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Thu May 07 2026 21:34 April Film Roundup:
- Queen of Katwe (2016): The second in our film festival of movies tied to Zohran Mamdani's life. This one has a cameo from the big Z himself, playing "Student Bookie" in a very 90s shirt. The rest of the movie is a pretty standard heartwarming based-on-a-true-story sports movie. I really liked the ending credits where they paired the actors with the real people they played. It really drives home the fact that there is no villain in this movie; nobody objected to the way they were portrayed. Except, perhaps, the Student Bookie.
- Project Hail Mary (2026): Saw on a date with Sumana, and in honor of her going in without knowing the Big Spoiler, if you don't know it I won't reveal it in this paragraph. But it was excellent. As someone who's created a Big Wacky Spoiler or two in his fiction I thought they did a good job of creating a Big Spoiler that...
You know what? It's a new paragraph, and the people who wanted to not be spoiled have moved on to the next movie. I'll say it: Rocky is great. A cool design, a great practical effect, a fun character. The scenes without Rocky... I could take or leave 'em.
- We watched some old public domain cartoons by Winsor McKay, inventor of the animated GIF. The best one, I would say, is The Pet (1921), which features both classic kaiju action and the immortal line "Say Doc — my wife as you know is a bug on pets — how can I murder the latest one she's found?"
Also, this went right over my head while watching it, but The Pet is a pre-Code film and this review points out that, as an entry in the Rarebit Fiend Cinematic Universe, it necessarily makes heavy use of a couple in bed together.
- Cactus Flower (1969): I sold Sumana on this as "like The Apartment but ten years later and not as good." And that is how it starts, but it quickly finds its own groove and turns into something really nice: a movie about two middle-aged people falling in love for the first time. It's a sweet rom-com that just happens to start with an attempted suicide and jokes about infidelity. The rare movie I'm glad Billy Wilder didn't direct, because it's just enough askew from his worldview that he never would have done anything so wholesome.
BTW, how about that 1969 dental practice? They've got a little darkroom for developing the X-rays. Really cool.
Bonus Kal Ho Na Ho connection: this film mentions a nonexistent address in Jackson Heights.