News You Can Bruise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Games

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

Literature

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

Runners-up:

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

My accomplishments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's my top ten for 2024. A very big year for Japanese movies, but Hundreds of Beavers takes the gold home for the U.S. of A.

1. Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
2. Supermarket Woman (1996)
3. River (2023)
4. Tokyo Olympiad (1965)
5. Slacker (1990)
6. Dance With Me (2019)
7. The Big Clock (1948)
8. A Taxing Woman (1987)
9. Something Wild (1986)
10. The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)

• Leah's Perfect Gift (2024): I had a part in making this movie! It's based on Leah's Perfect Christmas by Catherine Beck, the pen name of a member of my writing group.

  Near the beginning of the film the story train is visibly shunted off the generic "Hallmark Christmas movie" setup into a story that is, at best, poking loving fun at Hallmark Christmas movies, and then it's shunted back onto the track at the end for a Hallmark Christmas movie conclusion. In the middle the movie's all right, but the book spends a lot more time on Leah's outsider's view of Christmas in a way that really rings true. Also, in the book they take the Metro North up to Connecticut rather than driving, which makes way more sense.

  The book is better, is what I'm saying. In a Film Roundup first, I will reproduce some of my old notes from the meeting of our writing group where we went over Leah's Perfect Christmas:

  Really cute, I don't have a lot to change.

  The best part was the dinner where Leah takes Gavin's bleu cheese because his mom won't make a meal accommodation, and then his mom makes a completely unnecessary meal accommodation for Maddie.

  The parents are ridiculous stereotypes, but I didn't reliably find them ridiculous to the point of satire. I'd like to see more of that.

  The main issue I felt was a kind of emotional monotony through the middle of the book. Often a rom-com has a red herring romantic partner. I would either introduce a red herring or make the Christmas experience—not necessarily the parents—less uniformly unbearable. There needs to be something to distract Leah from Gavin, because I'm not being brought through the story solely by the idea that Gavin isn't the guy he seems to be when they're in New York.

  I haven't read the final version of the book, but in the movie they chose door #2, giving Leah a variety of Christmasy side quests that let them showcase the many, many colorful sets and props available to the production.

• Beaches (1988): The chick flicks continue! On my way back from Japan I stopped in LA to see Susanna and family. She and I walked around Crystal Cove State Park, where the beach house seen in Beaches has been preserved as a miniature film museum. (According to the museum, that house was used in a lot of movies, but most of them were silent movies in the early days of Hollywood, so nobody cares anymore.)

  This reminded me that our mom loved the soundtrack to Beaches, or at least kept the tape in her car for a really long time until we knew all the songs. (Other albums I assume Mom loved from the same evidence: Neil Diamond: His 12 Greatest Hits.) So I told Susanna I'd watch the movie with Sumana when I got back.

  And... it's pretty good. The critical consensus is negative, but I thought it did a good job of showing a long-lasting friendship between two women, a friendship that is strained but never breaks. And there are a lot of good songs on that soundtrack. In the 20+ years since I last heard the Beaches soundtrack I've grown more able to recognize the musical homages going on in the songs. In particular, I correctly identified "Oh Industry" as "a Laurie Anderson thing."

And now, it's time to send off another Star Trek series with this month's Television Spotlight.

• Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-2024): A standout of the Stream Trek era. I looked forward to every episode and thoroughly enjoyed the mixture of fan callbacks and traditional Trek stories. But there's one thing I didn't enjoy, and it's summed up by Sumana's common refrain while we were watching: "No one's making you be in Starfleet, Mariner." I griped about this in my roundup of season 1 and it never stopped being a problem. Beckett Mariner, the main character of the show, acts like a sulking draftee for nearly the entire series, even though she's a graduate of an elite military academy and a member of a post-scarcity civilization devoted entirely to personal betterment.

  She sulks on a ship whose crew starts out mediocre but improves in cohesion over time. She sulks on her punitive assignment to a crappy space station, which we later see get turned around by crew who came in with a more positive attitude. Other people improve, but she doesn't. There's a blissful couple of episodes when she actually leaves Starfleet and seems to be living the life she wants, but she comes right back. I can sorta make this make sense based on the exposition we get—mommy issues plus Dominion War PTSD, basically—but the series kept showing Mariner grow as a person, only to hit her reset button at the end of an episode or season. (Tendi did have sustained, persistent growth throughout the series, so it is possible.)

  The versions of Mariner and Boimler in the Strange New Worlds crossover were much more appealing than the cartoon versions, which probably indicates that the characters' flaws are exaggerated for comic effect vis-a-vis what they'd be like in a live-action show. But I don't find it funny to see people learn the same lessons over and over. It is a tribute to the writing of Lower Decks and the charisma of the actors that I loved the show despite this really annoying problem they never fixed.

• The Big Clock (1948): A great thriller driven by the grey-flannel trappings of postwar America. Having the detective lead a manhunt for himself is the sort of thing that feels like it should be a really common plot twist, but I can't think of another example.
• 90 Years Old - So What? (2024): A lighthearted movie about Aiko Sato, Japan's own Andy Rooney. Saw it on a plane and enjoyed how it sped along the passage of time. I didn't know this was based on a true story until the end of the movie. It just never occurred to me. If anything, I assumed it was a vehicle for the 90-year-old lead actress, Mitsuko Kusabue.
• The Asphalt Jungle (1950): Excellent heist film which blends in some noir, in that many of the criminals meet their Hays Code-required ends due to the humanizing weaknesses that made their characters more than cardboard thugs in the first part of the movie.
• Once Upon A Time in the West (1968): I liked this movie, especially the ballsy opening that introduces stars only to kill them off, but it was so long I started falling asleep in Act 3. I think there's a good 45 minutes in the middle you could cut.
• What If Tokugawa Ieyasu Became Prime Minister? (2024): It wouldn't be good, I tell you, and neither is this movie. I wasn't really following all of the historical heroes, but I recently learned about Ryōma Sakamoto, and when one of the samurai pulled out a revolver and started shooting I thought "That's gotta be Sakamoto."

  Emblematic of the conceptual problems with this movie is a scene where it's explained that the AI-generated heroes have been programmed not to pursue their ideological clashes/historical rivalries with one another. This would basically require removing their opinions about what is best for Japan--that is, their ability to do politics. It's a technocratic fantasy that, even though it falls apart inside the movie, doesn't fall apart quickly or disastrously enough to satisfy my cranky ass. To put it in American terms, if you brought back Thomas Jefferson and FDR and Ronald Reagan to rule the country, what course of action would they agree on?

  Nonetheless, I saw this film on an airplane, so it gets my near-universal bad movie pass.

• Ride Lonesome (1959): Perhaps the ultimate Western title. Sometimes a man's just gotta... ride lonesome. A decent story marred by the sort of lazy Native American stereotypes that most Westerns manage to avoid.
• TiMER (2009): Gonna bring up my groundbreaking Sleepless in Seattle review once again, because TiMER takes the core concept in an interesting direction. See, what we perceive as the rules of rom-coms appear to the inhabitans of rom-coms as laws of physics. They don't make sense, but quantum mechanics doesn't make sense either. We can build technology based on quantum mechanics, and the people in TiMER build technology based on rom-com physics.

  However, I have to say those fictional people in a fictional world don't go far enough. What we see in TiMER is not technically a rom-com (it's light on the -com, among other things) but pretty close. I think we should lean more into the sci-fi premise here, because scientists in a rom-com universe wouldn't stop at inventing the TiMER. That's because the TiMER creates a wide variety of natural experiments that anyone can conduct, though any given person can only conduct one.

  The TiMER reveals a universe in which people have free will most of the time, but lose a chunk of their free will starting at midnight on the day they're destined to find their One. (I'll ignore the time zone problem here, lest a Gremlin pop out of my computer and savage me.) What's more, you have to apply an opt-in prosthetic to have your free will suppressed! If you remove your TiMER on the day when you lose your free will, you and your true love both get your free will back! Amazing! It's spooky action at a distance, scaled up to a macroscopic level!

  When discussing the film afterwards Sumana and I proposed a subreddit where people post on the day their TiMER goes off, find their One online, and then hide in bed all day. Since the process is rom-com love-at-first-sight, it requires eye contact, just like in Sleepless in Seattle. What happens when people start doing this? Does the universe perform increasingly ridiculous feats of quantum teleportation to force the lovers together? Do you end up in a Groundhog Day situation, forced to relive the day over and over until you cooperate with physics?

  Uh, the movie's pretty fun. Lots of little variations on the theme. May I recommend Brendan's 2011 review if you want a review that covers, I dunno, the plot of the movie.

• Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964): Definitely one on the goofy side, with its villainous tycoons and egg-munching reporters and kid-friendly ecological message—but also has a couple scenes of human-on-human violence which are surprisingly shocking in a kaiju movie. The big G seems more clumsy than hostile in this outing, with his tail frequently getting stuck in things and generally proving a liability.

  In a possible first, I though the human characters were more interesting than the monsters here. I was prepared to dislike the fairy twins, but I found them charming when they weren't singing. The fight scenes aren't the best because Godzilla is never matched up against a kaiju with similar powers. Mothra just swoops around his head a lot.

  I will now never forget that "たまご" means "egg" because they say it so many times in this movie.

• Tokyo Olympiad (1965): An incredible narrative film made from documentary footage. I did not think I would enjoy a movie about the Olympics but I saw this movie, now I'm a believer. Sumana also watched O Sport, You Are Peace! (1981) and 16 Days of Glory (1985) and I watched some of those films as well, but there's no comparison in terms of quality. Tokyo Olympiad has a continuous focus on the people at the Olympics, especially but not only the athletes. Other films document the spectacle to please the IOC and the host country; Tokyo Olympics keeps pointing out that all the spectacle is made up of individual people doing stuff.

  Incidentally, I have a strong memory of my dad taking me to watch Greg Louganis compete at the 1984 Olympics, but there's footage of this in 16 Days of Glory, and it's happening in the afternoon; I remember it being dark out. Maybe we went to the qualifying heats or something?

• Being Two Isn't Easy (1962): Kon Ichikawa impressed us so much that we decided to check out this pre-Tokyo Olympiad dramedy. Not incredible, but very enjoyable, especially the wry sense of humor they give the Look Who's Talking-esque two-year-old. The parents are believably harried, obaachan is both infuriating and sympathetic, and everyone's just doing their best.
• The Hired Hand (1971): A good, lonesome western from Hollywood's all-too-brief "give the director total creative control" period. Dramatizes the west with a complete absence of glamor, but without relying too much on shock value and violence. (There is a little, but it's not, like, Unforgiven.)

• Christmas in July (1940): One for the "we can't agree on a title" files. A fun screwball comedy with twists you can see coming 1.2 miles away. At this point I can say that Preston Sturges movies just give me a good feeling. Not because they're warm and fuzzy—they tend to be the opposite—but because they posit that the human capability to fuck things up is limited, that we do good despite ourselves.
• Shack Out on 101 (1955): Like Raiders of San Joaquin, a film I chose because its title made me nostalgic for my childhood. It's got a fun Cannery Row vibe going on, and I didn't even mind the escalation into an action-ish noir movie, but my credulity was strained when basically every character in the film turned out to be a spy. It was like watching the final ending of Clue.
• The Swimmer (1968): I had heard of this movie, but suffered from a major misapprehension about the plot. I thought this guy literally swims from pool to pool, traversing underwater tunnels like in a Mario game. I'm not saying I didn't also recognize it as a highbrow metaphor for the human condition, but when Burt Lancaster got out of the pool and started walking to the next one I was drastically disappointed.

  I dunno, it's still OK. I feel like I don't encounter many movies like this, movies that are nominally mimetic but operate on a mythic or archetypal level. Most likely these movies are still around but I actively avoid them. Like, Evil Does Not Exist (2023) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) seem like they're going for a similar feel but I have no desire to see either one of those movies.

• The Facts of Life (1960): Maybe Lucille Ball will make Bob Hope seem funny, I thought. And... she kinda does? It helps that this isn't a fake-divorce film, like you'd have to make to tell this kind of story in the 1950s. It depicts real suburban desperation and genuine, Billy Wilder-approved infidelity. I never thought I'd see the day, but here's a movie where Bob Hope has some actual chemistry with his lead actress.

  Overall I didn't think this was great, but the ending was sweet. I guess what I'm saying is you take the good, you take the bad, you take them all, and... no, wait... sixty years ago we had Ball and Hope, and now... where was I going with this?

• The Bank Shot (1974): Another movie adaptation from my Donald Westlake kick, and the best I can say for this is it really shows how the adaptation of a good source material can fall short. The Hot Rock (1972) takes a lot of liberties with the book, but they're all in the service of making the story move fast enough to hit an unusual number of plot beats in a normal-length film. The Bank Shot feels like they wanted to do a different movie with the same central gimmick. (It's a great gimmick.) The scenes where they execute the gimmick are great; the others are lousy and it doesn't help that oom-pah circus music is playing during every action scene to tell you it's funny.

  The characters are unrecognizable as well (just as well that most of them are renamed from the book). The point of the book is that Dortmunder's genius at planning and staffing heists is exactly balanced out by his terrible luck. In this movie he's a super-criminal abetted by, and going up against, buffoons. They moved the setting from Long Island to LA just because it was easier to film. Not enjoyable.

  What was enjoyable was discovering, while writing this entry, that Donald Westlake wrote the screenplay for Cops and Robbers (1973)—a darkly comic heist with a great gimmick that's also a good movie.

• Salt and Pepper (1968): This movie's bad, but it does give a sense of what it would be like if they'd started making Austin Powers movies in 1968. In that respect it's sort of like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? from 1957—contemporaneous proof that the people who lived in a ridiculous part of the past were in on the joke. However, most of the actual jokes in this movie are not good, and the action scenes are like Austin Powers fight scenes but played straight. The best gag is near the beginning when Sammy Davis Jr. does the longest-delayed double take I think I've seen in a movie.
• Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975): Crime and grime, baby. When your response to being kidnapped is to just go with the flow, you know it's the 70s. Less watchable than The Bank Shot but has more indie cred. Looking up this movie after watching it, I saw that star Alan Arkin directed Little Murders, another "who cares, I'm already dead inside" movie. He also played the title character in Simon (1980). The guy had some issues, is what I'm insinuating.
• The Questor Tapes (1974): As soon as I saw "teleplay by Gene Roddenberry" on this pilot-cum-made-for-TV-movie, I knew it was only a matter of time before Majel Barrett showed up. (It was about 45 seconds.) But what I didn't expect was seeing a whole dry run for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Others have mentioned that Robert Foxworth's Questor is a prototype of Data, down to really specific 1st-season-of-TNG stuff like the "fully functional" gag. What I haven't seen others mention is that The Questor Tapes also prototypes the Data/Geordi relationship, with Jerry as Questor's friend/maintenance guy.

  And man, this movie has Gene Roddenberry humanism sermonizing like nobody's business. "An insane creator? Good thing humans don't have an insane creator! How horrible that would be!" (Not a direct quote.) I would not watch this if it had been picked up as a series, but as a time capsule showing an early draft of one of my favorite things, I loved it.

  PS: Ol' Gene reuses the Vulcan nerve pinch in this one. It's a low-violence way to put your enemies out of action—perfect for network TV!

• One Cut of the Dead (2017): I enjoyed this, but not as much as I was expecting. The recent Japanese mini-trend of long-take movies like this, River, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, etc. is very heartening. It's a genre of film that requires a lot of skill but very little money. However, this one was a bit disappointing because the description of the movie you see on IMDB and whatnot is actually a description of the movie-within-a-movie (True Fear) you see in act 1. There are definitely twists in act 3 that recontextualize True Fear, but... there are no actual zombies in this film. Sorry. It's just a triumph-of-the-human-spirit kind of thing.

  If there was some way to skip act 2 altogether I'd be more sanguine about recommending this film. It kind of drags, but you can't just cut it, because it's setting up all the character development for act 3.

• Seven Samurai (1954): I know I said no more Kurosawa films that take place before the Meiji Restoration, but I really needed to get out of the house for a day, so I saw this at Film Forum. It's good. I'm always apprehensive about sitting down for a three-hour movie, but due to selection bias they have a pretty good track record. The only super-long movie I've actually bailed out on was Reds (1981).

  Reading IMDB trivia about the different drafts this screenplay went through was comforting to me, as I go through my own creative struggles. Adding the wacky peasant-pretending-to-be-a-samurai was a good decision.

• Slacker (1990): A hell of a movie. Really impressive how it's able to keep its conceit going the whole time. Sumana proposed this one and I was skeptical, mainly because of the title, but it turns out the movie originally had a super-pretentious title and the studio made Richard Linklater change it. Speaking of which, that guy really loves his walk-and-talks, huh? Great dialogue, stylized but still seeming naturalistic.

  Now that I think of it, you could film an X-Files episode entirely running in the background of this movie. Many of the characters have a "wacky but sinister X-Files side character" feel. I guess that really was the vibe of the 90s.

  Since Slacker and X-Files now have me in the conspiracy mindset, time for me to share one of my patented cinematic conspiracy theories with you. I believe Richard Linklater has been secretly working on a film since 1990, with the cast and crew sworn to secrecy, to be released only after he dies.

• Noises Off (1992) - A fun farce with a tacked-on framing device we moviegoers probably didn't need. While planning this Film Roundup I kept thinking Steve Martin was in this, that's how fun it is. I don't even know what role I was mentally casting Steve Martin in. Maybe Christopher Reeve?

  Anyway, fun movie, especially if you like the Goes Wrong Show type of chaos. Probably not as fun as the original play, but the great thing about movies is you can now watch them anytime, without spending thousands of dollars to stage a new production.

• Inside Out 2 (2024) - I dunno. I read an article that framed this movie as specifically being about anxiety, and I guess through that lens it's a good guide for teens and their parents to get real about important topics. But I watched the whole movie, not just the anxiety part, and there's a lot that didn't work for me.

  Rather than harp on this, I want to present another crackpot cinematic theory, this time about an earlier draft of the Inside Out 2 screenplay. I believe that the new emotions introduced by Riley's puberty were originally intended as warped versions of the original five Inside Out emotions, rather than brand new characters. Disgust→Envy, Fear→Embarrassment, Sadness→Ennui, Anger→Anxiety. This plan fell apart when it became clear that the warped version of Joy could only be Horniness, and nobody wants that.

• It Happened To Jane (1959): One of the most generic movie titles ever, just below It Happened One Night and It. What happened to Jane, you ask? Fortunately, there's a song at the beginning of the movie that... no, the song explains nothing! Jane falls in love, okay? With young puppy-dog lawyer Jack Lemmon, no less. What a catch!

  I don't have a way to quantify this, but my gut says that older comedies like this have more stuff than modern ones. This movie has detailed technical subplots about running a mail-order business, the legal system, small town democracy, and railroad freight logistics; on top of the usual rom-com antics about mercenary journalists and sex segregation of lobsters. Also a song about the Cub Scouts, which has lyrics written by the director and which I must assume was included as some sort of residuals scam. I wouldn't say all of this comes together in a cohesive whole, but it definitely all happened to Jane.

• Supermarket Woman (1996) - We loved this story of user research and continuous incremental improvement. The best film of the month, I think. Showing recurring interactions with the same customers over time was a neat trick to kind of create recurring guest stars in a movie. Also did a great job showing the clash between craftspeople, who want to do the best job possible, and people trying to run a damn store, who need to give the people what they want at the cheapest price.

  Japanese question: the owner of the rival supermarket Discount Demon is referred to by the feudal title "daimyo". I am pretty sure this is a joke, but what kind of joke is it? Is Discount Demon doing a kind of Medieval Times thing, what with the old-timey demon mascot and the military-style discipline? Is this guy just really egotistical?

  PS: I think the supermarket shootout in Hot Fuzz was inspired by the chase scene in Supermarket Woman.

