News You Can Bruise for 2023

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!

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?)

• 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...

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

• His Excellency (1952): This film seems a bit spiteful with its "fine, YOU run the colonies, ya lousy working class" attitude. It's also not very funny. An Ealing disappointment.
• The Admirable Crichton (1957): Another class-conscious comedy of manners, less realistic but funnier than His Excellency. There's an act break in this movie where British people decide to upend class conventions because the alternative is certain death, and I gotta say, that act break is doing a lot of work.
• When Harry Met Sally (1989): Sumana and I both loved this canonical rom-com, from the serially foiled meet-cutes to the heartwarming ending. Carrie Fisher is a hoot in a supporting role and really sells her comedy; she does something tiny like dog-ear a corner of an index card and I crack up.
• Contact (1997): This is a good movie but I thought it was way too slow. Robert Zemeckis probably would have paced it a little faster if the very famous and beloved screenwriters hadn't been so heavily involved. As it is, it ends up at two-and-a-half hours. Who has time for that? Movies should be 90 minutes long!

  I dunno, it's probably fine. The early scenes in Arecibo and at the VLA are the ones that could most easily be cut, and those were quite fun. Lots of driving up in Jeeps like this is Jurassic Park. Contact also really shoved in my face how heavily Hollywood movies use old family photos as a narrative device. I knew about this before, of course, but now I can't let it pass by. My mind always fixes on it. However, I've watched a grand total of two movies since then, so maybe it'll fade.

• The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023): I watched this on an airplane, which is realistically the only way I was gonna see it, but the tiny screen foiled the main reason I wanted to see this movie, which was to catch all the little background references. But after skimming a few "We Found Every Easter Egg In The Super Mario Bros. Movie And Put A Bunch of Ads On The Page" websites, I don't think I missed very much. I did like the Mario Kart 64 speedrunning reference and the doomer Luma.

  Unfortunately this movie has a running time of 92 minutes, which is way too short for on a boring plane ride, so I also watched...

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023): Yes, two and a half hours of nonsensical action. The perfect length for a movie. The opening set piece was great. The artifact was great. Evil Werner von Braun was great...ly evil. The ending was great. Not the very end, that sucked, but the ending Indy thought he was getting before the final fake-out. In between: nonsensical action as the miles slipped away beneath my feet.

Surprisingly, the answer is—primarily—models trained on something other than English prose. Of the twenty-four stories in The Hallucinating Detective, I think the most interesting is "The Adventure of the Rapid-Fire Squirrel". The rift-coder model, trained on Python and Javascript repositories and programming problems, starts off thinking that figuring out whodunit is as simple as writing a solve function, but then starts interrogating suspects and exploring the imaginary crime scene. Many of the other models can't get past asking the suspects why they just said whatever (randomly selected) thing they just said.

I tried to vary up the prose styles in the prompts, from hard-boiled to comedic, but rarely did a model pick up on the request. I will say that em_german_mistral—a model presumably trained on and designed to output German text—not only produced very good English, but picked up that Sherlock Holmes could be a character in a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery: see "Sherlock Holmes and the Draining Pen Affair".

Finally, I want to highlight a beautiful, melancholy poem I discovered in the random Project Gutenberg selections that drive the dialogue in The Hallucinating Detective: "To His Brother Hsing-Chien, Who was in Tung-Ch'uan", written in the year 815 by Bai Juyi.

You are parted from me by six thousand leagues;
In another world, under another sky.
Of ten letters, nine do not reach;
What can I do to open my sad face?
Thirsty men often dream of drink;
Hungry men often dream of food.
Since Spring came, where do my dreams lodge?
Ere my eyes are closed, I have travelled to Tung-ch'uan.

When writing the final scene, I also came up with a brilliant game idea: a robot-programming game in which the programming language used by the robots is procedurally generated on every run.

• Miss Congeniality (2000): 2000? Seriously? I would have guessed earlier. I forgot to mention this one, which I watched with my uncle Leonard last month. I never thought of this before but Sandra Bullock is one of those actors who seems to choose roles with an eye towards living cool Hollywood fantasies. She's an astronaut, a hacker, she gets to drive a bus real fast... In this movie, she gets to fire a gun and undergo the Mousy Girl Makeover, all while complaining about beauty standards.

  Have you, Film Roundup reader, watched a movie before? You will be able to see who the villain is pretty quickly. Tragically, not a skill they teach at Quantico. An enjoyable flick.

