The unique constraints around the showing of this movie make it difficult to see, but it's worth seeing if it comes to your town; there's a fun twist at the end and the closing credits are touching.

(1) Sun Oct 02 2022 21:04 September Film Roundup: It's an rom-com Roundup this month, with lovers being reunited and old public domain British source material galore!

• Saving Face (2004): I keep forgetting to mention this film, which we saw months ago, and this is a good month to remember it. I don't remember much about it but it was a good watch, and as I recall the family dynamics were treated very realistically.

  When I was thinking of this movie it really reminded me of Kal Ho Na Ho, but I think that's mostly because they were both set in Queens in the early 2000s. Saving Face was actually filmed in Flushing!

• Fire Island (2022): I'll be very disappointed if it turns out the working title of this movie was not Prejudice and Pride, and that it changed to its current, boring title by studio interference. I have not read the source material, and had a lot of fun during the movie listening to Sumana speculate about who was who.

  I was intrigued by the scene where Bowen Yang's character cringes out at a party by narrating a 'gay Star Trek' SNL sketch starring Jason Bateman. I assumed this was a meta reference to an actual SNL sketch Bowen Yang was in, but it looks like it's referring to a sketch from 2005 that is not viewable online. This implies Howie saw that sketch on broadcast TV when he was, like, 15, and it was formative for him. It took some research to unravel this, but I can now say that was a good character beat and not just an in-joke.

  PS: There is a Merry and Pippin in this movie.

• 10 Things I Hate About You (1999): The Taming of the Shrew is one of the trickier Shakespeare plays to adapt into a modern setting, and although I thought this movie as a whole was only so-so, I liked its approach to the central issue of shrews and their taming. The two main characters effectively 'tame' each other by adapting into more suitable partners for each other, and isn't that what happens in a lot of rom-coms, and real relationships?

  The film ends with a helicopter shot of a band playing on the roof of a building, but it's not like the Beatles rooftop concert, they're way up there and there's no way anyone can hear them on the ground. And then the helicopter swoops towards the band in what IMDB trivia confirms was a terrifying experience for them. Where are they going to run? They're on a roof!

  10 Things I Hate About You was turned into a TV show, but the only actor to reprise his movie role was Larry Miller, who plays the Baptista role. This seems to happen pretty often. I assume everyone gets right of first refusal, but the stars see it as an imposition on their time and only the character actors see it as a regular paycheck.

  Finally, I want to note that during this film I came up with an all-time great riff: "I've found her celebrity crush list! Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamil... Cesar Romero?"

A quick Television Spotlight: we watched Only Murders in the Building, which I think gets much better in season 2 as they stop trying so hard to ape the form they're parodying (which resulted in lots of boring subplots) and lean in to wacky, nonsensical comedy (which resulted in me enjoying a Martin Short performance for the first time ever). I will say that season 1 was more effective at the Hitchcockian finger-wagging where they try to shame you for enjoying the thing they're showing you, but no one actually enjoys that—you're being shamed!

We also watched all of The Goes Wrong Show in the space of a coupel days, and see Sumana's review for that. Just really, really funny. I appreciate that the fictional actors all have consistent characters that lead to different styles of comedy as things Go Wrong.

Thu Sep 01 2022 21:15 August Film Roundup: By chance I ended up watching all of August's films without Sumana, so this is a bunch of films from my huge cinematic pile of "Sumana probably won't like these." And I think I was right!

• The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962): I admit I mainly watched this movie because the title sounded kinda dirty for a 1962 Hollywood film, and I wanted to see what they'd try to get away with. In fact, I suspect this is why most of the people who've ever watched this movie decided to watch it. They don't try to get away with very much. There are some good jokes, but if you watch to the opening credits you've seen a lot of them. Then you can enjoy the classic 1960s animated opening credit sequence, and move on with your evening.
• Raffles (1939): Another film watched in the spirit of "how much can they get away with?" I read The Amateur Cracksman in the early 2000s and liked it a lot, but the mood of the stories—jewel thieves are awesome and jewel owners have it coming to 'em—seems irreconcilable with the Hays Office diktat that Crime Doesn't Pay. How would the film end? Would they tack on a jarring ending that restored the tottering edifice of conventional morality? Sort of: the ending is ambiguous. A decent ending, though. Way better than the ambiguous ending of The Devil And Miss Jones. David Niven is fun, and I enjoyed the odd moment where the cops take a break from not solving crimes to watch cricket on the office TV. Relatable!

  Rififi (1955) is famous for its 30-minute silent heist sequence, but there's an eight-minute heist sequence in Raffles that's got just one line of dialogue—kind of a test run.

• The Black Godfather (1974): What if Michael Corleone had a social conscience? I guess it might go like this, but this film's "get the drugs off the streets" plotline seems copied from other blaxploitation movies and not an attempt to critique or rip off The Godfather (1972). (The other guy's definitely Vito Corleone, though.) Although this isn't a good movie overall, there are certain parts that are disproportionately good given the low budget. Half the stunts are cheesy MST3K fare, but half are really impressive and well-executed. There's a sequence shot in a coffin warehouse (SYMBOLISM) where the titular Black Godfather makes heavy use of his portable suitcase phone. They built a sci-fi Dick Tracy-esque prop out of a suitcase and a telephone and a tape recorder, and it looks pretty believable. Stuff like that.
• Repeater (1979): I forgot everything about this movie, including why it was in my queue, and I stayed mystified for the first five minutes (7% of the running time!) but eventually I figured out that Repeater is a British parody of/homage to the French New Wave. It's got a strong Celine and Julie go Boating feel, and if you start both movies Repeater will end around the time Celine and Julie gets interesting, so it's got that going for it. But it's always got a little bit of British snark that isn't present in the very sincere Celine and Julie or, let's say, Truffaut's parodies of American genre film, which is what they were really going for here. That said, I had a good time. There are bits that are super pretentious and some that didn't seem to fit the movie at all, but also some really good... I don't know the filmmaking term for those little vignettes that you string together when your movie doesn't have a through-line, but some good ones of those. Bonus: a pre-Young Ones Alexei Sayle.

  Old video game notice: there's a pretty long montage set in an arcade in (I assume) Wales with lots of fruit machines and novelty games as well as some kind of Space Invaders electronic thing and a Cinematronic Space Wars cabinet.