• A Taxing Woman (1987) - She's back! This is the point where we realized that Juzo Itami and Nobuko Miyamoto have a Joel Coen/Frances McDormand type of relationship. Not as joyous as Supermarket Woman but a fun crime drama, sort of a tax fraud Columbo. We do plan to see all of Itami's films eventually, or at least I do.

  Old video game watch: there's some classic (I must assume) MSX non-game software on display in the love hotel, but the real prize is the scene where Itakura sees the villain's son playing Super Mario Bros. on the family Famicom computer. There's no generic Atari beeps or disinclination to show anything but the back of the TV, the way there would be in an American movie of the period. It's shot very naturally, and when Itakura takes over, she's realistically good at the game!

  Capcom released a visual novel of A Taxing Woman for Famicom, making this the only movie I'm aware of that had a video game adaptation published on a game system also seen in use in the movie. This probably happens all the time now, but the closest I can come to another example is the Wii adaptation of Iron Man (2008). Tony Stark has a Wii in his modernist house, but you don't ever see him flinging around the Wiimote playing Twilight Princess.

• My Cousin Vinny (1992): This film is often praised by those in the legal profession. I guess that makes sense because there's no villain, the things happening in the courtroom are all things that happen in real courtrooms, and it flatters the legal mind by depicting the justice system as actually seeking justice. Unfortunately, as a non-lawyer, I must say there is a huge problem with this movie, and it's the titular Vinny.

  I mean, do you want this guy as your lawyer? I seriously thought the second-act twist was that oops, Vinny actually isn't a lawyer. He failed the bar again, he's been lying to his family for months, and now he's in over his head. There's a recurring cycle early in the movie where Vinny gets humiliated in court, over and over again, seemingly learning nothing. Not only does it feel like he didn't go to law school, it feels like he's never seen a courtroom drama. If you cut all but one of these cycles, and skipped quickly to the part where he starts interviewing witnesses, I'd be a lot more sympathetic to the movie.

• The Art of War (2000): Sumana saw this in the theater, way back when, and remembered it as being full of bad computer stuff. But like with Antitrust (2001), the perspective of years shows that the computer stuff, though hardly prophetic, isn't that bad. When it is bad, it's because the filmmakers came up with a bunch of roundabout hacker/spy crap instead of, I dunno, figuring out how to dramatize the use of PGP. It's pretty simple, guys: just show a "Decrypting..." status bar.

  The Wesley Snipes action is fun, and this film has the same outsized impression of the UN's influence that you find in much earlier films like A Global Affair (1964). I don't think I recommend this, exactly, but you could do worse.

  One of the first films that needs to manufacture a cell phone malfunction for the plot to work out.

• The Big Lebowski (1998): Possibly the first time I've ever seen a movie in a theater where everyone in the theater had seen the movie before. Since this was my seventh viewing of The Big Lebowski, I decided to do something different by sitting way up in front and focusing on small background details. Here's what I noticed that I hadn't noticed before:
  • The last thing Jeffrey Lebowski does in the movie is hit a dog.
  • On the porch of the unit opposite the Dude's apartment there's a huge pile of shoes. Shoe-free household, I guess. Was it set up as part of set dressing or is that just the situation of whoever actually lived there?
  • The Dude's landlord seems like a Prop 13 guy who inherited the apartment complex and is able to live his LA artist lifestyle on the irregular proceeds of the rent.
  • In the scene on the beach near the end, you can see someone just walking around on the cliff up above, unaware that they've become an extra in Leonard's favorite movie of all time.
• The Long Goodbye (1973): Why not, while Lebowski is fresh in my mind? This started out as a lot of fun but made the mistake of really caring about the plot and the mystery. I loved the early adventure to find cat food, Marlowe giving a pep talk to the hood assigned to trail him, but lost interest when he started taking his job seriously. Not bad for my first Robert Altman film, though.
• The War Between Men and Women (1974): Jack Lemmon plays James Thurber, if Thurber was Lemmon's age in 1974. (He was actually 80 and had been dead for 13 years.) Thurber's brand of quippy sexism is on its way out in 1974, but it still kinda works. The animated scenes distinguish this a bit from the average Women's Lib-era sex comedy, but otherwise I wasn't enthralled.
• Streets of Fire (1984): A goofy, over the top attempt to create a big movie musical that the kids will like, but it was made by baby boomers whose idea of cool is stuck in the James Dean era. There's just not enough punk rock in this; in particular it's much less cool than The Warriors, directed by the same director (Walter Hill) four years earlier. However, Streets of Fire is so wacky and off the wall that Sumana and I had a great time watching it. It's a classic good bad movie: a bizarre idea competently made and greenlight because hey, who knows what will be a hit?

  I think you could have made a big movie musical enjoyed by kids in 1984, but the kids in question would have been theater kids, right? Not the punks. This movie and Pennies From Heaven (1981) are off the mark with their fixation on recreating a time in the past when musicals had mass appeal. You need modern sleaze and transgression, a la Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  I made a bet that at some point in the movie a street would be literally lit on fire. Reader, I won that bet. There's also a classic "make this character a woman but change nothing else about the screenplay" character here, a la Ellen Ripley, which creates a sadly compelling female character by 1984 movie standards.

• Bullet for a Badman (1964): I don't have much to say about this generic 60s western. I remember that the location sites are beautiful, and the horses do a lot of good stunt work, falling over when their riders are shot and whatnot. I mean, I hope that's stunt work.

And here is the promised Television Spotlight:

• Franklin (2024): I think me and Sumana might be the only people who have ever watched this. It seems like an Apple TV honeypot designed solely to collect award nominations. I do recommend it if you're a major Franklinhead, as it's full of snappy quips. Probably way too slow and ponderous for the general public. We both thought Thibault de Montalembert was outstanding as the Comte de Vergennes.
• Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024): Time to bid adieu to the weird eldest child of the rapidly-closing Stream Trek era. Unlike Star Trek: Picard, Discovery had tons of great episodes and a really good season. Unfortunately, it was season 3, four years ago. Season 5 was all right, so I'm not super disappointed, but only because my expectations have been well lowered by this point.

  I haven't looked into this in detail, but I have to assume there was major turmoil behind the scenes at Discovery, since the showrunner kept changing early on and the show kept lurching in different creative directions, occasionally doing things like casually spinning off a much better Star Trek series. But Discovery never lost sight of its pole star: the belief that Michael Burnham is the most important person in history and has to save the universe all by herself once a year. Honorable mention to the way Star Trek's traditional countdown-to-everything-blowing-up timers would inexplicably pause for minutes at a time so that everyone could have their character beat, though they did tone that down in the final season.

  My biggest Discovery regret is that Michelle Yeoh and Jason Isaacs spent so much time playing contemptible Mirror Universe characters that we barely or never got to see their (presumably) heroic, Star Trek-y Prime Universe equivalents. Doing a show that doesn't focus on the captain was a bold experiment but it left a void at the core of the show that took a really long time for Michael and Saru to grow to fill... by becoming captains.

  Oh yeah, Saru! One of my favorite Trek characters, period. Especially in the early seasons, he was a believable and sensitive portrayal of a sentient prey animal. And... yeah, I like most of the other characters (not you, Burnham's various love interests) but Saru is the standout here. The secondary cast was neglected from the start and it feels like they never recovered. I love the eventual Chekhov-Sulu bromance between Owosekun and Detmer but it was such a long road, getting from there to here.

• The Prisoner (1967): I believe "hot mess" would be an appropriate term. This is so stylish and has tons of good ideas, many of which remain quotable 55 years later, but the impetus for the series in the first place—Patrick McGoohan's weariness of being typecast in spy shit—also drives it over the cliff at the end, with the last few episodes willing to put complete nonsense onscreen as long as the cliches of the spy genre are averted or mocked. We enjoyed seeing the titular Prisoner become more and more adept at using his environment, manipulating the Village and its government to his advantage. Definitely worth a watch.

  I've mentioned before Dave Hutchinson's "Fractured Europe" series of books and how they have a MEGA TWIST which, now that I think on it, seems strongly inspired by the setting of The Prisoner. This makes me feel a little better about my inevitable theft and adaptation of Hutchinson's twist.

• Rollerball (1975): The film that dares to showcase the dangers of relying on centralized archives for cultural memory. LOCKSS, people!

  If the megacorps really wanted to turn their bloodthirsty audience against Rollerball, they should have gotten Jonathan to take a knee during the corporate anthem.

  I do have more than jokes, let me check my notes. Oh yeah, I was spellbound by the bits of this movie that are just people setting up the arena for a fictional sport (e.g. the first few minutes). Unlike most fictional sports, Rollerball has consistent rules that make perfect sense. The Rollerball scenes are shot like a sporting event, not a feature film—it reminds me of footage of stock car races and the like. The only reason Rollerball isn't played in real life is that the creator refused to sell the rights to people who didn't get that it's a satire, you dolt, on the "sickness and insanity of contact sports and their allure." All of that's pretty unique, even if the film is a little slow.

• Mr. Thank You (1936): A.k.a. 有りがたうさん, which I can now read and understand thanks to my progress learning Japanese. This movie dares to combine lighthearted fun with the darkness that pervades the human experience, which is what you'd expect from an honest slice-of-life movie made in Depression-era Japan. It's enjoyable...? Like, it really is very enjoyable, but there also all these time bombs ticking in the background. Wikipedia says "Mr. Thank You marries the daughter to save her from her fate," but that's not the impression I got at all.

  This is filmed on the Izu Peninsula, where Laid-Back Camp also takes place, eighty years later. Both have shots of cars driving on the same seaside cliffs. I've seen lots of old movies filmed in vanished versions of places I've lived, New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, but I've never been conscious of so much difference in the way life has changed than when I compare Mr. Thank You and Laid-Back Camp.

• A Star Athlete (1937): In the runup to war, Hiroshi Shimizu has now gone into making full-fledged if half-hearted propaganda movies. There's a sequence in this movie that's apparently very impressive for cinematographers. They can have it, I say. I knew it was coming, I've seen a few movies, and I couldn't even tell you where it started or ended. A couple jokey town-vs.gown bits, and then we're back to the half-hearted propaganda. The scene at the end where the con artists think they're being hunted down by the students they cheated is a funny sequence.
• Some Like It Hot (1939): Watched solely for the title. Between this and The Ghost Breakers (1940), Bob Hope has a tremendous knack for almost starring in great movies. This one's nothing special, but it does show the frantic Tinpan Alley hustling behind those elegant club floor shows you see in 1930s movies.
• A Thousand Clowns (1965): At last, the true story of Balatro can be told. Really enjoyable, and inspirational if you're in that mood. The montages are like a capitalist version of Man With A Movie Camera. Other actors can't really share the same space with the overly charming lead.

  Jake Berendes sampled a couple of lines from this movie for his song "What Is The Mind", notably the absurd "I'll have a hamburger and a flashlight." I just about jumped out of my seat when that line happened, I tell you. Also it took me a while to figure out it was one of Jake's songs, because originally I thought I was thinking of "Where Is My Mind?" by The Pixies. I'm not a big Pixies fan, is what I'm saying.

  The kid in this movie is like a young Robert de Niro. As in, if De Niro was a child actor in 1965.

• Repo Man (1984): "Ordinary fuckin' people. I hate 'em." This has a lot of first-movie problems, but I can see why it's a cult classic. A ton of weird stuff happens, the filmmakers get a lot of cool images on the screen, but all of the jokes and commentary are at the approximate level of a Frank Zappa song (which, I admit, I used to be super into). I thought it was cheesy, but I ended up missing the cheese when it turned into an action movie.

  I grew up with those Ralphs generic brand products (you see an updated version of the design in the opening scene of The Big Lebowski), so I had trouble distinguishing between the items that signified frugality and the ones intended to be satirical. Also, what kind of liquor store stocks so many grocery products? Anyway, I don't think I'm going to join the cult, but it was a fun movie.

• Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw (1976): Yeah, yeah, everybody wants to make their low budget post-Bonnie and Clyde nihilistic road trip shootout movie. The only mystery about this one is how they got Linda Carter to not only star in this movie, but show her boobs. That sold a few tickets, you bet. I guess the movie was released just as Carter's career took off—she doesn't have top billing on the movie poster.

  There are a couple really good scenes in here, or at least scenes with eloquent dialogue, but they're disconnected from the rest of the story. I think the screenwriter had a few little pearls of genius that he stuffed into the screenplay because otherwise they'd never see film. Smart move, in my opinion. The editor couldn't cut them because the movie's only 89 minutes long as it is.

• The Kremlin Letter (1970): I thought this was going to be a serious thriller, and it sort of was, but I was misled by some goofy James Bond shit near the beginning, then further misled by a scene where the boss spy yelled at the new recruit: "You think this is going to be like your fancy spy college? Here on the streets it's nothing but goofy James Bond shit all day long!" It got a little more Le Carré-y after that. All in all, a decent popcorn thriller.

  Actually I just looked up the release year to put at the beginning of this entry, and it's a very good spy thriller for 1970. I've revised my opinion upwards at the very last moment. What a thrill ride!

• Heathers (1988): Gonna rain on the parade of this all-time classic, or at least the second half of the parade, after the big bands have come by and it's just the Shriners and the Boy Scouts marching past. The first half of this movie is amazing. I loved the snappy dialogue, the psychological manipulation, the bleak view of humanity. Then the second set of killings happened and, like Repo Man before it, it changed from something special into an action movie; in this case a slow-paced thriller about stopping a serial killer before he strikes again.

  Basically, we had a very girly murder comedy, and then a guy ran away with it and it became all about the guy and his emotional needs. To me the through-line of Heathers is encapsulated in the line "I've cut off Heather Chandler's head and Heather Duke's head has sprouted back in its place." You can't change a social structure by replacing the people who enforce it. I think if (say) Tina Fey had written the Heathers screenplay, it would have stayed on that track.

  Incidentally, I decided to watch Heathers because one of the beta readers for The Constellation Speedrun referred to one character in the book as "such a believable boyfriend-in-Heathers skeeze" and I had no idea what she was talking about. Now I understand!

Anyway, gasp as Films are Rounded Up before your eyes:

• Much Ado About Nothing (1993): Staging a Shakespeare play as a movie? I don't think that's ever been done before. A fun production that really plays up the hedonism. Lots of 90s butt-focused nudity, is what I'm saying. Denzel Washington is as likeable as ever. Pre-Speed Keanu Reeves is well cast as one of those Shakespeare villains who keeps monologuing about his own villainry.
• The Fastest Gun Alive (1956): I have a confession to make: sometimes I don't pay 100% attention to the black-and-white Westerns I review. They're so stereotypical that I can put them on in the background, play a game on the Steam Deck, and just tune in for the interesting bits.

  Well, an interesting bit happened pretty quickly in The Fastest Gun Alive—a classic puppy-kick scene, but well executed—and I started paying full attention and never stopped. This is really good! It plays like a noir drama, with its exploration of human weakness, but it's not a noir with Western trappings: it's specifically focused on the interaction between masculinity and firearms, which is as Western as it gets.

  It took me a while to figure all of this out, because The Fastest Gun Alive is also the kind of movie that's padded with an unnecessary tap-dance number. So for a while I was baffled by this movie that seemed to be veering back and forth between Double Indemnity and Oklahoma!. (IMDB trivia: "Glenn Ford at first demanded that Russ Tamblyn's choreography not be included in the film. But at the premiere, the audience noticed that the choreography, performed by Russ Tamblyn, was written into the credits. They asked why there was no choreography in the movie and the studio eventually put it back." Easier than re-filming the credits, I guess!)

  Glenn Ford does a very good sort of Martin Freeman everyman in the lead, but the quality of the underlying story probably comes from the chemistry between noir director Russell Rouse and screenwriter Frank D. Gilroy.

• I'm All Right, Jack (1959): Another surprisingly good movie made from less than inspiring parts: in this case, the slightly bawdy postwar British comedy. What starts out with a goofy series of pre-Monty Python "job hunt" sketches becomes a relatively biting satire of labo[u]r, management, and the bargaining table where they meet. I find Peter Sellers a bit hit-and-miss, but he's great as the shop steward.

  Like Dentist on the Job, I only found out after watching this that it's a sequel and we're supposed to remember the characters from the previous movie instead of just reading the stereotypes (which totally worked). I assumed that "as you know, Bob, you served in the war with these unbearable secondary characters" was a common enough plot device not to need a whole other movie backing it up. And although those secondary characters can get pretty unbearable, they each get a scene in I'm All Right, Jack that humanizes them and makes them more sympathetic—something American comedies generally don't bother with.

• What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? (1966): According to Wikipedia, "The title of the film came to [Blake] Edwards when he was asked the question by his son Geoffrey." I don't know why he didn't go on to make a movie about the Coast Guard, but instead we got this. It's all right. I like how the Italian villagers are completely done with the war despite seemingly being unaffected by its ravages.

  This film is kind of America's version of The Corporal and the Others (1965), in that we've all agreed the Nazis were the real bad guys in WWII and what side everyone else was on (the Hungarians, the Italians) isn't really relevant. Once the Germans show up this does lose a bit of the farce and become a more typical war movie. Or maybe the farce moves up a level of abstraction: one fun thing about the last act of this movie is the ridiculous extreme to which it takes the old "knock out the enemy and wear their uniform" gag.

• Hundreds of Beavers (2022): This movie is just insane. It's like Guy Maddin made a feature-length live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, and I mean that completely literally. There's one breathtaking moment where it plays with a classic Buster Keaton gag (you know the one) and immediately follows it up with a postmodern twist on the exact same gag. Brilliant.

  Nonstop sight gags for two hours straight does get a little exhausting, but I noticed a couple of tricks that the film uses to structure your attention. The unifying concept of the middle of the film is the trapline (Wikipedia: "a route along which a trapper sets traps for their quarry"). One common trick I use in SF worldbuilding is to introduce a simplified version of an idea and gradually make it more and more complex. Hundreds of Beavers does the opposite: it shows a trapline that is way too complicated for either the protagonist or the audience to understand; then destroys it, replaces it with a much simpler trapline, and then starts gradually making it more complex, illustrating each complication with helpful video game-style graphics.

  The different types of trap on the trapline also provide structure to the gags in the middle of the film. As the trapper moves around and around the route, you sort of check in with each gag, so it's not just a formless mess of laughs... the way the first 30 minutes of this movie is. Maybe the first bit should be treated like an animated short shown before the movie proper, with a break in between for a reel change.

  Weird, funny, surprising, and different from almost any other movie (by which I mean, exactly like the funny parts of Guy Maddin's movies). A big recommendation from me.

• Mimang (2023): I went into this knowing it was inspired by the Before series, and would have been a little bit disappointed were it not for the discussion afterwards with the director, where he explained that for him it's less about the changes in the characters over time, and more about the changes in the streets they're walking on.

  There's some of what I call "Cornetto trilogy foreshadowing" at the beginning, but it foreshadows the way the film is shot and edited, rather than the plot. (The director brought this up in the discussion afterwards, so for once it's not just me spouting off on something I think I noticed.)

• The Hot Rock (1972): I've been reading 20th-century heist novels as research for a novel idea, and here's a movie based on such a novel (by Donald Westlake), which I read right after finishing the novel. I think it does a great job of taking the exciting cinematic set pieces from the novel, while not even trying to capture the more cerebral humor the novel gets from its wry omniscient narrator. Great fun, big recommendation. Another novel in the same heist-comedy series was made into a movie (What's the Worst That Could Happen?), but not until 2001. That one doesn't seem very good or faithful to the book at all; the common fate of novel adaptations in the blockbuster era when not every movie was based on a novel.

  Other 20th-century crime authors I've been trying out, BTW: Kyril Bonfiglioli (hilarious!), Dick Francis (meh).