• You've Got Mail (1998): We've seen enough Nora Ephron screenplays now that her go-to tactics are becoming visible. In my review of 1993's Sleepless in Seattle I projected that movies' technologically mediated rom-com world into the future, where mobile apps flash thousands of faces at you until they find the one that triggers the "love at first sight" rom-com spark. You've Got Mail can be seen as the groundbreaking experiment that disproves this model of the rom-com spark.

  With the introduction of dial-up online services into the rom-com-verse, You've Got Mail presents two characters who fell in love online but dislike each other IRL. They encounter each other several times without triggering the spark or showing any awareness of it. This, Ephron concludes, is because the spark requires a connection to be made between personalities, not persons. The masks we wear in public make our true selves invisible to each other, and it's only in AOL chat rooms that we can truly be known.

  Oh, something about the movie itself? It was fun, but a better ending would have had Kathleen falling out with Joe, then founding amazon.com to destroy his stippled brick-and-mortar empire.

• That Thing You Do! (1996): Like the previous movie, this is part of our traditional celebration of Hanksgiving, and we watch it every November 2023. I remember seeing the end of this movie on a VCR stand in high school, which spoiled the ending, but maybe that's a good thing. My viewing partner (Lady S— of G— Manor) was afraid the whole time that this was a movie where the evil record industry guy screws over the up-and-coming band. I tried to reassure her, but to no effect. Anyway, a fun way to bathe in someone else's nostalgia, if you go in knowing there's no real villain.

  In the closing credits they play some of the hundreds of songs called "That Thing You Do" that were submitted for consideration as the fictional band's hit song. Possibly the largest number of songs ever written with the same title. At the time, I remember hearing that They Might Be Giants was one of the auditioners, and thinking that this represented a rather forlorn hope due to TMBG's rather distinctive style.

  I assumed that sometime between 1996 and now, this song had made it onto some compilation album that I'd missed, but looking it up just now I see that that is not the case! Maybe because they signed over the rights when they submitted the song or something. It lingered unheard until 2021, when the TMBG "That Thing You Do" was leaked onto YouTube. I've heard it now and... they tried, but Tom Hanks (who surely made this decision personally) was right to go with Adam Schlesinger's version.

• Eat Drink Man Woman (1994): A fun movie, an early entry in the "multiple rom-coms going at once" subgenre that I saw later in Love In Space. The scenes in the big restaurant kitchen blew me away, especially that first long shot, which felt like a scene from a thriller. There was even some classic DOS laptop gaming action and Microsoft Paint 3.1. I must deduct a fraction of a point for not originating the "Sir, this is a Wendy's" joke. Harsh, I know, but those are the rules. Of course, it cancels out, since all movies ever made suffer the same penalty.
• A Global Affair (1964): Did you know that Bob Hope was a data scientist responsible for drafting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child? Or at least, his character in this movie was, and we all know there's no real daylight between Bob Hope and the character he plays in his movies. In this one he's pushed into caring for an abandoned baby who's... the Messiah? The Antichrist? I dunno, the postwar internationalism of this movie forms a real Rorschach test when placed in a modern political context.

  The marketing for this gender swap of The Lady Is Willing (not to mention the name of the movie) presents Bob as lecherous and vaguely Jack Nicholson-ish as delegations of ladies make eyes at him. But the actual movie, like all 1960s sex movies, shows him as nothing but put-upon and upset by the attentions of these international dames. They're seriously interfering with his golf game and his regression analysis!

  In general I'm detecting an awkward changing of the guard in the 1960s, as Danny Kaye and Bob Hope hang on to roles that should have gone to Jerry Lewis and Jack Lemmon. At least Cary Grant had the good sense not to be in Man's Favorite Sport?. Hope is sixty years old in this movie, and he looks great for sixty, but by this time definitely seems more the "confirmed" kind of bachelor than the "swinging" kind.

  PS: This movie's full of random UN factoids, some of which still apply. I didn't know that the UN headquarters is an extraterritorial exclave and not part of the United States or any other country. I'm pretty sure it's just that and Antarctica.

• Polite Society (2023): Loved this movie in a very particular way: this is the closest I've seen to a movie that captures the cinema-junkie fun of the Cornetto Trilogy movies. It starts out a slice-of-life movie full of references to genre movies, and then weird things start happening and it turns out to be a real live genre movie. Lots of fun. Sumana and I were also reminded of Sorry to Bother You (2018) in the specific way this one escalates.
• The Talk of the Town (1942): The kind of title you only use when you're desperate. They came up with twelve possible titles for this movie, and most of them were generic and dull, with The Talk of the Town being the dullest of all. The worst part is that The Talk of the Town was registered to Universal at the time, and Columbia had to trade away Sin Town (a better title!) to use it. So presumably this movie was originally going to be called The Talk of the Town.