• Assignment K (1968): Amazing European location shots and some fun spycraft liven up a by-the-numbers espionage thriller. The agent's cover story (buyer for a toy company) is more interesting than his secret missions. I really wanted to see more about the challenges of onshoring manufacturing!
• Raiders of San Joaquin (1943): A forgettable Western that I've already forgotten most of. I chose it out of some idea that it might take place in the San Joaquin Valley, but it's actually San Joaquin County, up by Stockton. Of course it's actually whatever random place in California Universal filmed their westerns, pretending to be Stockton.
• Something Wild (1986): A PSA for middle-aged guys on not getting mixed up with Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Not quite like any other movie I've seen, which is its own kind of recommendation: until the last bit, I really had no idea what was going to happen next. This movie also effectively pulls one of my favorite dramatic tricks: A is trying to hide something really horrible/bizarre from B and you think there's going to be tense moments; but then it turns out B already knows and is cool with it, or at least resigned.

  Overall a real comedic surprise from a director I associate with Philadelphia and Silence of the Lambs.

  This movie has more arcade games than any movie I can think of that doesn't actually feature a video arcade. It's 1986, the peak year for arcade games being in (and outside!) every random convenience store and gas station. A period piece set in 1986 would make sure to feature classics like Ms. Pac-Man and Defender, but only a movie shot in real 1986 convenience stores would showcase Yie Ar Kung-Fu.

  (In case you weren't there, as I recall the outdoor arcade games were usually chained to something; you couldn't just pull up with a pickup truck after hours and steal them.)

• Dentist on the Job (1961): Dull black-and-white Carry On-style comedy is livened up somewhat in the last act, where the lads hijack Britain's first satellite launch. That was entertaining.

  I thought the setup was somewhat preposterous, and upon reflection, it is exceedingly preposterous. But afterwards I discovered this is a sequel to Dentist in the Chair (1960), so I'm a little less weirded out by the casual "I'm trying to find a sinecure for these two incompetent dentists who are best friends with a thief" setup in the opening scenes. Those characters have already had a whole movie to set their dynamic, and we're just shoehorning them in to this one.

• Moving Violation (1976): A movie full of car chases and carefully arranged stunts. I can't decide if it's a terrible or great idea to show a long shot demonstrating how unlikely it is that Car A would randomly hit Car B, but it was a cool shot.

  Kay Lenz reminds me of my sister Susanna, and Eddie Albert has another great role (cf. The Heartbreak Kid) that I really didn't expect from "the Green Acres guy." Of course, Fred MacMurray is best known for being in a dull sitcom, but he was great in noir and western roles. Actors take the jobs they can get, is what I'm saying.

• Dance With Me (2019): One thing I haven't mentioned on this blog is that I've started learning Japanese as a hobby. In support of this, Sumana suggested we watch some Japanese media to help me practice reading hiragana and katakana, which explains the rest of this Film Roundup. First up: a film I wanted to watch at the Japan Cuts festival in 2019, missed my chance, and then couldn't find this movie for years. It was worth the wait--a funny setup that goes in really weird directions instead of becoming repetitive. Big recommendation.
• River (2023): Dance With Me was good, but this is the best film we saw this month, by far: a time loop movie where each loop is shot in a single continuous take. Highly character-driven, but with a bonkers twist so you don't leave the theater thinking you accidentally saw an arthouse movie.
• Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2021): Turns out there's a boom of Japanese time loop movies right now, so we watched a couple more. This is a precursor to River, made by pretty much all of the same people, and with the same long takes of people going up or down stairs. It's kind of a simpler, easier-to-understand version of Primer (2004), but setup took way too long, with seemingly scene after scene involving new characters being introduced to the conceit of the movie. Compared to River where pretty much everyone's on board by the third loop.
• Mondays: See You 'This' Week! (2022): Office comedy as time loop movie. Pretty fun but it passes up some obvious critiques about office work... or sets it up and leaves you to finish the critique yourself, but in my experience most movies ain't that subtle. Like, the advertising agency in this movie is coming up with a campaign for a carbonated miso soup tablet--the sort of obviously unsuitable product you'd see in a filmed SNL skit.

  Good news for Leonard's Japanese reading practice, but bad news for any gaijin trying to watch this movie: there is so much on-screen Japanese text in this one that subtitles weren't enough to follow the story. When it was just corporate emails and text messages, it was usually clear from context what was happening, but once we started getting "we're in a time loop" Powerpoint presentations and Ken Burns pans over pages of manga, Sumana and I were pausing a lot and making heavy use of Google Lens.

  The only other movie I can think of that's so text-heavy was Shin Godzilla (2016) and there the details of the text, like all human efforts to thwart Godzilla, turned out not to matter. Also, as I recall there was an English translation layer superimposed over the Japanese text, like what you see in subtitled anime, so if you read quick enough you could catch it all.

Speaking of which, the Television Spotlight this month shines on Laid-Back Camp, a relaxing anime series that Sumana and I both enjoyed watching, and she didn't mind me constantly pausing to sound out signs or text messages. Fun and calming, with lots of katakana on the signs so I felt like I'd figured out what they were saying once I decoded the sounds.

BTW there's another movie I regret missing in the 2019 Japan Cuts festival: Samurai Shifters, the nerdy samurai librarian story, which I still haven't found anywhere. Just putting that here for my own future reference.

• Future '38 (2016): A very divisive film according to user reviews, but Sumana and I both loved the screwball comedy banter, the old-timey sci-fi slang, and the fact that it seems to have been filmed over by the Trader Joe's in Long Island City. It's kind of the perfect Film Roundup movie, because it combines the aesthetics of old comedies and low-budget SF.
• Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number! (1966): Another Midcentury Modern sex comedy with no sex. Bob Hope is actually properly cast in this one, as a middle-aged father who's tempted... to bring leftover fried chicken to a hungry starlet. He should just cheat on his wife with his housekeeper Phyllis Diller, like a normal 1960s real estate broker.

  Even dull movies like this usually have a couple interesting bits, and I think Diller is the interesting bit here—I'd never seen her act before and she's got a lot of what I think of as "Kate McKinnon energy."

  Oh yeah, here's another thing: a while ago I mentioned that there's a span of decades where Hollywood movies don't seem to have car chases. Well, they definitely do by 1966. This is one of those comedies that ends with a wacky car chase that I find boring (see also: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). You do get to see Bob Hope hijack a cop car, which I thought I'd only be able to see in the alternate universe of The Man in the High Castle.

  Something must have happened in the early 60s to make car chases safer or cheaper to film. Maybe a technological advancement, maybe a streamlined permitting system, maybe the formation of the Stuntmen's Association in 1961. Maybe it was simply a lost technique rediscovered so they could film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). I don't know. Someone's got to have a master's thesis on this, I'm just going by what I see in the movies.

• The Corporal and the Others (1965): a.k.a.. "A tizedes meg a többiek". As the author of Situation Normal, the story spoke to me: people trying to opt out of a war take refuge in a seemingly abandoned place that quickly becomes a hotspot; farce ensures. Not as much of The Good Soldier Schweik as I perhaps stereotypically expected from an Eastern European war comedy, but it was a good time overall.

  I imagine Hungary in 1965 was a tetchy place to make a WWII movie, and the balancing act here is quite noticeable: the Nazis are portrayed as monstrous buffoons and the regular Hungarian army isn't that much better, while the advancing Soviets (Hungary's nominal enemy) are mainly represented by one hapless draftee. I think this works in the movie's favor as a comedy, driving home the fact that nobody is going to help these desertees, they've got to help each other. This enthusiastic IMDB user review gives some historical context.

• Bad Day in Black Rock (1955): This film promises unity of time and doesn't quite deliver, although I guess the "bad day" could be the one that Spencer Tracy has arrived to investigate. This was a decent drama that had much less "classic Western" than I expected based on the description. But it had way more "Asteroid City" than I expected based on the description, which was a pleasant surprise.
• With Six You Get Eggroll (1968): For some reason I thought this rom-com came out in 1978 and I kept thinking "this is really outdated, it could have been made ten years earlier." The joke's on me! This was all right; I liked the role-reversal, with the parents escaping to the drive-in to get away from their judgmental children. George Carlin's first film role is as the waiter! Some good banter between the leads, and unlike modern rom-coms it doesn't end when they get married. Unfortunately, the comedy does end (in both senses) with a big car chase that's not very funny.
• Mr. Majestyk (1974): Like watching First Blood, if Rambo was my grandpa Dalton. This guy just wants to get his crop in, and he's going to fuck up the whole crime syndicate to do it. The Elmore Leonard screenplay elevates it above the usual 1970s action fare, I think.

  Includes a great, messy scene where a bunch of watermelons are shot up, like The Untouchables meets Double Dare. Also includes a good, exciting car chase scene. Maybe they just shouldn't be in comedies?

• Decision At Sundown (1957): A strangely bloodless title. "I'm gonna need a decision by sundown, Tex." This movie's one big seige/hostage situation and maybe if I'd been in more of a Dog Day Afternoon mood I would have liked it more. But probably not, judging from the amazingly dull final line. ("I'll tell you one thing, none of us will ever forget the day that Bart Allison spent in Sundown.") It's the kind of bad line that now sounds like it came out of an LLM. In fact, while writing this review I asked Rob Dubbin's LLM to come up with a better final line, and it just didn't give me any output, silently admitting defeat. Richard Deacon provides some welcome comic relief.
• The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963): A good concept, I always like a good cinematic police/criminal team-up, but only intermittently fun to watch. I hesitate to mention this since this isn't a Hollywood picture and I don't know where it fits my theory, but... this 1963 comedy ends with a big car chase that's not very funny.
• The Long Good Friday (1980): Loved it. A better, non-comedy version of The Wrong Arm of the Law. The classic tale of a criminal whose life is spiraling out of control and doesn't see that he's facing threats that are way above his level. Before seeing this movie, I didn't know Bob Hoskins was British, because I'd only seen him play characters with perfect American accents; here, he perfectly straddles the line between genial and thuggish, which is where you want your movie crime bosses. A young Helen Mirren has a couple of intense scenes.
• Simon (1980): A Woody Allen movie with no Woody Allen; Alan Arkin plays the part instead. Unfortunately, Woody passed on this one for a reason: the film is a mess. But it's a mess full of the aesthetic I love: Modernist buildings, creepy think tanks, scientists who dress like Carl Sagan, the Space Shuttle back when it was an untested and mysterious spacecraft. All that good stuff. The rest of the film? Well, there are some jokes, and Wallace Shawn's in it.

  The Indian scientist in this film is credited as simply "Jayant." There is an Indian actor who acted under the name Jayant, but he died in 1975. This is Nikil Jayant, an actual scientist who ended up playing an evil scientist in a movie about evil scientists. He was at Bell Labs at the time, and I have to assume Marshall Brickman met him there while researching the film.

  Apart from Simon (1980), Dr. Jayant is known for his work on data compression. Here's an IEEE paper from him from around the time of Simon, a paper that apparently came with a vinyl record so you could hear the examples! This guy's a triple threat!

• The Lawnmower Man (1992): Speaking of sci-fi messes. What I didn't know until just before I saw this film is that it's not a normal Hollywood production; it's a low-budget movie made by a VR booster to get the public psyched up about VR. As a creative work, it's a B-movie that unexpectedly made it big. As a piece of cinema, it's kind of an industry propaganda film, like Hats Off To Soup or Telephones: When You Need To Talk To Someone But They're In Another Town. Go in with this knowledge, and the movie makes sense. It's not as boostery as Hats Off To Soup, because the director also cares about telling a story, but that's why the VR segments are the way they are.

  Do I recommend this film? Not really, no. The goofy CGI isn't funny out of context, and the contextual matter is too slow and predictable to be interesting on its own. However, there is some nice-looking old tech, and if you can get over the "cheese" factor and the "total nonsense" factor, there are still some chills to be found in the scenes where human beings are transformed into human-shaped collections of POV-Ray balls. Also, young Dean Norris was a nice surprise.

And as long as I'm messing around with this spreadsheet, here's a top ten of the films I first saw in 2023:

1. Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight (1995/2003/2013)
2. Godzilla Minus One (2023)
3. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
4. Polite Society (2023)
5. Barbie (2023)
6. Oppenheimer (2023)
7. The French Dispatch (2021)
8. Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
9. What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968)
10. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic (2021)
11. Asteroid City (2023)

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

• 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...

• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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!

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Romancing the Stone (1984): I said I wanted to watch this last month, and we did, and it was a disappointment all around. Diane Thomas had a really good idea and would have gone on to improve the state of 1990s rom-coms if she hadn't died, but The Lost City, directly inspired by this film, does a better job in every respect except for some excellent set dressing in Joan's apartment. Danny DeVito's fun, too.

  I keep thinking of cool scenes from this film but they're actually scenes that fill the same plot beats in The Lost City, that's how closely related the two movies are.

• Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022): Loved it! The first film of the pandemic era to give me an intense "movie" thrill. Fun, silly, heartwarming, lots of action. The idea of picking a Chosen One based on her all-around mediocrity is brilliant. "I'm learning how to fight like you." is a perfect line.

  This was so good I'm seriously considering watching the directors' previous film, Swiss Army Man (2016), which I'd previously consigned to Trash Humpers territory.

• The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012): An interesting documentary covering the often-interlinked topics of "how did this thing happen?" and "how did everyone immediately forget that this happened?" It also starkly exposes the divide between what space travel means for average people (cool optimism) and what it means for governments (blowing up the other guy). At the end there's an elaborate counterfactual flight of fancy of the sort you don't normally see in documentaries, but I can't complain, I wrote "Panspermia Cannon".
• Dinner at Eight (1933): A very pre-Code film based on a play that's wacky and lighthearted all the way through except for one BIG HONKING SUBPLOT that's dark as hell. As if William Faulkner guest-wrote one chapter of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. Really enjoyable overall with its Wilder-esque cynical/sincere attitude towards romance.
• Chicken People (2016): A decent documentary about a weird hobby disrupted by an epidemic. Yes, at last, it's Film Roundup: The Movie! This was all right. The chickens were cute, and it didn't feel patronizing the way some "weird hobby" documentaries do.
• All of Me (1984): Our expedition into Steve Martin's golden-age comedies continues. This one has Lily Tomlin too, so it's gotta be good, though Tomlin's character spends the first act of the movie bedridden and the rest of the movie only visible in mirrors. Not her best physical comedy outing, is what I'm saying. Enjoyable overall, and also features a pretty big part for my mom's old friend Michael Ensign. (nb. this has not been independently confirmed, and my mom was known for telling tall tales, but "I was friends with that ST:TNG guest star" is a really weird thing for her to walk into the living room and lie about)

  We recognized the mansion in this movie from a Columbo episode, looked it up, and found that it's the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, Hollywood's go-to rental when they need to shoot on location in a real mansion. In addition to that Columbo episode, it's the mansion in There Will Be Blood and Jeffrey Lebowski's place in The Big Lebowski--though for obvious reasons Lebowski didn't film in the rooms with the huge staircases that I associate with the place.

• 50 First Dates (2004): Saw this on an airplane, making this the first film I saw outside the house since Gravity in 2020. It was a great movie for killing time on an airplane. In another example of weird Hollywood synchronicity, this is basically a much lower-brow version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (also 2004), but its endless iterations get at a point that I don't think Eternal Sunshine touches: there's something special about the act of falling in love, as distinct from being in love, and there's something appealing about repeating just that bit over and over. After all, romance novels usually focus on the "falling in love" bit and leave the rest to an implicit HEA.
• Encanto (2021): And I saw this on the way back. This was fun and I'm not complaining that it ran way longer than 90 minutes (airplane), but the pacing seemed off, or at least different from other animated kids' movies. We spend a whole lot of time meeting a whole lot of characters and not much time doing things. I guess it's just more psychological than similar movies that are more quest-focused, more of an Arrested Development kind of thing.
• Odds Against Tomorrow (1959): Between this and The Breaking Point (1950) it seems clear to me that just a really basic racial consciousness can really improve your film noir. This was really good, with great moments of tension, but in the finale chase it gets incredibly didactic, a cardinal noir sin in my book. As soon as you see a road sign saying "STOP DEAD END", you know what you're in for. We get it! Admittedly it's the same kind of unsubtlety you see in Star Trek ten years later, so I guess audiences do need to be hit over the head with this stuff.
• Pick of the Litter (2018): A bonus movie that we saw maybe a year ago and I kept forgetting to put in Film Roundup despite Sumana's occasional reminders to write up "the guide dog movie". No more! This is a movie that knows its audience well enough to make it clear that all the dogs end up fine. A wholesome movie, the dogs are all good, and some interesting logistical bits around their training.

• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989): Silly and fun, and I didn't expect what a big heart this movie has. My mental stereotype of Bill and Ted was that they were idiots, a more lovable version of Beavis and Butt-Head, but they're not idiots at all; they just have a learning style that flourishes under independent study instead of classroom lectures. I'm also down for any movie that features chaos in a mall (e.g. Dawn of the Dead (1978), which I didn't put in Film Roundup because I didn't see the whole thing, only the mall part; such is my commitment to mall chaos).
• Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991): Another pleasant surprise! I'm grateful whenever a successful franchise really shakes things up and goes into a different direction for the second outing, like with Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. Speaking of which, Sumana and I are both big fans of William Sadler as Death. I will venture that working a big in-joke into your screenplay based on a typographical error in an earlier draft of your screenplay is a very bad idea... and yet this is somehow a stone I'm not comfortable throwing.
• Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020): This one was not that surprising, but it was definitely enjoyable and they came up with some new time travel gags along with resurrecting old favorites from the first film. I loved how they showed that really nice people don't need to become cynical as they age, but that relentless niceness and positivity can become suffocating. Basically this movie did a good job tying up loose ends that most people probably didn't feel needed tying.

  There's a cameo in this film that's quite brief—I think this person is on screen for about two seconds—but acts as a perfect punchline and solution to a plot puzzle. Great cameo. Now that I type this out, though, there was also space for a cameo by Cameo; a missed opportunity.

  Possibly the best line in the film is "Welcome to, and sorry about, Hell." Really captures the handoff from one generation to another.

• Hindi Medium (2017): A departure from the month's theme, more of a dark comedy, with lots and lots of unsubtle social commentary. A lot of Indian movies are loose remakes of American or European movies, but you could adapt this into an American movie without changing much at all, since India and the US have the same relevant problem.

  Adding to the growing list of "stock characters Leonard likes": the secretly corrupt or hypocritical authority figure who talks the talk well enough that for a couple of scenes you think they might be for real; e.g. Principal Lodha in this movie.

• Coming 2 America (2021): Very similar feeling to Face the Music, with a father learning to pass the torch to his children and unnecessarily tying up loose ends. It was definitely good to see Cleo McDowell return with his trademark skirting of trademark law. I bet his influence means that Zamunda's intellectual property laws aren't that strict... they might not even be in WIPO!
• The Lost City (2022): A very enjoyable film with Sandra Bullock doing her usual action/romance/comedy thing. Mainly made me want to re-watch Romancing the Stone (1984), which was a Mom rental choice in the late 1980s and which I saw before I understood what "romance" was. Kind of an important key to comprehending a romantic comedy! Anyway, all the actors are having a good time, it's fun.

  Side note: it seems a lot easier to get Brad Pitt to be in your movie if you can promise his character will be quickly killed off. (See also: Deadpool 2). Sure, it makes sense, but it seems more brutal with Pitt than with other big-name actors. Jeff Goldblum was only in a couple scenes of Thor: Ragnarok, but he accomplished this by stepping offstage for most of the movie and having a long lunch.

  Side note #2: Beth, Loretta's publisher, goes way beyond what any of my publishers would ever do for me, and beyond even what I'd imagine Nora Roberts' publisher doing for her. In fact, when I saw a trailer for this movie a while ago, I assumed Beth was Loretta's wife, based on her determination to find her and rescue her. This lead to some intense expectation shear in the first ten minutes of my viewing.

• Royal Wedding (1951): A forgettable cash grab except for a couple interesting things. First, this film is in the public domain because the copyright registration wasn't renewed. Second, that ceiling dancing routine! So fun!

  I'd heard of the ceiling routine and remember reading some years ago that the exact mechanism used to film it was a closely kept Hollywood secret, but after seeing it, that seems like a cocktail of hogwash and flimflam. We watched the scene once, formed a hypothesis (they rotated the set and camera in sync), and went back and rewatched. We saw nothing inconsistent with our hypothesis, which we later confirmed through Wikipedia.

  Not only that, this solution is telegraphed by an earlier scene where they tilt the set floor during a dance routine to simulate a ship's deck. Basically, this seems like a secret that couldn't have survived the invention of the VCR, or being a projectionist in 1951 and seeing the scene every night. Maybe Fred Astaire was right and it really was a more innocent age.

  You know what? It was a more innocent age, because in most Fred Astaire movies, Astaire's dance partner is presented as his girlfriend or his wife, but in this movie Jane Powell is playing his sister. In the show-within-a-show they're billed as "Tom and Ellen Bowen," and the only reference to how weird this looks is one random joke. I'm sure it reads just fine in the screenplay, where the dance sequences are just [DANCE SEQUENCE GOES HERE], but the dance sequences in the finished product have Tom and Ellen Bowen enacting stereotypical pornographic scenarios like "I'm the king and you're the housemaid" and "we are literally a romantic couple." In fairness, royal weddings and incest do traditionally go together.

• Shrek (2001): Yes, we got Shreked. Is that a thing? It is now! See, if you Shrek your downline, then when they Shrek their downline, you get a percentage of all the Shrekitude! This could be you in the bright green Cadillac!

  Apparently I'm supposed to review Shrek as a movie? It's bad. The concept is fun, there's some gags, it picks up near the end... But the main characters are annoying and the visuals are ugly. Shrek is the best-looking humanoid in this movie. To be fair, they bit off more than their 2001-era CGI teeth could chew. But when I picture this movie re-modeled with better CGI and rereleased with the same sound track, I don't want to watch that movie either. That hypothetical movie seems worse, because there is a certain charm to bad CGI and I'm impossible to please. That reminds me, I want to watch Lawnmower Man.

• Shrek 2 (2004): Despite the disappointing Shrek Sumana wanted to watch this because of a post she saw on Tumblr that said the sequel was way better than the first movie. That's definitely true! The CGI is much better, as are the gags, and there's even a subtle mystery (what's up with the king). Basically, Shrek walked (made fart jokes) so that Shrek 2 could run (do character comedy).

  Actually, there's a joke I didn't get until just now! The fairy godmother is a crime boss... like the Godfather. I didn't notice because they don't hit you over the head with it like in Zootopia. So, good job, Shrek 2.

  We will not be watching the other two Shrek movies, because that Tumblr post said they were terrible, but I admit a sick interest in knowing at what point they bring back "All Star" for the meme.

• Roxanne (1987): We closed out the month with another quality Steve Martin rom-com. This and Spaceballs (also 1987) are among the first movies I remember being 'new'—there were ads for it in the paper, and later on it showed up in the video rental place, and that's how I experienced movies until college. I guess what this says about me is, I started reading the newspaper in June 1987. Anyway, decades passed, I've now seen the film and it's quite fun. A little bit tame, maybe, but enjoyable. Good job making the lead character a firefighter rather than a cop, and we also enjoyed the subplot about the discovery of a comet. It's a good all-purpose subplot for a character who needs a little punch-up. Just think how much it would improve Shrek if Shrek and Donkey were rival comet hunters!

  Hall of fame riff, when C. D. Bales can't drink from the wineglass and asks for a straw: "He did not expect that."

• L.A. Story (1991): An excellent, funny, surreal rom-com. I don't know if there's any box-office truth to the stereotype that men only watch rom-coms when obligated to by "the old ball and chain", but I do like this genre a lot better when the humor has some edge (like Remember the Night (1940) or Intolerable Cruelty (2003)), or when it's really weird and goofy, as it is here. Great humor, solid emotional beats, and good chemistry, as you'd hope for when your two leads are married IRL. Also, Muppets-style cameos galore, a tradition that I wish more comedies would adopt, except sometimes bad comedies do it and it just makes me dislike them more.

  Tip for screenwriters: early on, this film establishes a platonic friendship between the male lead and a secondary woman character, solving what we in the rom-com-ology business call the "Clark Gable conundrum" and priming the viewer to read his wackiness as eristic.

  We saw this on DVD, and the DVD seems to have been made around 1997, which is early enough for not-that-entertaining "special features" and Easter eggs, but not yet in the golden age of historically useful director commentaries.

  SanDeE*'s name is not given its proper respect in the credits (Sarah Jessica Parker is just credited as "Sandy"), but it's correct on the IMDB page.

• The Quiet Earth (1985): Watched this for free on Youtube because Kris mentioned it, and it really is a very Kris movie. The sort of movie you show your kid when they're ten if you're engaged in an experiment to create another Kris. However I can't recommend it wholeheartedly. There is a very distinctive climax to this film about half an hour in, and the rest of the movie is less cool and a bit anticlimactic. Cool ending though.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010): We watched this because it came up on Framed and Sumana hadn't seen it. I saw it in the theater, pre-Film Roundup, and it holds up pretty well. In fact some of the cinematography that used to read as explicitly videogamey now just looks like Marvel-style action movie stuff, indicating a Man with a Movie Camera style triumph.

  I wasn't the biggest fan of Allison Pill's performance in season 1 of Star Trek: Picard, but I loved her work in season 2 when Dr. Jurati hum-de-dum with the spoiler lady. I guess you could say I've been allisonpilled. Anyway, it was a big surprise and treat to see her as Kim Pine in this film, and to then notice how her performance in Picard uses those same moments of frustration and sarcasm.

• Downhill (2014): We borrowed the DVD from some friends who'd joined Sumana on the Coast-to-Coast Walk dramatized in the movie. As we started to watch the film, Sumana got out her maps and paraphernalia for her walk... which included a postcard advertising this movie! Sadly, that was the highlight of the evening.

  Downhill leans heavily on the walk as a natural through-line, and the plot is very episodic and haphazard. Which would be okay except the movie also has the all too common problems of "no one's particularly likeable" and "one super d-bag spoils everything," so why keep watching? The answer proved to be Jeremy Swift (Higgins from Ted Lasso), and the nature views, which were spectacular.

• Departures (2008): I couldn't remember the name of the movie because Passages is a better English name. Even when I knew that wasn't it, my mind kept filling in "Passages" and I had to do some embarrassingly specific search like japanese film funeral washing best foreign picture. Anyway, this is a nice little film. Also very episodic, but I didn't mind because everyone tried their best instead of being a jerk. There is a lot of scenes where people grieve a dead loved one but they found different ways to show it so it doesn't get repetitive. Content note: it's possible they killed an octopus for this movie. I stopped watching Iron Chef altogether ten seconds after the Chairman unveiled those tanks full of octopus, so I'd want to have known.

• Support Your Local Sheriff (1969): While watching this milquetoast comedy I started to think that Blazing Saddles might specifically be a parody of it, but when looking at IMDB afterwards I decided they're going after the same cliches, and Blazing Saddles gets to the heart of the matter in a way that makes Support Your Local Sheriff hardly seem like a parody.

  I've made fun of Mel Brooks's sentimentality before, and I will do so again, but the best parody comes from a place of deep love for the thing being parodied, and I did not feel that love with Support Your Local Sheriff. It felt more like an ancestor of the Scary Movie franchise. There were a few good gags, but damn if I can remember what they were.

  I think Blazing Saddles first came to mind while watching this because both films use the technique of letting the joke run way too long—the mud fight in Sheriff, the bean dinner in Saddles. I almost never like this. I guess Space Ghost Coast to Coast pulled it off a couple times.

  To say something nice about Support Your Local Sheriff: James Garner's character does try really hard to resolve situations nonviolently, in an almost Star Trek way. But is that supposed to be admirable, or part of the joke?

• Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story (2007): From the sunset of the "toss some super offensive gags into this comedy, it's fine" era of Hollywood, to be followed by the dawn of "offensive gags are okay so long as the characters are seen to take offense." Overall this was really fun, less because of the source material and more because it's a wide-ranging comedy that doesn't care about presenting a coherent world because it's parodying other movies.

  To draw a comparison to the "let the joke run way too long" thing I mentioned earlier, let's discuss Eddie Vedder's cameo in Walk Hard, where he gives a rambling introduction speech. I can see the argument that this is the same type of joke as the bean dinner in Blazing Saddles, but I beg to differ. In fact, I demand to differ! The screenplay starts off with a few pure repetitions, then starts mixing up the rhetoric as you understand that this is a joke based on repetition, and then ends when it runs out of good ideas. Versus a physical comedy bit that's just the same thing over and over.

• Werewolf of Washington (1973): The summary of this film promised a level of political satire which was not met. An early illustration that quoting the catchphrases and quirks of a hated political figure is not intrinsically satirical or funny. (A lesson that, alas, still eludes us.) The screenwriter/director is well-informed enough to base the main character pretty closely on William Safire, but doesn't really know what the President does, or knows but wasn't able to work it into the screenplay. In this film, POTUS is basically the mayor of Washington, D.C.

  Considered as a lowbrow comedy rather than a satire, this is... still pretty bad. But I laughed and laughed at the scene in the White House bowling alley, where the President spouts platitudes as Dean Stockwell's character gets his wolfman fingers stuck in a bowling ball.

• The Laughing Policeman (1973): A pretty good police procedural starring San Francisco public transit. Bolsters my hypothesis that in the early 1970s, it was easier to shoot a "big American city" movie in San Francisco than New York. There are a lot of location shots in this film that would have been really difficult to get in New York. Walter Matthau is nice and jowly, and Bruce Dern makes a plot point out of the fact that the 1970s cop mustache is the same as the 1970s gay mustache.
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): This is a film where not much happens, and also a film where everyone these days goes in knowing the ending, but damn if it's not engaging for almost all of its nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime. For a lot of films made between 1975 and 1985 I can be entertained just watching the set dressing, and the set dressing here is top-notch.

  I was really skeptical of the decision to give Francois Truffaut a major acting part, but it works. "This character needs a translator" is a dynamic you don't see in films very often, and they play it naturally while also getting some good gags out of it.

• Evolution (2001): Like Spaced Invaders passim, this is one of those bad sci-fi films I've always kind of wanted to watch even though I knew it was bad. The difference is I could have easily seen Evolution when it came out, since I wasn't in high school, but... I just didn't get around to it, I guess. Anyway, I had the right idea. In a sign of my own growth as a critic, if I had seen this in 2001 I would have been very upset by the inaccuracies surrounding the mechanics of evolution, but for me in 2022 that's far from the worst problem with the movie.

  It's not bad at the start, when the stakes are no higher than the egos of a couple of professors, but it rapidly escalates into a world-saving thing and I don't care. But then Dan Aykroyd reads the phone book for a while; that's fun.

  According to IMDB trivia, it was Julianne Moore's idea to give her character a character trait. Good thinking! PS: Shout-out to the Hallucigenia reference.

• Moon 44 (1990): This is a bad film that is interesting theoretically but not in practice. Roland Emmerich, a German living in West Germany, made a Hollywood-style film in English to try to sell it to Americans. Sort of like if Billy Wilder had directed Bringing Up Baby before fleeing Austria. And it's really believable! Moon 44 looks just like the American movies it's ripping off (Blade Runner, Aliens, and of course the big S. W.). It even does a good job of catching the 1990 Hollywood zeitgeist a la Total Recall. When Moon 44 flopped, Emmerich eliminated the middlecountry and just started directing American movies, including Independence Day, a film that feels like the much better second draft of this boring movie.

  I did not finish this and can't recommend it at all. I think I made it about 45 minutes in? I started longing for Mike and the 'bots (Joel wouldn't have bothered with this film), and not long afterwards I bailed out. The visual effects look great, very crunchy and Turnbull-ish, but only so long as you're looking at screenshots and not watching the film itself.

• Local Hero (1983): Another excellent, gentle Bill Forsyth comedy built on a near-Billy Wilder darkness and cynicism. Not saying much about it because you should just watch it.
• Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003): Sumana took a few introductory Hindi classes through the local library, so we watched a lot of Bollywood this month to get a little immersion. Looking back at it, this movie was just okay, but our enjoyment was greatly magnified from being set in New York City and watched in the deep of winter at the height of the Omicron surge. We were constantly pausing it and playing games like "Mock the Geography" and "NYC or Toronto?" For the record, I believe only one shot was actually filmed in Jackson Heights -- the brief vox pop outside the produce market.

  Highlight: the epic, hyper-American "Pretty Woman" street party dance number ("They should show this in the line for Customs." - Sumana). Lowlight: everything else Shah Rukh Khan's character does. ("This guy is annoying." - Sumana (paraphrase))

• My Favorite Year (1982): A very fun period comedy of the sort it's hard to imagine anyone making nowadays, partly because the corresponding Favorite Year would be 1994. It's super-sentimental about a bygone era of entertainment in a way that just wouldn't... what's this? My Mel Brooks sense... tingling!

  Likewise, the film My Favorite Year (1982) is loosely based on Brooks's experiences as a writer on [Your Show of Shows] including an encounter with the actor Errol Flynn.

  That explains that!

• Queen (2013): By far the best Bollywood film we saw this month, a female-empowerment film that's also a fun tour of Europe. Rajkummar Rao takes a villain turn, and is believably obnoxious and entitled.
• Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019): A queer rom-com that builds empathy using a Hamlet-ish play-within-a-play ("can you play The Wedding of Gonzago?") and has a nice twist where you think Rajkummar Rao is the romantic lead unless you already know how act two is gonna go, which Sumana did and I didn't. This was the movie where we noticed that Rao, although good-looking enough to play the romantic lead, seems to prefer roles where "romantic lead" is a psych-out: he's an entitled jerk (Queen), he's wrong about being the romantic lead (this film), or the romance just isn't important to the story (Newton).
• Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021): A second queer rom-com, with a wackier tone than Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga. This one builds empathy by showing you real-world news clips, which is the exact opposite technique of play-within-a-play, and would be like me reviewing this movie by quoting other reviews of it. Always nice to see the stock film character "supportive parent(s) of queer character," whether played serious as it is here or comedically like in Booksmart.

  There's another stock film character who always shows up in twos, and I can reliably get a laugh out of Sumana by referring to them as "Merry and Pippin." Anyway, there's a Merry and Pippin in this film. See also, e.g. Logan Lucky (2017).

• Eye of the Needle (1981): A thriller that was all right but gave me a good thrill about halfway through when the two plots joined up. It's one of those "everything goes wrong for our competent main character" films, except, twist: the main character is a Nazi and we're rooting for the "everything goes wrong" side of the ledger. Double twist: everything goes wrong for everyone, resulting in ruined lives all around. At least the timeline is preserved.
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973): What if crime... but very little grime? This is one of the cleanest-looking 1970s crime flicks I've seen. Lots of suburban banks, roadside parks, spacious parking lots... Even the bar, the bowling alley and the diner are clean. (And that bowling alley has a hell of an arcade, though you only see it in a quick pan.) Nothing's stylish like in The Godfather, just shabbily respectable. A good choice for a film on the classic "no real difference between crime and business" thesis, a film where people betray each other without raising their voices and the most objectionable thing that happens is that one of Eddie's guns gets used.

• Hudson Hawk (1991): A case study in exactly what you can and can't get away with simply by being a big movie star. You can get your movie made, and indulge all your midlife-crisis fantasies, and make it pretty much as quirky as you want, so long as the screenplay fits precisely into the standard Hollywood act structure. But the movie won't make money. We had a good time, but a lot of it was MST3K-style cheesy fun rather than "this movie is great" fun, so I understand why it has a bad reputation. Everyone's acting is over the top, but only Sandra Bernhard is hilariously so.
• Looper (2012): Rian Johnson made the bold decision not to license a random Phillip K. Dick novel for this, and I salute him for it. A good, entertaining story, although the secondary characters were more interesting than the primaries.

  "Oh no, she's gonna get fridged."

  "This is a time travel movie. She can get fridged multiple times!"

• Red Notice (2021): Meaningless fun, with a level of self-indulgent "let's set up fun things for the cast and crew to do" that reminds me of a number of the other films in this month's Roundup. I precisely predicted the timing of the final twist, but not the twist itself, and how much credit can I even take for the timing? This screenplay has the same structure as Hudson Hawk.
• Giants and Toys (1958): I missed my chance to see this in a theater (Film Forum?) before the pandemic, and watching it with Sumana is a reminder that our taste in arthouse films are a bit different. This had a decent satirical edge, but I was hoping for something more in the vein of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)
• Single All The Way (2021): I've now watched enough of these holiday roms-com that they're jumbling together in my mind especially because it feels like they were all filmed on the same sets. This one's pretty fun, it's not the one with the rock climbing, but what does it have? Skiing, I think? Big points on the screenplay innovation of running the "fake boyfriend" play without ever making a character lie to their family.
• A Bigger Splash (1973): I don't have many good things to say about this rather boring film so I'll just go over them: Not many artist biopics dare to show full-frontal nudity of the artist. The film now has a very interesting documentary aspect when it comes to 1970s gay culture. The bits where the subjects of David Hockney paintings recreate the poses in the paintings were always funny.
• Schmigadoon! (2021): This was basically a movie cut into twenty-minute chunks so I'm putting it here rather than giving it a Television Spotlight. This was a lot of fun with its loving mockery of classic musicals. It's no The Good Place but it scratches the same itch—basically Pleasantville for grown-ups. BTW if you like Cecily Strong as a doctor's SO in a musical parody of antique sitting ducks, don't miss this 2018 SNL skit and its sitting duck.
• Guys and Dolls (1955): The film that single-handedly enforced the gender binary throughout the Eisenhower years. Are you guy or doll? Pick a side! Fortunately, we live in more enlightened times.

  Obviously Schmigadoon! made us want to watch a real classic musical, and this was at the top of our list: famous, sounded interesting to both of us, neither of us had seen it. We have tickets to a Broadway show that we've been looking forward to for a while, but I'm not feeling super optimistic right now. At least we can enjoy a miscast Marlon Brando and a seething Frank Sinatra in the comfort of our homes.

• Psych 3: This Is Gus (2021): As the title implies, the Psych films have become less mystery-focused and more of a soap opera where we periodically check in on the beloved characters. We'll keep watching but this can't be getting the franchise any new fans, can it? For this one, a number of people Zoom in their performances, including Kurt Fuller. Stay safe out there!

• Harischandra Factory (2009): A light dramedy about the origin of India's film industry and the making of the country's first feature film. It's one of those situations where the question of "first" depends heavily on the WHERE clause of your SQL statement. Official government credit (and first choice of the dramedy biopics) goes to Dhundiraj Phalke rather than Ramchandra Torne because... Torne sent his film overseas to have it developed? If you did that now, would your film cease to be an Indian film? Torne's film wasn't long enough? What does it mean for a film from 1912 to be a "feature", given the different context for film showings? I'm skeptical.

  Anyway, this was pretty entertaining and we both got strong "Sumana's dad" vibes from the main character. Bonus: Phalke was inspired by an Alice Guy-Blaché film! Probably this one.

• Zoolander (2001): One of those comedies that leaves it all on the field, with mixed results. You'll be enjoying the ride and be abruptly jarred out of the experience by something horribly offensive, like blackface or Donald Trump. The research I did for Bamboozled indicates that Zoolander was the last mainstream Hollywood movie to do first-order blackface gags (as opposed to meta-jokes about how blackface is offensive, which had a brief vogue around 2008). There are two different blackface gags in here, and they're relatively tame, the end of an era, like those final Roman emperors who can't consolidate power and get overthrown three months later.