  This raises so many questions, some of which might be answered in my review of the bizarrely-named Upstream (1927), which lifts the curtain on a lost world of preregistered movie titles. But one question we may never see the answer to is: did Universal say "Send us whatever title you want, but it has to have 'Town' in the name. We're doing a picture about a town, by gum, and we can't lose that! Sin Town? Sure, we'll throw some sin in there."?

  The movie itself certainly isn't dull, although it is somewhat dilg. Yes, my favorite pastime as the drama unfurled was making jokes about a character's unusual name. "Wow, Cary Grant is a real DILG." "He likes his borscht with a lot of dilg." "His favorite Babylon 5 alien species is the Dilgar." Sorry, I just had to get my dilgs in. Dilg is a very uncommon name but not unheard of: for example, Peter Dilg of Long Island "has one of the largest private collections in the country of windup phonographs and gramophones."

  Anyway, the movie's fine. The best parts are Grant and Ronald Colman going at it like Socrates and Thrasymachus.

• Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949): We really enjoyed this Lucille Ball YIMBY comedy. I wasn't really expecting to, because my preexisting opinion about Lucille Ball was that she was a really good producer but her comedy hasn't aged well. After watching this movie, I think she's fine, and what hasn't aged well is the sitcom format.

  See, in Miss Grant Takes Richmond, Ball's character is a clumsy ditz who gets in over her head, sort of like her character in I Love Lucy. If this was a sitcom, "clumsy ditz" would be the extent of her character development. Since this is a movie, we get to see her discover that being a clumsy ditz doesn't preclude you being really good at other things, like customer service and managing real estate developments. It's a more satisfying ending. Also, there's some great slapstick in this film which I don't think would have been allowed on television at the time.

• Godzilla Minus One (2023): This is very good, one of the best Godzilla movies, not least because of its refusal to zoom out from its focus on a few people who are having very bad days. Godzilla only shows up four times! This decision frustrated me while I was watching the movie, since I liked the grand (if incompetent) sweep of 2016's Shin Godzilla. But in retrospect it keeps the stakes at human scale in a movie about a very big thing (Godzilla).

  This focus on the individual does mean the movie tips into cornball melodrama at a couple points, but maybe it's just a matter of degree. Maybe some people don't like seeing any level of human emotion in the hapless people who flee from Godzilla by running away in the same direction he's walking in, without really considering the possibilities of alleyways or crossstreets. (Not saying those are guaranteed safe, but give it a try, folks!) Maybe those people are at a 1, and people who really loved all the corny personal drama in this movie are at a 10, and I'm, let's say, at an 8.

  Overall, I have to say I left the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed by Godzilla's invincibility.

• Danger Flight (1939): I can barely remember this movie but I know we watched it and I anti-recommend it highly enough that the details don't matter much. It was trying to bring a wartime level of airborne action-movie excitement to a world that was not yet at war. So the plane is a mail plane, and the threats are bad weather and hoodlums.

  Maybe this was even a serial pasted together into a feature? I don't remember and won't look it up, but it had that feeling.

• Goverment Girl (1943): This one wasn't great either but it gives an interesting glimpse into the extreme housing shortages of wartime Washington.

  There's a car chase sequence in this film that was actually filmed on the streets of D.C., and while watching it I was struck by how rarely I've seen such a thing in Code-era movie. It's not technically impossible; Buster Keaton was filming car chases in the 1920s. But I feel like from the invention of talkies until 196x, car chases were done in the studio with rear projection and are thus not very exciting. In fact, I think the only reason they filmed this one on location is that it's a motorcycle, not a car, so rear projection wouldn't work.

• Visit to a Small Planet (1960): "Maybe a science fiction theme will make dorky Jerry Lewis comedy more bearable," I thought. Oh, what an innocent fool was I! It's bad. I remember some alien/beatnik interactions that were kinda funny. Oh, and the moment in the nearby screenshot had a great Jerry Lewis delivery.
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947): This film does not have the courage of its convictions. After a few fun fantasy sequences a la the original source material, Walter Mitty is quickly thrown into a world of real thrills and excitement and excuses for Danny Kaye patter songs. At that point it turns into a fish-out-of-water scenario, like North by Northwest or something. When Walter Mitty is about a fish who wishes he was out of water and never will be. James Thurber hated this movie, but presumably not enough to tear up his big check from Samuel Goldwyn. I merely found it a bit dull, and got no check from Goldwyn whatsoever.