  This film spawned a couple of memes ("a center for ants" always makes me laugh) but I agree with Sumana that there's a lot of meme material in here that never got mined because it came out right at the beginning of meme culture. It's also interesting that Zoolander came out of a series of skits done for a VH1 award show. Reminded me of how Ted Lasso started as a skit done for a sports promo. Are promos the secret low-stakes breeding ground for comedy? Seems like it fills a similar conceptual niche to the SNL skit.

• Love Hard (2021): Was kind of expecting an Edgar Wright thing given the concept of this Netflix holiday rom-com, and the director has obviously seen Edgar Wright movies, but the material's just not in the screenplay. I'm just going to have to wait for my "Hot Fuzz of rom-coms..." or write the script myself.

  It was fun overall, and Sumana and I both loved the centerpiece of this film: a very funny filk of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" that turns the problematic standard into a consent-fest. ("Say, what's in this drink?" / "It's just lemon LaCroix.")

• Baywatch (2017): In this tragedy, a public safety organization gradually takes on more and more of the characteristics of the city's dysfunctional police, culminating in an extrajudicial execution. Funny and deliberately stupid. An interminable dick joke early on effectively conveys "this is a hard R, but not the kind you were hoping for with a Baywatch movie."

  I would have made the villains a gang of dolphins who synthesize flakka in their underwater lair, Breaking Bad style. Just an idea for the sequel... or an unrelated movie.

• Catch Me if you Can (2002): Editing this in as I forgot to review it initially, but I don't have much to say about this. A fun period piece with lots of heisty details. It kept me entertained for 140 minutes, a rare quality of movies that shouldn't be underestimated.
• The Mummy (1999): High cheese factor, and Brendan Fraser is likeable enough, but it felt like an expensive MST3K film and the plot beats were more predictable than usual. On the bright side: film debut of Oded Fehr, who I first met as Admiral Vance on Star Trek: Discovery. Probably the most competent Starfleet admiral we didn't first see at a lower rank. (Update: forgot about Admiral Ross! He was quite competent.)
• For British Your Eyes Only (1981): The festival of "Leonard acquiesces to watching a Bond film" continues with this down-to-earth entry. I liked the ski chalet in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and enjoyed its return with an Olympic-fever twist. I'd love to see this tradition keep going: maybe the next Bond film can have a set piece in Salt Lake City or Lake Placid.

  Kind of funny that the filmmakers went all-in on full-frontal caricatures of Margaret Thatcher and her husband, but were too afraid of a lawsuit to show Blofeld's face.

• The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981): An entertaining directorial debut from Joel Schumacher. Lily Tomlin is always fun, and the over-the-top consumer satire here prefigures Robocop. Tomlin plays a dual role—double the Tomlin, double the fun!—and also has a cameo as an obnoxious telephone operator. I have since learned that this was one of her Laugh-In characters, which has merely solidified my desire to never watch Laugh-In or learn anything about it.

  As for Charles Grodin's performance, I'll say that he's never funnier than when he's playing deep in love with a woman one-fifth his size. Which brings us to...

• The Great Muppet Caper (1981): I don't think this one holds up very well. I don't hate it; it has my favorite Muppet celebrity cameo (a bizarrely uncredited Peter Falk), and the Nicky/Miss Piggy romance really is transgressive. The secret for human actors in Muppet movies is to commit 1000%, and Grodin gives at least 1002%. But it's disjointed (IMDB trivia says it's two screenplays stitched together) and big sections suffer from the Muppet curse of "too many humans, not enough jokes."

  The famous bicycle scene is really technically impressive, but looking back on it, how much do I care about technical accomplishment in a Muppet movie? It's not packed with gags, and it doesn't advance character or plot. When I write a scene with someone on a bicycle it's because that person really needs to go somewhere, on a bicycle. And I don't even have a real bicycle! I'm using nothing but words! But you don't see me showing off.

• We started watching His Girl Friday (1940) but Cary Grant's character is such a jerk we stopped after about ten minutes. I'm pretty sure we did this exact same thing back around 2007, so I'm making a note of it here to avoid a future repeat.
• For The Love of It (1980): A bad title for a bad TV movie that was more or less fun to watch. We subscribed to Paramount+ for a month to watch season 2 of Lower Decks (good stuff BTW, but once again the back half of the season is way better than the front half). This made it to the top of our movie list based on the very interesting streaming service description, which I won't reprint here because it's a) a huge spoiler for the ending, and b) incredibly inaccurate when applied to the movie as a whole.

  That's the kind of slapdash approach to filmmaking you're in for here. We were scratching our heads the whole time. The screenwriter wrote a lot of Batman 66, and it shows: there's Batman 66 fight scenes, Batman 66 chases, Batman 66 villains, and Batman 66 gags. Star Jeff Conway would go on to play Zack on Babylon 5, the kind of security officer who gets tricked by Kermit the Frog, a man so guileless that when my memory goes, the last thing to leave the Babylon 5 wing will be the riff I did of Garibaldi shaking his head and saying "I need a smarter henchman."

  I can't say this movie wasn't fun—it was very fun—but there's a thousand better ways to spend your time even if you just want to watch a stupid comedy.

• College (1927): Now here's a stupid comedy that's old, and therefore highbrow. There's a Pre-Code dirty joke in a title card, there's some good Buster Keaton gags, and where would we be without the traditional blackface scene? We'd be in a movie I could halfheartedly recommend, is where we'd be. As it is... just wait for it to enter the public domain. It'll only be a few years, and then you can have a good time watching just the last 20 minutes of this 66-minute movie. For a real challenge, just watch the last 45 seconds, because this thing goes to warp speed at the end!

Season three got a little incoherent with pieces being yanked back and forth across the board, but the character of Susie kept me coming back. My sister's name is Susie and there aren't a lot of Susies in media these days, and it was good to see some Susie representation. I don't think my sister would approve of Susie Myerson, but I don't think much of Leonard from The Big Bang Theory, so whatevs.

And now, our feature presentation:

• To Be Or Not To Be (1942): Great screwball comedy that's got some extremely rough chuckles. There are two different gags where a suicide is played for laughs, and I must admit, one of them is hilarious. Not verbally clever enough to be a Wilder, but definitely up there, and has the same sweet-and-sour "marriage is a bourgeois farce but love is real" feel as The Apartment or Avanti!.

• Swades (2004): Seen at Sumana's suggestion, this follow-up from the director of Lagaan (2001) is extremely didactic and not terribly exciting dramatically. Also, less NASA content that we hoped for. It does do a good job of finessing transitions between digetic and nondigetic music (really important in a Bollywood movie).

  I saw Lagaan like twenty years ago, so it's not officially in Film Roundup, but definitely catch that one if you haven't seen it. It's... I just realized it's an underdog sports movie. Oh well!

• The Warriors (1980): The opening to this film is really incredible. I was kind of laughing at the sight of all these costumed tough dudes buying subway tokens and filing through the turnstiles, but it's explained later on why they're being extra careful not to be picked up for fare evasion at this moment.

  The rest of the film... pretty good, I guess? Very style over substance, like a pre-post-apocalyptic Mad Max. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the most in-depth film I've seen about running the subway, but this film is really smart about the mechanics of riding the subway.

  There's a scene near the end of The Warriors where there's basically a little arcade set up in the middle of a subway station. There's no way something like that would actually exist; there's a pinball machine just sitting there in a 1980 New York subway station with no one keeping an eye on it. It had to be props. But why set up those props? I kept expecting an action scene to break out that would result in the smashing of the props, and there was an action scene shortly thereafter but it was filmed on a sound stage. So, did they just put some props in a subway station to add visual interest to a few shots? Were they going to have an action scene but it was too expensive to film, or it got cut? Was that a real subway-station pinball machine that everyone agreed not to vandalize, out of awe, like the baby in Children of Men? I doubt I'll ever know.

• An American Werewolf in London (1981): I wasn't really into this one but I can see all the pieces working well together and there were a couple really creepy bits. Plus funny-creepy bits like the people David kills sticking around and being really annoyed at him. Also, it was great to see all the period ads in the Tube station. This is what goes on in my head when I watch a movie BTW. "Well, he's a goner. Hey, are those vintage holiday destination ads?"
• Heat (1995): I'm sure there were also complaints about this at the time, but... De Niro and Pacino are in one scene together? C'mon! The worst part is, it's by far the best scene in the movie! The ending doesn't count because they don't have any dialogue or interact at melee range.

  From IMDB trivia: "The coffee shop scene sold Robert De Niro on the idea of making the film. He, Al Pacino, and Michael Mann later admitted that they couldn't wait to shoot that one scene." Yeah, no kidding! Just shoot that scene and wrap it, guys. You've had your fun.

  Apart from the coffee shop scene and the heartbreaking bit at the end, there was a lot of slogging through this movie for me. I know they put a ton of work into this, but I'd watch something that took an enormous effort to film and think "yeah, if you had a huge shootout with the cops in downtown L.A. it would definitely look like that."

• Sweetie, You Won't Believe It (2020) a.k.a. "Baby, You Won't Believe It" (the title as given in the closing credits), a.k.a. "Zhanym, ty ne poverish". Good to see a raunchy comedy from Kazakhstan that's actually from Kazakhstan. Some good laughs, and in the spirit of international friendship I'll assume there were also some Kazakhstan-specific laughs that didn't translate, but I wasn't wild about this one.
• The Color of Money (1986): What a pleasure, start to finish. Paul Newman is great, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (who I'd never heard of) makes the perfect partner/foil, Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise crazy. Just be glad it's him, not you. A relatively un-violent Martin Scorsese exploration of masculinity, a satisfying and perfectly fair twist that exploits the fact that you are technically watching a sports movie, fancy trick cinematography just for the sake of giving the audience something cool to watch but it's also thematically appropriate... love this film.

  I assumed the "Stocker" arcade game was a fictional rebranding of "Super Sprint" or something, but it's real!

• Solaris (2002): I've read the book, I've seen the movie, now... the other movie! This adaptation has a much stronger focus on the internal experience of the Solaris constructs than the 1972 version or (as I recall) the original novel. That was really interesting. And of course the ending was presented using a typical Soderbergh twist that briefly made me wonder if he'd changed the ending. So... a decent film? At the very least I understand why they wanted to do another remake. Good low-budget space station, too.
• Smokey and the Bandit (1977): This is basically a 1970s Fast and Furious movie featuring hot people driving way too fast for no good reason. Very enjoyable, Burt Reynolds and Sally Field really make it fun.

  An underappreciated weird aspect of this film is how its country soundtrack periodically brings you up to speed on the (very simple, easy to grasp) plot and characters through the entire movie. Demi Adejuyigbe's parody raps are silly, but at least the conceit is that Will Smith waited for the movie to end before summarizing it. I guess thinking about it from first principles, this is probably a movie people watch while they're drunk and/or high, so it's useful to have an occasional reminder.

  I remember multiple times seeing Hal Needham's name in movie credits and thinking "Thank you; this movie really did need a ham." But looking at Needham's IMDB page I don't know what movies these might have been. His stunt work is usually uncredited and I haven't seen any of the other movies he directed. It's a mystery. I swear I've had that exact thought four or five times.

  Another name that popped up in the Smokey and the Bandit credits: Michael Mann as a sheriff's deputy. I looked it up and it's a different guy, not the future director of Heat.

• Muppets From Space (1999): Definitely a lesser work from our familiar crew of felt auteurs. On the other hand, this did a great job of distracting my young nephew, last seen by Film Roundupgoers in late 2019 watching Muppet Treasure Island, which was way better than this.

  I guess it was fun to see a movie with characters I vaguely remember from Muppets Tonight in the mid-90s? Sort of like going to see a band who staunchly refuse to play their old hits.

  This is completely unrelated because I found it researching a hypothesis about this movie that didn't pan out, but there's a page on the Muppet wiki page of pictures of Muppets kissing other Muppets. Be careful! With Muppets, there's a hair's breadth of difference between "kissed by" and "eaten by".

• Portrait of a '60% Perfect Man' (1980): Billy Wilder rambles about whatever for an hour, in this weird documentary that's kind of like a reverse Italianamerican (1974). We heard about it, wanted to watch it, couldn't find it online, but fortunately it's on one of the DVDs of the Criterion edition of Ace in the Hole. Due to the director's technique of just following Wilder around listening to him talk, this film preserves a core sample of some lesser-seen portions of 1980s LA. As a kid, I spent time in plenty of old peoples' houses that felt very similar to Wilder's apartment. And Wilder's screenwriting office at the studio (I'm assuming MGM) is truly a land of contrasts: an ugly, windowless room covered in pegboard, on which Wilder has hung priceless works of art from his collection. At least they gave him an office.
• Furious 7 (2015): I really should have written the review immediately after seeing the movie because it's now all mixed up with the others. How many super-hackers does one franchise need? It was fun, though; good to see Kirk Russell still getting action roles. I remember being really proud at recognizing "Azerbaijan" as being filmed in Colorado based on the geology of the road cuts—Mom would have been proud, too.

  I will mention one thing about this movie that's really special: after Paul Walker's death during filming, the easy route would have been to change the script to kill off his character as well. But that would have been a metafictional violation of the themes of the series. Instead, they put in a lot of effort and CGI to establish that Walker's character ends up completely happy and no one's going to bother him with heist stuff ever again.

• The Fate of the Furious (2017): We're not going into a theater to see F9, but the other day I was at a subway stop where someone had ripped down layers and layers of ads, I saw an old ad for this film and it felt fresh. Anyway, we're in flat-out James Bond territory now, a third super-hacker is in the mix, and there's no going back. Missiles, submarines, aeroplanes... it's a duck blur.

  This film does have the coolest action scene in the series so far, and one of the coolest action scenes I've ever seen, period: the "zombie cars" sequence, which implements a huge amount of vehicular mayhem with minimal injury to human beings. Thanks, evil super-hacker!

• Spotlight (2015): We're now getting historical recreation films from my adult lifetime. What does this mean for my already precarious mental state? Answer: it's fine. I was originally going to skip out this one due to the heavy subject matter, but it's an effective story of low-tech data journalism. Especially good at dramatizing how learning the full extent of a problem can make it seem like the problem itself is growing out of control. But it was always that bad!
• Trees Lounge (1996): It's the Buscemi-ist! Watched without Sumana, whose opinion of Steve Buscemi I just realized I don't actually know. (Sumana: "I guess my opinion is he is a good actor.") This was all right—pretty typical 90s indie film about losers, but just watching Buscemi be pathetic/creepy "warms" my heart.

• Bob le Flambeur (1955): Minute by minute I didn't have the best time watching this movie, but that's mainly because of all the Hamlet cliches. AFAICT Bob le Flambeur invents both the French New Wave and the modern casino heist movie. On top of that, it's got an amazing twist ending that you'd only see in a casino heist movie with a French New Wave sensibility. I respect the movie as a whole, but no Hamlet cliches in that ending; it feels totally fresh even after 55 years of casino heist movies. Reading up on the movie afterwards, the twist has been used a couple times since, but not nearly as often as building the team, practicing on a copy of the safe, etc.

  This film has a lot of low-budget tells I recognize from MST3K movies. I'm no snob but I do not enjoy a shot of someone at a desk having a phone conversation in an apparently unfurnished room. Film pros seem to count this in Bob le Flambeur's favor for reasons that IMO boil down to "give Jean-Pierre Melville a break, filmmaking is hard." But I'm gonna double down: although Bob le Flambeur is a really good movie it would also work well on MST3K. Maybe the RiffTrax folks should branch out a bit.

• Le Circle Rouge (1970): Melville has a much bigger budget here than for Bob le Flambeur, and he avoids the MST3K tells, but this is more on the level of popcorn noir for me. A dialogue-free jewelry store heist? We've all seen Rififi (1955), my friend. Melville claims he originally wrote this heist in 1950, which gets him my sympathies, but that and five francs will buy you a pack of Gauloises.
• A New York Christmas Wedding (2020): After restoring the Film Roundup Screening Room to its former glory we found this on our Netflix list, probably from some late-2020 Happiest Season-inspired list of queer Christmas romance movies. It's fine as far as it goes, and gives you a view into what people who live in Manhattan secretly think of Queens. But the fantastic element, which combines religion, alternate universes, and time travel, nerd-sniped us to the point where all I can think about is simpler ways of telling the story.

  Gotta share our best riff, as an angel gives a sappy speech:

  L: What is this 'Live, Laugh, Love' crap?

  S: He read that on a Celestial Seasonings tea bag. You know, they just call it 'Seasonings'.

• Fast and Furious (2009): The film so forgettable... I forgot about it when I originally wrote this Film Roundup! Probably not fair given that we were watching one of these very similar films every day, rather than treating the series as a reason to go to the mooovies every couple of years. But even now, having refreshed my memory after looking at the Wikipedia page, I don't really have anything to say about this movie except, this is the one with the minecart level.
• Fast Five (2011): OK, now we're heistin'. The Rock finally shows up to play the likeable antivillain to Vin Diesel's likeable antihero. It's like a 007 movie where Blofeld is also really fun.

  The downside of the series finally moving from "we drive cars way too fast" to "we steal huge amounts of money" is the introduction of firearms and massive body counts. Sumana really dislikes this and I'm not a huge fan either. I tried to mollify her by pointing out that in the Fast & The Furious universe it seems impossible to die in a car crash, per se. Someone has to shoot you or the car has to explode afterwards. This helped a bit.

  Continuing the fine tradition of "crime pals or gay couple?", this movie hints really strongly that Leo and Santos are a couple, but the fan wiki says they're just Kashi Good Friends cereal. What is this, the 1960s?

• Fast & Furious 6 (2013): The escalation of the stakes and the increasing brutality of the PG-13 violence finally surpass the limit of my personal suspension of disbelief. A couple movies earlier I predicted the crew would drive a car out of a cargo plane, and it happens here but not in the cool way I imagined. Sung Kang is always fun, though, and he's on the F9 poster so I assume they eventually pull a comic-book retcon on Han Lue's death. I'm super comfortable saying this because the same thing just happened in this movie.

• The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021): Fun family animated comedy, good gags and character comedy, not much else to say. I really enjoyed the (rot13 spoilers) Sheol nowhere.
• The Fast and the Furious (2001): "Welcome to Race Wars; sorry about the name." This was all right, but it was basically the same as Point Break, only the stunts were less cool. Pretty sure they even reused one of the locations from Point Break. So they knew what they were doing. Vin Diesel's antihero is very likeable, really carries the film. And, I'm assuming, the whole series.
• 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003): Okay, I guess we're doing this. This one was awful. Paul Walker's character is so boring, and this movie lacks even the excitement created by the act-two discovery that he's an undercover cop. The torture scene is the kind of thing other movies have to cut to get their PG-13. Antibonus: no Vin Diesel at all.
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006): The first film in the series that I would say is "good". The cinematography is solid, the plot is all right, the race scenes are legible, and drifting is a totally different thing you can do with a car, so it's not just people driving real fast. Even the title is a reference to a classic Japanese film. Sumana's a big fan of Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) and was super excited to learn that Han Lue in this film is the same Han Lue from Better Luck Tomorrow.

  Wikipedia says "The series transitioned towards heists and spying with Fast & Furious (2009)." So I guess we've passed through the crucible and the good stuff is coming up next. I thought it would all be heists and spying, and this whole time I've been squinting at the movies and thinking "I guess ambushing and robbing a semi truck is a kind of heist..."

  According to IMDB trivia, this 2006 film takes place in 2013! That's quite a jump for something that's not mentioned in-universe, but it does give Han Lue plenty of time to transition from whatever shady stuff he was doing in Better Luck Tomorrow (I haven't seen it). Also makes it a bit more plausible that people standing on a mountain are able to wirelessly transmit streaming video to each others' flip phones... maybe through an ad hoc peer-to-peer network?

  BTW, what was the first American film to show an emoji onscreen? Good luck answering that question with our primitive search engine technology! It probably wasn't this film. IMDB keyword search shows nothing earlier than 2014, but c'mon.

• Thunder Force (2021): '80s Month started out in a state of interruption thanks to this Netflix original that, I assume, missed its theatrical chance thanks to the pandemic. Superhero origin stories are very 21st-century, but this is a "wacky science" story, so at least it has an '80s heart. And an '80s soundtrack.

  Everyone's game for the comedy, Jason Bateman is delightfully typecast, and there were a couple of real funny scenes, so it's far from the worst movie we saw in April. It's a huge idiot plot, though. I literally realized a huge problem while opening the fridge, and from that point on enjoyed the movie less.

• Hanky Panky (1982): This was the worst movie we saw in April. Best thing I can say about Hanky Panky is, we see some classic slices-of-life due to Sidney Poitier's insistence on location shoots for scenes that could easily have been done on the backlot. There's a New York coffee shop called "Disco Donut"!

  

  Otherwise, this feels like a movie destined for heavy Comedy Central rotation in the '90s: three good slapstick gags, comedians who aren't super funny on their own and have no chemistry together, reliance on action-y set pieces, and an overall rejection of both jokes and character comedy in favor of a vague morass I call "lighthearted drama".

• Trading Places (1983): An excellent film all around except for an ill-conceived, monumentally lowbrow section on a train; a section which can easily be cut for television because it has no effect on the otherwise superb plot. You can draw a straight line between the pre-train scene and the post-train scene, predict its existence without seeing it, and be better off.

  Apart from that, really funny overall. Nobody does "smart but not as smart as he thinks he is" like Dan Aykroyd. I also enjoyed imagining the Duke brothers as being played by Statler and Waldorf.

• Footloose (1984): We were expecting a superficial feel-good film, especially as scenery-chewing John Lithgow was revealed as the villain, but it's actually pretty subtle. Lithgow's performance has some depth, he's by far the best actor in the film and his character garners some sympathy.

  The soundtrack for this movie is something else, I tell you. "Let's Hear It for the Boy" and "Holding Out for a Hero" were both originally released on the Footloose soundtrack.

• The Color Purple (1985): A well-done rural drama, generally depressing but with moments of triumph at the most Speilbergian moments. Whoopi Goldberg in particular is great in this.

  I was expecting a good dose of horror in The Color Purple, but I didn't expect the most horrifying thing in the film to be the clueless comic-relief white lady. She's a tonal mismatch with the rest of the movie, and Spielberg admits he was out of his depth directing this thing, but I tell you, Sumana and I were on the edge of our seats like Miss Millie was the Jurassic Park T-Rex.

• Ruthless People (1986): The prize of '80s Month! A tightly written, extremely fun character-driven comedy. A little convoluted but not too hard to follow. And—this one's just for Leonard—packed chock full of outrageous '80s L.A. design, with its bright-colored triangles and impractical furniture shapes.
• Outrageous Fortune (1987): This is basically the good version of Hanky Panky. The main characters are really fun, with great dialogue, neurotic in different ways. (Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner were effectively playing gender-swapped versions of each other.) But it's got Hanky Panky's overreliance on action scenes and even the same road-trip from NYC to the Southwest (was there a tax credit?). I greatly preferred the first part of the film where the main characters were just being obnoxious to each other.
• Coming to America (1988): A fun, wholesome rom-com of the type I do not associate with Eddie Murphy's comedy style, but it works. John Amos is particularly funny as the uptight entrpreneurial dad; is it too much to hope that in the 2021 sequel he's revealed to have a Gus Fring side? Recommended.

  According to IMDB trivia, "According to John Landis, it was his idea to have Eddie Murphy wear make-up to play a Jewish man, as a sort of payback for Jewish comedians wearing blackface in the early 1900s." Yeah, the early 1900s, how time flies, it's been five whole years since John Landis directed a scene between Eddie Murphy and a corked-up Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places. I guess this was his way of apologizing, and this was far from the worst thing Landis has done while making a movie (look it up; I won't mention the name of a crime because he was acquitted, but even without the criminal aspect he was responsible for a workplace where people died).

• Batman (1989): It had to be this to close out the decade; the film that all the boys in my grade were obsessed with for months and I never saw because who drives to Bakersfield and sees movies? Not my family, apparently.

  Hard to believe that at the time this was the "dark" version. With Nolan for comparison this is a bunch of goofy Tim Burton stuff, effectively a gritty reboot of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Burton doesn't spend too much time in the ball pit and the result is a fun movie overall. There are a couple characters who are superfluous to the screenplay, but judging from the voluminous IMDB trivia this thing was undergoing serious rewrites as it was being shot, so you'll get loose ends.

  Jack Nicholson's a great Joker—by far the best thing about this movie—but/and his Joker laugh is this Jack Lemmon-esque bark which distracted me with a million-dollar realization: Jack Lemmon would have been incredible as an interim Joker in the 1970s. Throw in Walter Matthau as a dad-joke Riddler and you've got good stuff, hypothetically speaking.

  I watched a bit of Cesar Romero's Joker while writing this review, and learned about a proto-Harley Quinn named Queenie. The Joker's also got a proto-Harley moll in this movie, though she's one of those superfluous characters I mentioned earlier and has little to do. It's incredible how close to the surface Harley Quinn was for so long without taking a coherent form.

  Finally, from my perspective in 2021 I really loved how this movie doesn't really care about Batman's origins. It assumes you already know about Batman. After all... he's Batman. If you somehow went in to this film not knowing that Batman and Bruce Wayne were the same guy, there's no "reveal", just an inexplicable scene 3/4 of the way through where Michael Keaton's in the Batcave for some reason.

• Private Benjamin (1980): One of those unassuming gems that hides in cinema history waiting to pounce on people doing these constrained watching exercises. This is a series of comedy sketches that combine to form a plot that ranges far and wide, extending both before and after the boot-camp sequence we were expecting.

  I never heard of Private Benjamin before '80s Month, but it was a deserved hit and started a mini-fad. Turns out that Stripes (1981) is a Private Benjamin copycat: what if men joined the Army? Between this and Nine To Five I feel like 1980 was the high water mark of a Women's Lib trend in women-led comedies that receded until the 2010s.

• Loophole (1981): The only big 1981 film that appealed was Time Bandits, which I couldn't find as a rental. So we rolled the dice on a British heist movie, and those usually reliable dice came up "rather" and "disappointing".

  It's always fun when a square with professional qualifications (here Martin Sheen as an architect) gets roped into a heist, but this is ultimately a feature-length dramatization of the "one chalk mark" joke. And the "loophole" isn't a loophole at all.

  Sumana zeroed in on the potential: Loophole feels like a war movie, showing the camaraderie of men from different backgrounds isolated from their families, looking out for each other and working towards a common goal. In addition, there is a very exciting climax which would be the ideal place for a double-cross or heist-within-the-heist, maybe employing (just spitballing here) an actual loophole in something. But we just cut away from the climax and the film ended after a short denouement.

  In a final indignity, the subtitles for the version we watched were generated by a neural net that had been trained on American TV news. It was not remotely up to the task and gave the impression that 1980s British criminals had words like "Obama" and "podcast" in their vocabulary.

Preparing for this project was a ton of fun, and we now have a pretty big list of interesting-sounding '90s films for future Roundups. In the end, "big" usually meant "big box office", but for a couple of the years we made a decision based on lasting cultural impact or cult status. I didn't want to watch a bunch of Disney animated features, folks.

• Total Recall (1990): All-time great PKD plot gets a second half that feels like an unused arc from Babylon 5's crummy final season. I would forgive a great deal if it were possible to read the back half as an implanted memory of Verhoevanian excess, and there's even internal evidence for this, but the screenplay must have got muddled in development hell because that explanation doesn't wash. Basically, there are scenes from POVs other than Quaid's; what could that possibly mean? Who's having those experiences?
• Point Break (1991): Over-the-top fun, from the ridiculous/beautiful action sequences to the goofy/sinister character development.
• Sister Act (1992): Fun family comedy with a little action, in the vein of the older Disney comedies we'd rent when I was a kid. The Apple Dumpling Gang and whatnot. I loved the chase scenes through the casino, possibly because "being in a room full of people whose hobby is making bad decisions; also there's a buffet" seems impossibly far away right now.
• Sleepless In Seattle (1993): Meg Ryan's character is a huge stalker, but when you live in a rom-com universe, stalking can be a positive-sum activity! A big feature of these universes is love at first sight, and when Annie hears Sam's voice on the radio she gets clocked by love-at-first-sight. But due to the structure of mass media, Sam doesn't know that Annie exists! The rest of the movie is basically Annie trying to close the love-at-first-sight circuit by making Sam look at her. And it almost works! But it takes a child's faith and pre-9/11 security practices to finally get them both in shot for more than a couple seconds.

  Around 2006 in the Sleepless In Seattle universe, a dating website was created that showed you hundreds of pictures a minute to trigger the love-at-first-sight reaction. Once they had identified one side of a match, it was simple to complete the pairing. This website rapidly cleared the market for romance, ensuring that everyone got their Happily Ever After.

  Anyway, Sumana and I suspect that a big part of this movie's success was the way it showed technology's ability to mediate romance over long distances. That's old news now, but at various points in Sleepless in Seattle, animation is used to dramatize the physical distance between Seattle and Baltimore in a way that really jumps out now. Why spend that money on animation, and why pick two American cities that are about as far apart as you can get, if that isn't super important to your film?

• The Shawshank Redemption (1994): Of all the films in this list this is the one I really didn't want to watch. It seemed long and monotonous. But if "big" is going to mean anything, it has to include the single highest-rated movie on IMDB.

  Anyway, it was fine, and great fun in the final act. It's probably no surprise to anyone that Stephen King occasionally reuses plot points, but I thought I'd casually mention that the core twist of this movie has a lot in common with the twist in The Eyes of the Dragon, King's 1984 foray into high fantasy.

• Friday (1995): This film has a lot of really funny supporting characters (our fave: Bernie Mac's pastor) but it also has two main characters who don't do much. IMO it takes the concept of "audience stand-in" too far to have your main characters sit in the driveway watching the other characters. Maybe I just don't like stoner comedies.
• Twister (1996): I definitely don't like disaster movies, so I didn't care for the action set pieces, except for the rescue from the wrecked house, which I'll justify by saying it's more of a suspense set piece. However, in Twister the disaster is small-scale and repeating, so it turns out to be a pretty fun story of the scientists who study the disaster.

  There's also a slobs-vs-snobs storyline which I'm pretty sure makes no difference at all to the plot. I believe every story beat would have happened exactly the same way if the "snob" scientists didn't exist. Maybe they were a late addition to the screenplay? Anyway, the real attraction here is the "slob" scientists, whose personalities and research are rendered very realistically.

  Among those slobs was a bit character who's one of the big reasons we chose this movie. Sumana saw this movie in theaters and was captivated by a character who she remembered as an Indian woman with short hair—a rare bit of '90s representation.

  We identified the doppelganger pretty quickly (see screenshot) and IMDB let us close the books on this investigation. That part is played by Wendle Josepher, who, unlike No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal, is not Indian. (Also, we'd seen her before, in a small part in Intolerable Cruelty.) Still a representational victory for women scientists with short hair. Please note the floppy hat.

• Air Force One (1997): This is good fun, but equating the President's leadership with his ability to personally kick ass creates obvious perverse incentives, especially given how easy the latter is to fake. I don't think it's a coincidence that Donald Trump used the Air Force One soundtrack at campaign rallies. Not blaming Air Force One for this; it's just taking an attitude that already exists and using it as the premise for a diehardlike.

  Breakdown: the stuff on the plane was great, the scenes back at the White House were fun, especially the press pool. ("Madame Vice President! Is the President barefoot?" "Does he have a machine gun yet?") Everything else was pretty dull, especially the ticking time bomb with what's-his-face being released from the Shawshank Redemption prison and sloooowly walking out to the yard like the guy going up the steps in Becket (1964). Just gimme a plane and people exiting the plane in unorthodox ways. William H. Macy was a nice surprise.

  I will concede that if the American head of government was separate from the head of state, it'd make sense to have the head of state be someone who's really good at kicking ass and doing patriotic stunts.

• Pleasantville (1998): William H. Macy is no surprise at all in this story of human beings who act like Sphex wasps, a dimension so square that a couple dorky '90s kids can casually start a revolution. This was really fun and creative. Really my only issue with Pleasantville is yet another problem that seems to have come out of multiple screenplay revisions: what's up with the Don Knotts character?

  I don't think this movie needs a framing device at all—I'd do this story entirely inside Pleasantville as a B-movie apocalypse story. But I can see how that wouldn't pass muster with '90s studio execs. So fine, framing device, Don Knotts, magic remote control, got it.

  Now the issue becomes the actions of that character. Over the course of the movie he becomes more and more angry at our real-world heroes and how they're screwing up his perfect bubble universe. In the climax of the movie, David a) permanently "ruins" Pleasantville and b) reenters the real world where Don Knotts can get to him. That was a mistake! Now he's really going to give him what for! Now he's... driving away? He doesn't even seem mad? This movie shifts a major character offstage at what should be his big scene, and we don't care because the story's over and who needs that guy. That is, to me, an indication that the character did not need to be in the film at all.

  BTW, big thumbs-up to Joan Allen, who plays an excellent space alien in this film, coming right after her role in Face/Off (1997).

• Notting Hill (1999): In Sleepless In Seattle, the romance took place almost entirely in the woman's head. Now, here's a rom-com fantasy for the guys, in which a famous woman falls in love with a rando. A great supporting cast and fun dialogue makes the premise believablish. I was impressed by how much work they put into the films-within-the-film.
• Mo' Better Blues (1990): After reaching 1999 near the end of the month, we started back in 1990 with the goal of focusing on smaller movies. But we only got one movie into that plan—turns out February's shorter than other months! Mo' Better Blues isn't perfect—if your film's Wikipedia page has a section called "Anti Defamation League controversy" you've got a big problem—but I liked the plot arc, a nice twist on the "tortured genius" storyline with a sweet resolution. Bleek loses the thing he loves most and is able to come to terms with it because he's got friends and family. Sort of Kieślowskian.

  I generally like it when a screenwriter/director writes a part for themselves, and I think it's great here. Spike Lee's character is constantly humiliated and beaten up, but gets one moment of awesome: a scene where he has the perfect opportunity to say "Hey, I'm walkin' here!" Truly, a New York dream.

This was a fun experience and in fact we're keeping it going: we've already deemed March to be '80s Month and watched a fun film from 1980. It does look like I've seen most of the big '80s movies that are still remembered by people my age, so this month is likely to be more of a "forgotten gem" thing. Still fun though!

• Quartet (2012): A pretty enjoyable dramedy that gives older actors the chance to ham it up. We got two dramatic characters and two funny characters, the plot hits the beats in the order you think it will, it's fine; the pleasure is mostly in enjoying the British Acting.
  • Bonus connection to last month's Irma La Douce: Famous singer comes to town.
• Speed (1994): This is really, really fun, and captures the feel of Los Angeles around the time I was living there in college. In fact, here's a story I've apparently never told before: when I was in college I saw a Santa Monica bus like the one in Speed get hit by a car! No one was hurt, everyone got off the bus and started filling out forms. I actually remember being on the bus when it was hit, and filling out a form with a little stub pencil, but I'm not claiming that because it's easy to confabulate that kind of memory. My point is, Speed takes certain liberties with the sturdiness of that kind of bus. One tap and it's down for the count.

  The bigger problem with Speed is that the core middle bit, on the bus, is such a perfect action sequence that it's been raptured straight to Movie Heaven. The subplot about the bad guy and the two completely different transportation-based set pieces that flank the bus sequence are Left Behind, looking cheesy and sheepish by comparison. I mean, you've probably seen Speed and it's probably been a while. Do you remember the elevator sequence? No, I'm pretty sure you're thinking of Die Hard. Or maybe Gremlins 2.

  Speed is nearly two hours long. Much as I love any time the LA Metro shows up on screen (hello, Captain Marvel), you coulda cut that whole sequence, saved a bunch of money, and packed in two or three more showings per day of a ninety-minute Speed in a busy multiplex.

  It would be great if last year's showing of Gravity and this year's Speed acted as bookends on the pandemic, but it ain't happening. I will point out that Sandra Bullock's Speed character, like her Gravity character, spends a lot of time calling for help from people who can't help her. But that's not the movie I came here to find a connection with! How about:

  • Connection with Quartet: Tune man.
• The Devil And Miss Jones (1941): A pretty fun film with some good old-timey New York jokes ("I work at the automat. I have charge of blueberry pies.") falls flat at the last possible minute by setting up a scenario where management recognition of a union is the only realistic way to achieve a happy ending and then... skipping right to the happy ending, letting you draw whatever conclusions you want about how the plot got there. Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Oh, definitely on your side, for sure.

  This film has no creative connection to the similarly-named porno classic, to the extent that I wonder whether the director of The Devil In Mrs. Jones had heard the title but never seen the film. It seems like the common situation where you mishear something, decide your mishearing is cooler, and do your own thing based on the mishearing.

  • Connection with Quartet: Romance blooms among the elderly.
  • Connection with Speed: Bad cops.

• Kiss Me, Stupid (1964): Fun and acidic. The plot only works because one character is a huge jerk at several crucial points—IMO something to avoid in plots. Can't say much else against it. Not a top-tier Wilder film, but a very good mid-1960s film. In fact I think this could work really well as a dark-and-gritty film reboot of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

  We're big fans of star Ray Walston, a.k.a. Boothby—check him out in This "Murder, She Wrote" episode where he basically reprises his "buddy boy" role from The Apartment.

• Irma La Douce (1963): Knowing that this was supposed to be a musical explains a lot of its problems: it's way too long (which would have been okay if it had had 45 minutes of musical numbers), plot develops too slowly (because people can't just do a song to explain their situation), and there are weird setups that are never repaid involving people losing clothes and immediately getting them back (maybe these were hooks for songs?).

  According to IMDB this made a lot of money, but there's some other 1960s movie that's way better on any given axis: Billy Wilder directing Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine (The Apartment), Jack Lemmon funny-voice dual role (The Great Race) Billy Wilder sex-worker farce (Kiss Me, Stupid), Shirley MacLaine sex-worker farce (Sweet Charity). On a creative level Wilder should have just tried to direct this as a musical. If it succeeds, it's another feather in his cap. If it's a flop, at least he went down swinging.

  I will admit that this film has some really funny bits, but they're lost in the 2:27 run time like bacon bits in a huge salad. It's also got a jaw-dropping final shot, but it's mainly jaw-dropping because it's tonally inconsistent with the rest of the movie and, as far as I know, with every other film Billy Wilder made. Even The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes didn't try anything like that.

I still love Wilder, but as I see more of his stuff I think my impression of him has been distorted by the 1959-1961 seasons, where he directed three of the best movies ever made in three consecutive at-bats.

Here are some of our favorites from the past few months, in an easy-to-click list format. Share your favorites in the comments!