OK, now for the movies I saw this month:

• Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013): Excellent continuation and conclusion to the trilogy. The naturalistic, conversational style continues. Before Sunset perfectly captures the long lingering when you really need to go, but you're with the one you want to be with. Good stuff.
• Luv (1967): The Elaine May/Jack Lemmon/Peter Falk collaboration we needed to heal our nation. Pretty sure nothing bad happened after 1967, but there's still time. From the period when Broadway plays were routinely turned into movies, this has very heavy "play" marks on it and it's not exactly a great comedy, but we were in the mood for dark madcap humor and this delivered.

  The neurotic late-60s Neil Simon-ness of the characters in this movie brought to mind the elevator scene from Sweet Charity (1969). That scene is a lot funnier than anything in Luv, but it was nice to be reminded of it.

• The Philadelphia Story (1940): Can you be more specific? I thought I was going to see Rocky. I'm going to go against the moviegoer grain here and say this was just okay. So much sitcom-style misunderstanding! Admittedly this movie predates sitcoms, but at this point I'm tired of it. Just communicate, people! I'm pretty sure I fell asleep for about 10 minutes and missed nothing.

  Yeah, good thing Film Roundup isn't one of the inputs into the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator, or this review would spoil its 100% rating and I'd have the hardcore Storyheads coming after me.

• Scrooged (1988): I finally understand why people my age claim Die Hard (1988) as a Christmas movie; because otherwise they'd have to watch Scrooged every year. A decent concept with great practical effects becomes disappointingly random due to countless script rewrites, self-indulgence, and Bill Murray's insistence on improvising important bits. Sure, that speech at the end is an impressive feat, but we have large language models now, so the burden of rattling off vague sentiments can now be lifted from humanity's shoulders. Elaine May had an uncredited writing pass on this movie; they should had just filmed whatever she wrote.
• The Boy and the Heron (2023): This may be the most controversial sentiment I've shared on Film Roundup, but this movie is not good. It's the kind of thing you make when you're so famous and important that you bypass an agonizing but essential part of the creative process: having someone else look at your draft and tell you that there's really good stuff in here but it's too big and sloppy, and you need to figure out what story you want to tell and focus on that.

  The good movie inside this one is something self-critical with evil Totoroid parakeets, something about the juggernaut Miyazaki has created, the immortal images in his films and the limits of art's ability to change the world. But that new idea doesn't show up for a long time and it's in there with so much more typical stuff, that I wasn't feeling it at all.

  There's the very slight chance that this is awesome in Japanese and a bum translation screwed everything up, but reviews of this movie sound like people trying to convince themselves that a bad movie is good.

• Our Hospitality (1923): This (now public domain!) film apparently invented the idea of clogging up a hilarious short with a bunch of dramatic plot elements to pad it out to feature length. Yes, Buster Keaton's innovations have always been a double-edged sword. The stunts are great as always, and the parts where Buster's running in and out of the house like a deadly game of freezetag are quite funny, so overall I do recommend this one. I mean, the "padding" takes it to 73 minutes, it's not that bad.
• Cup of Cheer (2020): This film is a mess. But we enjoyed finally seeing a Christmas romance parody that swings for the hard R rating, especially given its Zucker and Zucker-like insistence on playing everything straight. But it's a mess. It feels like much of the screenplay was improvised and typed up without polishing. Really funny moments sit side-by-side with obvious clunkers and entire subplots that aren't funny and don't add anything.

  If you read IMDB reviews you'll see the movie's natural audience have been turned off by all the swearing and filthy dialogue, and you'd think this would drag down its rating beyond what it should be, but a 5.5 is exactly what Cup of Cheer deserves.

• Oppenheimer (2023): I was engaged for three hours despite already knowing the story, so objectively speaking I have to count this movie as a success. Creatively, the most interesting part for me was the junction between the second and third acts, right after the Trinity test. Oppenheimer sees his world-historical importance slipping out of his fingers, never to return, until he's just a schmoe like the rest of us. The key scene IMO was the one where the A-bombs are loaded into trucks and the trucks drive out of Los Alamos and the camera doesn't follow them.

This month, Television Spotlight focuses on Taskmaster, a show that combines the collegiality of British panel shows with the sadism of Japanese game shows. We're slowly going through the show, we're on series 9 or something, occasionally re-meeting someone we recognize from the small and incestuous world of British comedy. You were in Footlights, eh? Interesting, interesting.

We've also started going through the international spinoffs, notably Kongen Befaler, the Norwegian edition. Kongen Befaler contestants are all notably more handy than their British counterparts, possibly because Norway has universal compulsory military service. Update: This is not true, I misread an ambiguous document. Only about 10% of Norwegians actually undergo military training. However, according to Norwegian Wikipedia, Calle Hellevang-Larsen, one of the handier participants, is "a trained marine telegrapher from the Norwegian Navy."