• I believe this tradition started with Sumana showing me the 2001 Spike Jonze video for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice". If you like this (and why wouldn't you), I've found an officially-posted clip of Christopher Walken's striptease from Pennies from Heaven (1981), twenty years before Weapon of Choice. I think there's a straight line between these two videos.
• "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel, a video I'd heard of through MST3K references but... wow, it's amazing. Pretty much every Peter Gabriel video is inventive and fun, but the other really great one has to be "Big Time".
• "King of Wishful Thinking" by Go West, another great example of the "put everything in there" school of music video making. I also want to point out that these guys are surprisingly buff for pop musicians, who judging from other videos tend to be on the scrawny side.
• The Cars have a number of wacky videos, including "You Might Think" and the John Waters-directed sci-fi comedy "You Are The Girl", the video which proves that Ric Ocasek should have played a Vorta on DS9 alongside Iggy Pop.
• Huey Lewis and the News do a lot of fun rom-com music videos like "Stuck With You", but also things like the drumstick POV shots of "Hip to be Square" and the 2020 frontline-workers tribute "I Am There For You".
• Hall and Oates are a group I never really heard songs from or thought about, but "Possession Obsession" and "Method of Modern Love" are both really fun, and they have a number of other good songs that I'm not mentioning because they don't have great videos.
• "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon, feat. Chevy Chase. My mom used to say that when she was single and living in LA in the 1970s, one of her friends had tried to set her up with Paul Simon. Assuming this actually happened (never a safe bet with my mother's stories), it would have been after his 1975 divorce. Simon went on to have relationships with Shelly Duval and Carrie Fisher, and Frances Whitney in 1975 would have fit that type, so who knows?
• Lionel Richie's glorious "Dancing on the Ceiling", which ends with a gratuitious '80s camero and led me to another great song I'd never heard before, "Nightshift" by Richie's former band The Commodores. The video for "Nightshift" isn't terribly memorable, so here's Richie's Technicolor West Side Story-esque video for "All Night Long". At the end of the video someone goes "through" a door and has to just stay behind the door, because it doesn't really lead anywhere and the door won't close! The music video equivalent of just singing softer and softer rather than fading out.
• Through this process we discovered British band ABC, who I only knew from "When Smokey Sings". They have a bunch of playful videos including "The Night You Murdered Love", in which the lead singer is hunted by a female assassin on a skateboard; and "Poison Arrow", in which the lead singer is hunted by a female assassin without a skateboard. They also made a fun animated video for "How To Be A Millionaire" which has a cool Batman: The Animated Series feel, but the only copy I could find on Youtube plays the video in reverse, presumably to avoid the eye of Content ID. This reverses the meaning of the video, showing the band members leading less extravagant lives and returning items to store shelves.
• Thomas Dolby, of science-blinded fame, is to me the archetypal "weird 80s music video" maker; see also his "Hyperactive".
• "Think" by Information Society... unlike the other links here, I don't like this song, but the music video is an incredible taste of the '90s. Anyone can rip off Brazil, but it takes a true Gilliam-phile to also collect Time Bandits.
• "Pop Musik" by M - Super-low-budget work that I feel was really influential in the language of music videos just from having come out so early (1979).
• Berlin's "Metro" has a similar look, as if Rainer Werner Fassbender directed it right after making Kamikaze '89.
• I'm not really into the Pet Shop Boys, but the second music video for Opportunities is great, and director Zbigniew Rybczyński has a solid body of work, including Rush's "Time Stand Still" video.
• Pat Benetar specialized in big female-empowerment action-movie videos, like the Sweet Charity-esque "Love is a Battlefield" and the Nazi-punching adventure "Shadows of the Night"
• Annie Lennox has a number of fun videos, my favorite being "Would I Lie To You?"
• Steve Winwood's "While You See A Chance" illustrates the dichotomy of the '80s pop video. Steve himself is well-dressed and presentable, playing the keyboard in a sound stage where two Suliban are crawling over a giant pyramid! What's going on? Never explained. Steve doesn't seem to mind. Did they go to high school together?
• Two great videos from Men At Work: "It's A Mistake" and "Who Can It Be Now?"
• Dire Straits's "Walk of Life" is a glimpse back into a time when you couldn't just see a bunch of sports bloopers whenever you wanted, it had to be a special thing. Also on Youtube is the Walk of Life Project, which shows the ending of various movies redone with "Walk of Life" as the closing song.
• "Jump" by the Pointer Sisters also includes sports highlights—plus potentially dangerous jumping in high heels.
• "I Can't Wait" by Nu Shooz is the perfect example of the appeal of this project to me. I've probably heard this song twenty times in my life without ever paying attention, and only remembered it because of the catchy hook. But it's got a wacky, surreal music video with corny 1986 CGI effects. The song is fun! It was a big hit! People put a lot of work into this video! But it's just been sitting around in the back of our collective cultural unconciousness, not giving us the enjoyment it could give in a new context.
• The Human League's video for "Don't You Want Me" is nice and metafictional.
• Scandal's "The Warrior" has learned the lessons of Cats. Relatedly, Hall and Oates's "Maneater" and Heart's "Nothing at All" both use a panther to represent the feminine. In fact I'm gonna assume it's the same panther; how many trained panthers are there who can stalk through a music video?
• "No One is to Blame" (melancholy) and "Everlasting Love" (cute) by Howard Jones.
• Calloway's "I Wanna Be Rich"
• Joe Jackson's "Stepping Out" and "Down to London", which is kind of the same video twice.
• Finally, some videos that make me homesick for Manhattan: Bananarama's "Cruel Summer", Glenn Frey's "You Belong To The City", and (again), "Possession Obsession"

• "Being Shakespeare" (2011): Drama doesn't need a reason to exist, but it feels like this one-man show has a reason that I don't understand. This New York Times review says it's putting forth the case that Shakespeare authored his own damn plays, which, okay, but I already believed that. The biographical reconstruction was pretty interesting.
• "Macbeth" (2010): I remember seeing that Patrick Stewart was doing Macbeth on Broadway, and not going for it because the tickets were too expensive. Now, thanks to a global health disaster, he comes to my living room! We thought this was really solid and the staging gave it a real The Death of Stalin vibe.

  BTW when you look up Patrick Stewart on IMDB, his top "Known For" item is Logan (2017). I give you this information to do with what you will. (Probably nothing)

• Happiest Season (2020): I don't watch many recent holiday rom-coms, and I will say this speaks more to today's issues than, say, Christmas in Connecticut, but I liked the "com" more than the "rom". Daniel Levy's comic relief was both welcome and massively oversold by his over-prominent presence in the opening credits.

  For the first ten minutes of this movie I was really tense, because it opens almost exactly the same as Get Out. Maybe this is less a fact about Happiest Season and more a reflection on how effectively Get Out evoked the rom-com feeling before subverting it.

As the days get shorter we've gone back to one of our old online-video hobbies, a hobby that deserves (and will get) its own blog post. But I do have a Television Spotlight for you, albeit one I forgot to mention a couple months ago when we watched it: Raw Craft with Anthony Bourdain. It's the most blatant Sponsored Content ever, but it's got the late Anthony Bourdain interviewing and appreciating a lot of interesting craftspeople like Elizabeth Brim and Raul Ojeda.

• Stranger Than Fiction (2006): Thought the twist of this rom-com was going to be the fictional character falling in love with his neurotic creator, but that twist would be too creepy for this sweet story full of Will Farrell goofiness. A good time.

  Sumana and I both liked the office set for Dustin Hoffman's literature-professor character. All that 1970s concrete and glass made me think of the offices at Cal State Bakersfield where I'd end up babysitting myself while my mom was getting her masters' degree.

  Without implying that it affected my enjoyment of the movie, I want to mention that Karen Eiffel's novels seem pretty bad. There's always a reverse-Ishtar problem when one tries to depict great art using ordinary skill. Stranger than Fiction falls flat depicting both the novels themselves and the way critics think about fiction (as opposed to, say, screenplays).

  Sometimes Sumana and I play a game where we figure out how early in human history a given story could have been set. We couldn't come up with any "fictional character comes to life" stories (as opposed to, like, "statue comes to life") older than the twentieth century, but I'd think it could have happened in medieval Japan, or in Europe any time after Tristam Shandy. However this particular setup seems best suited to the early 1960s—a mediocre highbrow writer who hasn't finished a book in ten years but is kept on contract with a big publisher for prestige.

• The Lady Eve (1941): I kind of thought I'd seen this one, but it turns out All About Eve (1950) merely has a misleading title. This was another fun rom-com, though made much earlier, at a time when Hollywood was still trying to figure out how to merge the "rom" with the "com". Barbara Stanwyck is always hilarious as the brassy dame who don't need no man, but once the man she don't need enters the picture it always loses a little. At least now they're pairing her with A-list hunks like Henry Fonda instead of that guy from Christmas in Connecticut.

  We speculated that the classic A New Leaf (1973) might have started as a gender-swap of Fonda's ditzy rich scientist and Stanwyck's gold-digging schemer. Think about it!

• Betaville (1986): The Alphaville parody/sequel you didn't know you needed. Godard paid tribute to American genre fiction, and America responded with a no-budget short full of great gags that you can watch on Youtube. Big recommendation. Watching black-and-white French New Wave people wander around 1986 New York was a soothing balm for this guy who hasn't been in Manhattan for months.

In Television Spotlight news, we re-upped our CBS All Access account for the new Discovery season, and caught up with the first season of Lower Decks. We were initially very skeptical of the main character—a little "competent asshole" goes a long long way in this household—but the other characters are quite fun, and by the end we were on board and excited for season 2... which is about average for the first season of a Trek show. We loved the continuity deep cuts. My absolute favorite part was how the inhabitants of Beta III went right back to worshipping Landru the minute the Enterprise left and the Federation never followed up.

BTW, this is by no means a novel complaint, but the near-total (but not total!) lack of NCOs and enlisted beings in Starfleet really makes things weird for Lower Decks. All the schmoes and screwups in this show are Starfleet Academy graduates. Theoretically, any one of them could give orders to Chief O'Brien. But there aren't any O'Briens around to do the grunt work.

There is an explanation for the officer-heaviness of Starfleet vessels, which I learned in the "Is Starfleet Military?" episode of the Gimme That Star Trek podcast: it mirrors the structure of a bomber crew like the one Gene Roddenberry served in during WWII. It was great to learn an explanation for this, but when writing Situation Normal I tried to make things a little more realistic. In Trek's defense, I found it really tricky to keep the ranks consistent, and the exact ranks never mattered dramatically—only the distinction between commissioned officers and the rest.

• That Sinking Feeling (1979): Six months into the pandemic I find myself cracking open the Bill Forsyth Whimsy Reserve. His first film slows down after introducing the cast, but once the heist gets going it's great. Much sillier and slighter than Breaking In and Comfort and Joy, but you can see the Forsyth DNA at work. Subtitles a must.

  This film's ahead-of-its-time treatment of gender presentation comes almost entirely from ripping off the even more ahead-of-its-time Some Like it Hot. (The rest seems to come from ripping off Warner Brothers cartoons.) Steal from the best, I say.

Yeah, so, a couple items for the Television Spotlight. We're in the middle of our Legend of Korra rewatch, and it's is still fun. New fun for us this time around is catching what we now see are a ton of Avatar references.

I forgot to mention this at the time, but we watched Star Trek: Picard as it aired and enjoyed it a lot... but maybe my expectations were too high? Certain very powerful character themes (my favorite being Picard effectively choosing to become Locutus again) were handled so subtly compared to the un-subtle plotting that I question whether they were even there or whether I was writing a better version of the show in my head. Anyway, haven't seen Lower Decks yet but between it and Picard and The Orville it seems like TNG has finally displaced TOS as the official Trek throwback show. Truly, this is my time!

• The Old Guard (2020): Nothing fancy, but a enjoyable action concept leads to a lot of scenes in the Deadpool mold where the heroes can soak up incredible amounts of damage and keep fighting. A conceit similar to the heavy use of tasers in PG-13 movies (and Korra) in that it lets you have more brutality than an audience would otherwise be comfortable with.
• The Rise and Fall of Nokia (2017): Smana wanted to watch this documentary because she was involved in Nokia's mobile-Linux projects of the early 2010s. I enjoyed the parts of the documentary that dealt with the invention of cell phones but I thought it presented the introduction of the iPhone as a fait accompli rather than going into why Nokia's (kinda disorganized) response was inadequate. Not the tone you want to take in a film made to celebrate the centenary of Finland's independence, I suppose.
• Nixon in China (2011): We streamed the Metropolitan Opera's performance for free when they put it up. I really love the libretto but neither of us were wild about the music. We don't really watch opera, so we don't have the reading conventions down. After an Act I which was pretty naturalistic and easy to read, we were totally befuddled by the weird fourth wall breaking in Act II. Act III was not naturalistic at all, but typical of what I think of as opera: people singing out their emotions, you know, like a Broadway musical.

  But I keep going back to Act II, which features the Nixons watching another opera (The Red Detachment of Women). Their reactions to the plot lead them to interfere with the performance, but the opera-within-an-opera seems designed to accommodate and work with such audience interference, because of course it's all part of one big opera and the "audience" is just as much performers as the people they're interfering with. That was really interesting but I imagine that's a feature of Act II of Nixon in China and not something special you get from the art form of opera.

• Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999) - Back in May I said I regretted missing it the first time it was made available through Youtube, so all I can say now is the grass is always greener. Jesus Christ Superstar is way better. There are some good anachronistic gags here, but I think a lot of the enjoyment of this musical comes from nostalgic memories of the high school production where you played Asher and the butler.
• Amadeus (2017) - We loved this INCREDIBLY FICTIONALIZED story of someone with way more taste than talent. I gotta stress this is FICTIONALIZED, based on romantic myths about Mozart and his death, and apparently none of it happened this way. But what an archetype is created in this play. Great to watch.

  Reading about this afterwards I'm glad I saw the play instead of the movie, because the movie introduces a bunch of additional plot elements that doesn't really matter. It won Best Picture, so I guess they know what they're doing?

• Psych 2: Lassie Come Home (2020): Fun for Psych fans, no reason to watch the movie otherwise. Except: let's say one of the actors in your ensemble cast suffers a stroke after the TV show has wrapped. The easy path would be to write them out of the made-for-streaming sequel movies, or else bring in someone else to play the character. Instead, Psych 2 is a film entirely about the character's stroke and its aftermath. This is another way in which Psych feels more like the product of a close-knit team than other shows. Another way is the constant in-joking and bringing back characters who died in season 4, which I'm kind of tired of.
• Christmas in Connecticut (1945): Apparently this film made boffo box office because it was released three days before V-J day. When everyone wanted to celebrate by going to the movies, this is the movie there was to see. Barbara Stanwyck is fun as always, and the scamtastic setup is fun, but the male lead is kinda Zeppo-ish and for the sake of variety I was rooting for the coded-gay architect who's just looking for a beard. (She picks Zeppo.) There was also a little subplot about hostility between different waves of American immigrants which I thought was interesting but didn't go anywhere.

  This could definitely be remade as a Hallmark Christmas movie -- look at the super-white title! -- and in fact it was remade in 1992. Today it would be about an Instagram influencer, I guess.

• The Bride Walks Out (1936): Stanwyck-mania continues! Not a great film, although it kind of feels like a trial run for I Love Lucy: wacky neighbors, wife wants to work outside the home. Zeppo would be an improvement over the guy in this movie; he seems to actually dislike his wife and think of her as a burden. So why bother? Maybe it made more sense under Depression-era gender roles. Actually you know what this really reminds me of is Fig Leaves (1926), with the modelling wife and the misogynistic business partner.

  Some good one-liners and a surprising amount of unnecessary vaudeville schtick. It's always fun to see a dramatization of the office in New York's City Hall where Sumana and I got our license.

• Door Ke Darshan (2020): An uninspiring Bollywood remake of one of our favorite films, Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) Not just another film with the same idea--they clearly copied some of the shots, reminding us of how powerful/funny those shots were in the original and how they're not those things here. The setup here is totally implausible, which primes us for comedy much wackier than is appropriate to the story. And we don't even get the wacky comedy! Despite the superior videography capabilities of 2019 India vis-a-vis 1989 East Germany, the characters in this movie are only able to muster one fake broadcast.

  Rather than go on and on I'll present you with the result of our post-movie fix-it discussion: you can make an Indian version of Good Bye, Lenin!, but it needs to be set in 1947, with Mom a big booster of the Raj. Not in the cards for a low-budget picture like this.

  During the fix-it discussion we were brainstorming other big world events that could provide the backdrop for a similar movie.

  S: She could be in a coma through the Russian Revolution.
  L: Yeah, call it Hello, Lenin!

  I'm here all week! Because I can't go anywhere and there's nowhere to go!

• Small Island (2019): A great "immigrant experience" drama... from England? A sure sign of national decline, that other countries are beating us at our own game. Just another reason to watch Hamilton on Disney+!

  Seriously, this was probably the best show of the month, with really well-defined characters and well-timed comic relief. Recommended!

• The Madness of George III (2018): Just as Oceans Eight (2018) got me to care about the Met Gala, this movie got Sumana to be sympathetic towards George III. I really liked the political machinations, but what I'd really like is more This House. I also thought this play took a lot of cheap shots at 18th-century medicine. It wasn't super funny and seems like the ultimate soft target. I mean, everyone from that time period is dead... because 18th-century medicine was terrible! Zing!

  For someone like me who doesn't really know the history, this play has an interesting happy ending. The king gets better! But then you go to Wikipedia and it turns out ten years later the same thing happened again. As so often happens, it all depends on when you stop telling the story. Brits: do you know what happened with George III or is it a high-school blur of "well, he was mad, and then the Regency happened"?

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (2019): A silly original text made enjoyable by really leaning into the silliness; plus acrobatics, some judicious fourth-wall breaking and a well-executed gender swap (Oberon has all of Titania's lines and vice versa). When combined with having much of the audience as groundlings milling around the stage, this performance really felt like it delivered the modern equivalent to the night out you would have gotten in Shakespeare's time.

Tonight the gala Television Spotlight shines on CanCon production Schitt's Creek, co-starring Film Roundup favorite Dan Levy, who is either playing himself on this show or took his Schitt's Creek character to The Great Canadian Baking Show, because they're the same person wearing the same outfits. The show's fun, low-key Canadian take on "Arrested Development but not mean", the sort of thing we saw with Jane the Virgin.

• Frankenstein (2011): We were not big fans. We saw the version with Benedict Cumberbatch as the creature and Jonny Lee Miller as the doctor, rather than vice versa. I don't think it would have made a big difference because my problems were with the super-unsubtle script. Some nice bits of staging... and some super-unsubtle bits of staging. Not subtle, I guess I'm saying.
• By Jeeves (2001): In conversation afterwards, Wodehouse superfan Elisa revealed she'd seen the original London run of Jeeves in 1975. She spun a fantastic tale of the play having originally featured a heavy Roderick Spode fascism subplot, a tale backed up by the Youtube link she sent me of S P O D E, Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Tomorrow Belongs to Me."

  That show sounds really interesting but it was a flop, so Webber eventually reworked it into this simpler, fluffier, lower-budget piece with a really awkward framing device. Still kinda funny though. Sumana and I thought Wooster was depicted as way too stupid (and uncharacteristically aware of his own stupidity), and Jeeves as way too snarky, but Elisa says that's in line with the earlier stories, before Wodehouse had a handle on the characters.

  Hard for me to complain about the slow start because Webber himself defused the criticism in a wrap-up video where he smiles warmly and thanks the fans for watching all his plays, "even By Jeeves—slow start, I know."

• Antony and Cleopatra (2018): Not much fun apart from the mental pleasure of decoding 500-year-old jokes.
• Moon Zero Two (1969): Rewatch of the MST3K cut during the MST3K LIVE Social Distancing Riff-Along Special with Emily Marsh in the big chair. I really enjoy the underlying movie (it's stupid, but its decent budget gives it a lot of fun sci-fi set dressing), and it was nice to see a good print of it rather than the much-circulated VHS tape I remember watching.
• A Doll's House: this one fell flat for us; not sure how much of the problem is with the original vs. the changes made for the adaptation. Some good Hitchcock-esque suspense with the letter.
• Barber Shop Chronicles (2018): A great play: a convoluted plot that turns out to involve just a few simple human relationships. Big recommendation.
• Cats (1998): I confounded expectations by loving this play. It was exactly as good as Cats. I'm not going to see it again and again, though.

  It's hard to beat the book here: the poems are really enjoyable. The staging puts the cats at around Fantastic Mr. Fox on the anthropomorphic animal twee-meter, which is right where I like it. I've never been a huge fan of "Memory", the show's hit single, and next to all the Eliot it really felt out of place, like a practice song for Phantom.

  The enjoyability of Cats didn't mean we spared it our acid riffing. Our best one: as the rest of the cast takes their bows, someone busts on stage singing ♬ I'm Chumbyfate, the cat who's always late! ♬

• This House (2013): Engrossing political dramedy with an incredible soundtrack and staging. Probably our favorite of the National Theatre set so far. We started out thinking the play might be entirely fictional; then the wealth of detail convinced us it was probably somewhat historical; then I looked it up afterwards and not only did all the big plot beats happen, all the people portrayed in This House are real people who now have OBEs and Wikipedia pages. Another big recommendation... and since this is the most recent National Theatre production to go online you can still watch it, assuming you reliably read Film Roundup right when I publish it.

• One Man, Two Guvnors (2011): Really enjoyable farce with a good variety of types of comedy. Not a lot to say; we loved it. Big recommendation.
• Jane Eyre (2015): Sumana has read the book and I haven't, so we played a game where Sumana would periodically pause and I'd make up how I thought the story is going to go. I think I did pretty well—I invented an "inspirational teacher" character who was cut from this adaptation but is present in the original novel.

  This is where I started noticing that the National Theatre does really cool set design. One Man, Two Guvnors was written as a play and it's got normal British play-staging: a drawing room, then a street, then a pub, etc. But when you're adapting a novel that spans most of someone's lifetime, you need a more abstract space that can be reconfigured on the fly. These sets act like children's playgrounds, providing scaffolding for the imagination. This is probably entry-level stuff, but I don't watch a lot of theatre.

• Treasure Island (2015): Another fun one, with a super-impressive set that transforms from inn to ship to island to cave. How closelyy does this production track Stevenson's original vision, most clearly realized in Muppet Treasure Island (1996)? Well, there are no Muppets, that's a big ding. But Patsy Ferran makes a great Jim Hawkins, and most of the time you're watching Jim, so minute-to-minute I think it's better.
• Twelfth Night (2017): I discovered here that watching Shakespeare with subtitles really helps you understand the play and feel smart. In fact, by the time we finished watching Twelfth Night I was convinced I had written Shakespeare's plays. I mean, look at this acrostic:

  Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness,
  Rherein the pregnant enemy does much.
  Aow easy is it for the proper-false
  Nn women's waxen hearts to set their forms!
  Olas, our frailty is the cause, not we!
  Eor such as we are made of, such we be.
  Low will this fadge? my master loves her dearly

  Exactly the sort of stupid stunt I'd pull. Anyway, check out this presentation of one of my classic comedies. Oliver Chris plays Orsino as exactly the kind of amiable public-school dunce he brings to the role of Guvnor #2 in One Man, Two Guvnors.

On a less highbrow note, on the weekends we've been watching Andrew Lloyd Webber shows on The Shows Must Go On!, a YouTube channel created just for this purpose. Despite what I thought going in, it turns out I'm not a big fan of Webber's stuff. I remember liking Evita when I was a kid, and I'm holding out hope for his quirkier shows, like the Jeeves and Wooster musical and the... Thomas the Tank Engine???

• Jesus Christ Superstar (2018-ish?) - My favorite so far of the Webber we saw this month. Great concept, decent songs. I regret missing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat the week before, since my sisters like that one.
• The Phantom of the Opera (2011?) - There's a common type of story about a Tormented Man of Genius whose Genius explains/excuses/justifies his antisocial/misogynistic/destructive behavior as he drives away everyone he cares about. You can read The Phantom of the Opera as a gender-swapped version of this story, about a Tormented Woman whose destructive Genius manifests as an abusive, overdemanding partner. That's an interesting story, but probably not the intended reading. The title song is rockin' but watching this felt like buying an album having heard the one hit single.
• Love Never Dies (2012) - The less said the better regarding this Phantom sequel. The best thing to come out of this viewing was our joke that the 'song' the Phantom has written for Christine to sing turns out to be the Doublemint Gum jingle:

  ♫ Double-double your refreshment ♫
  SING!
  ♫ Double-double your enjoyment ♫
  SING FOR ME!

• Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Royal Albert Hall Celebration (1999): Not technically a musical at all. At this point I realized that even front-loading the greatest hits won't do much for me. I will give props to Julian Lloyd Webber for refusing to dress up for his brother's birthday celebration, performing an energetic cello piece wearing what looks like a football jersey from videogame publisher Acclaim.

• Gravity (2014): The last film I'll see in a theater for a while. What a send-off! Almost all movies are better on a big screen, but this is the only good movie I can think of that needs the big screen to be good.

  Also a great example of the kind of action movie I like: almost roguelike in its combination of a small number of elements in different ways. The General does this; so do individual Jackie Chan fight scenes.

• The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018): A film made just for Sumana, who loves spy action but doesn't love movies full of dudes. As for myself, I enjoyed the humor and the goofy Kate McKinnon faces, but an action scene that's not set in free-fall? I just don't get it. Very much a popcorn movie for me.

The Television Spotlight is in full force this month; Sumana and I are watching Ken Burns's epic "Baseball" documentary (1994) with all its slow pans and Shelby Foote drawls. PBS is streaming it for free within the US. We're not quite done, but I feel comfortable recommending it. Don't care about baseball? It's for you! I think for people who do care, this documentary may be a little boring. For me, it's nice hearing people really passionate and knowledgeable about the long history of something I don't really care about. And only about 20% of it is depressing, unlike the Civil War documentary. Steven Jay Gould is a nice surprise.

Finally, just a reminder that my Film Roundup Roundup page has over 150 recommendations to tide you over while Film Forum is closed. Take care!

• Remember the Night (1940): Really nice rom-com with heart and a satisfying bittersweet ending. Brought down a bit by the stereotypically racist "comic relief valet" role given to Fred Toones at the opening. I dunno, you make this nuanced, funny piece that carries powerful emotions across eighty years and I gotta put a big asterisk on it because of cringey racism. Not to single out this movie in particular; Fred Toones has 223 roles listed on IMDB, thirty-five of which are "Porter (uncredited)". He played "Porter (uncredited)" in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington!

  Filmmakers take note: Remember the Night is effectively an edgy Hallmark Channel Christmas movie and could be remade as such.

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979): My first time seeing this on the big screen, and it was preceded by a talk from Film Roundup fave Douglas Trumbull! Some cool photos and juicy special-effects gossip. Then, the movie! It's not great. Reading between the lines of Trumbull's talk I feel like I got an understanding for what went wrong. But I've been reading The Best of Trek, an old series of books assembled from fanzine articles, and fans in that era were pretty hungry. Easy to turn up our noses today, when there's an entire streaming service being kept alive by original Trek programming.

  As with Star Trek V, I'm gonna stand up for this "bad" movie as having a heart of pure Star Trek. First, nothing else has the scale of the V'ger flythrough. The Dyson sphere in "Relics" is bigger, but 1) it's just a sphere, 2) the Enterprise barely goes inside. This is klicks and klicks of varied, mysterious organomechanical sensawunda. Great stuff.

  Second, it's common knowledge that ST:TMP is a rehash of a TOS episode. But is that so bad? Why not take a classic episode, crank up the humanism, and give it a lavish big-screen makeover? Isn't that better than where we are now: redoing the first "good" Trek movie over and over?

  Bonus from discussion: Trumbull is working on a cinematography technique involving filming at very high framerates. He's been working on this for a long time—Brainstorm (1983) was supposed to be a showcase—but the return of 3D movies, which are filmed at high framerates, means movie theaters now have projectors that can show these films.

  Trumbull made bold claims about the immersive qualities of films made using this technique, claims I think could be tested relatively easily by reformatting the 2016 Ang Lee movie Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. I haven't seen that film, but it was shot at a high framerate and was panned for problems Trumbull says he has solved. That contemporaneous Slate article paraphrases him as saying that eliminating flicker creates a better film experience—the opposite of what I heard him say in person—so presumably he's learned something from Billy Lynn. Just noticing things from outside the industry here.

• Space is the Place (1974): I was really into the first scene, which takes place on a TOS-like alien planet with weird flora, but they must have used the whole budget on that scene because the rest takes place in hospitals and warehouses and is mostly dull. Big credit for early Afrofuturism, and the nonchalance with which all characters accept the science fictional premise. Sun Ra goes to the youth center to rap with the kids and a lot of them are like "who's this old fogey?" but there's no "I'm skeptical that you just spent several years in space."

  If you're a fan of Sun Ra's music then I'm sure the music redeems it, but I'm not (sorry, Jake). In fact, this film made me realize I'm not really into Frank Zappa anymore. When I was in college those long guitar solos seemed like the sort of thing I should like, and would grow into as I matured, but during this movie I kept thinking "I know their styles are polar opposites, but this is boring me in exactly the same way as a thirteen-minute Frank Zappa song." So, it's good that this film got me to examine my preconceptions.

• Alien (1979): Rewatch with Sumana. It's still great! Before showtime I asked Sumana some diagnostic questions to see what she knew about this movie from cultural osmosis. "There's a famous scene in this movie. Do you know what I'm referring to?" She didn't at the time, but during The Scene she gave me a significant elbow nudge.
• Dark Star (1974): Also a rewatch with Sumana, but I originally watched Dark Star in the pre-Film Roundup era, so I'll go into a bit more detail. Like Space is the Place, this has some great scenes, but at feature length it's a slow ride. I was thinking "man, that ending seems really familiar" and chalked it up to having seen the movie before, until Sumana also mentioned finding it familiar. Turns out it's a ripoff of "Kaleidoscope", a really good Ray Bradbury story we'd both read. You thought Stephen King's student-film "Dollar Babies" were a bargain, but plagiarism is even cheaper.

  Sumana found the dude-heaviness of Dark Star a bit tiresome after the greater diversity of Alien, which is reasonable, but I think Dark Star gains power if you see it as a movie made by a buncha guys who are worried about being drafted.

• Apollo 11 (2019): I was blown away by this film, made almost entirely from unused contemporary footage synced with mission audio. There's a little illustrative CGI and on-screen graphics, but it's mostly just amazing shots of people and equipment. Two bits stick in my mind in particular. First, a long, long pan through rows of computers and rows of desks that ends up in what you see in other movies as Launch Control. It was like seeing the whole iceberg. Second, this movie dramatizes the 1202 incident, creating a near-Uncut Gems level of tension, without having to stop and explain what was going on. You just hear the real-life participants dealing with the problem and you get the gist. I may be watching this again at the museum soon; that's how good it is.
• High Life (2018): I was 100% engaged in this Silent Running style story with this guy and his daughter, and then that story turned out to just be a framing device for a J. G. Ballard type of thing in flashback. Claire Denis told the story she wanted to tell, but I was not into it until the flashback ended, at which point my interest abruptly resumed. So not a recommendation overall.

  Caution to doesthedogdie.com fans: I don't think I've ever seen this many dead dogs in a movie.

• We saw a bunch of more or less spacy 2001-inspiring shorts. Some of this called back to 2013's computer film festival with droning and strobe lights, but a couple stood out: John Whitney's Catalog, which true to its name felt like a sizzle reel; and Colin Low's special-effects extravaganza Universe, narrated by Douglas Rain and starring a daredevil astronomer. Watch 'em online!
• The Earrings of Madame De... (1953): This is... a film noir. I see why it's not marketed as such: it's super femme and it takes place in the 19th century. But it's the story of someone who makes one bad decision and has to keep hustling and doubling down and improvising until the aftermath ruins her life. Just awesome. Would love to see more stuff like this.
• Dolemite is my Name (2019): Doing a biopic as a comedy is a great idea; there should be more. Pure moviemaking fun. Loved the cameos. One obvious comparison is Ed Wood, but this movie seems to care a lot more about accuracy. The main liberty I found in IMDB trivia was dramatizing the filming of some scenes from the Dolemite sequel as though they were from Dolemite. Presumably just for fun.
• Ikarie XB-1 (1963): For the 1960s this is some impressive psychological sci-fi. Like watching two really good TOS episodes back-to-back. A little heavy-handed, but I repeat myself. I went looking for director/screenwriter Jindrich Polák's other stuff and randomly found a time-travel thriller comedy (Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977)) and an ET-like family movie (The Octopuses from the Second Floor (1987)). A solid body of work!

  But here's the secret to Ikari XB-1's success: it was based on a Lem novel! One of the early ones, the ones that never got translated into English but provided seemlingly endless grist for Eastern Bloc filmmakers (see First Spaceship on Venus, which is basically a bad version of this movie but it's easier to tell the characters apart). It's a little moviegoing treat, like finding a Billy Wilder writing credit.

  And the surprises keep coming: when researching this I learned that MIT Press is reissuing six of Lem's books later this month! Including a new translation of The Invincible, which I've never read. Very exciting. Don't sleep on Memoirs of a Space Traveler and His Master's Voice!

Got a hot Television Spotlight tip for ya today: "The Repair Shop", a wholesome BBC reality show where conservationists who normally (I'm assuming) make top £££ restoring Rembrandts and Louis XIV cabinets, turn their skills to family heirlooms brought in by random people. You may have noticed that I only like reality shows where people are nice to each other, and this one's 100% collaborative, very relaxing to watch.

Most of the movies in this year's top ten come from the 1980s, due in large part to Bill Forsyth's dominance of the scoreboard. Sorry to be the person in the Youtube comments on a rock video saying "Wish I had a time machine! I'd go back to the 80s and relive the same ten-year span over and over until I died! Who's with me? haha!"

1. Wings of Desire (1987)
2. Knives Out (2019)
3. Breaking In (1989)
4. Comfort and Joy (1984)
5. Face/Off (1997)
6. Gregory’s Girl (1980)
7. Working Girl (1988)
8. Puppy Love (1985)
9. Booksmart (2019)
10. Sweet Charity (1969)

On a meta level, I love how almost every year my top film of the year has been one I went into without any particular expectations. Keep the surprises coming, I say.

If you only care about recent movies, here's my top list from 2019:

1. Knives Out (2019)
2. Apollo 11 (2019)
3. Booksmart (2019)
4. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019)
5. Born Bone Born (2018)

I snuck Apollo 11 in there even though I saw it on January 5th, because it's just that good. As always, I've updated Film Roundup Roundup to include about thirty recommended films that in I either first saw or first reviewed in 2019.

• Knives Out (2019): The highlight of the month, right off! A really fun film that pulls off the delicate dance of not being a traditional murder mystery that we've all seen before, but also turning out to, yes, be a traditional mystery after all. I'm always there for an eccentric detective, and quite often there for the story of a wealthy family who lost everything.
• Ad Astra (2019): I did not enjoy this movie but it had one perfect science-fictional detail, it dramatized a real-life detail I'd never seen dramatized (astronauts being paranoid about their psych evaluations), and its final message was one I've never seen presented in filmed SF, so in some sense it was good? I appreciate it on an academic level but it didn't move me.

  I kept thinking Natalie Portman was going to be in this, but that's a whole other 2019 space-madness movie, Lucy in the Sky, which has an oof IMDB rating of 4.5.

• The Stranger (1946): Not quite the "together at last" I was hoping for from an Orson Wells/Edward G. Robinson matchup, but definitely a watchable thriller. I enjoyed the small-town machinations—who will bring the ice cream to the tea social?—as well as Robinson playing a cultured character closer to his real-life persona more than the "thriller" bits, but it's all part of the puzzle.
• Muppet Treasure Island (1996): My nephew's introduction to the Muppets! He was enraptured! However, he was also enraptured by Dr. Seuss' The Grinch (2018) when we slapped that up on the TV to keep him busy, so it's tough to exclude the null hypothesis.

  As for myself, it was great to see Tim "the human Muppet" Curry serve up the ham, and I loved the fresh Kermit/Sam relationship where Sam—whose defining characteristic is craven service of power—sees Kermit as "power" rather than a suspicious intruder to be reported on Nextdoor.

  Overall, this adaptation made me want to read the book, whereas The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) makes me feel like I've gotten everything good that the book has to offer. That's an impossibly high bar to expect from a film adaptation, but Christmas Carol meets it.

• Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978): Seen at the museum with Rachel, Brett, and nephew. I could lose the ice-skating intro, but what's really nice here is Bert and Ernie's child-logic "Gift of the Magi", and what's really nice is the gentle way Big Bird's Santa obsession is handled. Unlike basically other Santa story I've ever seen, this is a dual-layered story that you can appreciate on its own terms whether or not you Know.

  After seeing this we walked through the museum's Jim Henson exhibit, and nephew (again, no previous Muppet experience) instantly recognized and loved the Big Bird puppet. Although we didn't run the experiment, I don't think he would have reacted the same way to the mo-cap dataset used to map Benedict Cumberbatch onto a CGI Grinch.

• The Irishman (2019): Speaking of mo-cap datasets. Saw this on the big screen (at the museum, again) the way Martin Scorsese intended. It was very enjoyable, though the enjoyment was tempered by the interjections of a film-snobbish audience member during the intro. I came here for a movie; I don't need the live show!

  Anyway, this was a really solid straight-down-the-middle gangster film, but overall I'd rather see a weirdo entry in the genre, like Comfort and Joy.

  I knew going in that The Irishman had a scene that was filmed in a bank in my neighborhood. It's an antique bank building, and I was looking forward to it as a little easter egg. The whole time I expected the old-timey bank scene to show up in the 1960s timeframe, but that scene takes place around the year 2000. My own private plot twist!

• Uncut Gems (2019): The lights went down and the soundtrack let out a big Tangerine Dream BWAAAAAAAM and I thought "oh, shit, this is by the Good Time guys, isn't it?" Yes, it is. This was certainly more fun than Good Time. I expect for a certain type of moviegoer these films are an adrenaline rush like Gravity. For another type of moviegoer these films are way too stressful and you have to walk out. I guess I'm in the middle? I was along for the ride, but I'm probably not going to keep seeing these, assuming I start paying more attention to directors' names.

  One cool thing about Uncut Gems is that it's set in 2012 because the plot hinges on real-world events from that year, but if you live in NYC it's pretty easy to see it was filmed recently. Scorsese would have spent millions digitally erasing the LinkNYC kiosks and changing the ads on taxis, but the Safdie brothers are more chill. It's not important to the film!

• Torn Curtain (1966): A fun late Hitchcock except I expected an extra double-cross that never came. This is a pattern for me, and I think I'm just used to post-Hitchcock movies where there's one more twist. Our two main characters are engaged, and the POV doesn't strongly stick with one or the other—each has scenes where the other isn't present—which limits the possibilities for double-crossing. It's a shame as an extra twist could have taken it into North by Northwest territory for me.

  Weird detail probably caused by incoherent 1960s sexism: Julie Andrews's character is some kind of space scientist, like her fiancé, but she's treated like his secretary, down to the level of how much she's expected to know about his project: not nothing, as would happen if she worked on a different project altogether, but not so much that the East Germans can get the information from her instead of Paul Newman's character.

  I originally wrote the two main characters are "married", because the film starts with them in bed together, but that's Alfie, always pushing the boundaries of film. Whether it's flushing a toilet or implying that people who are almost married are having sex, he's giving a big "shove off, mate" to the squares!

• Bamboozled (2000): This is the most difficult-to-watch movie I've ever seen. I don't value "difficult to watch" per se so this isn't going on my best-of list, but I will put it next to Face/Off on the "so bad it's good" shelf: Bamboozled is bad and good simultaneously and for the same reasons.

  A while back I said that you can't make social change by making a movie, but Bamboozled seems to show it's possible, if the society you're trying to change is Hollywood. The same crossed wire that leads filmmakers to romanticize 'the movies' makes them susceptible to arguments delivered via movie—arguments that will not affect the moviegoing public as a whole. Bamboozled is pointing out a lot of problems with Hollywood, most of which are structural, but there is one simple thing that even a lowly bring-me-coffee screenwriter can take to heart: blackface gags are evil and you need to stop it.

  Roger Ebert's review of Bamboozled notices the film's systemic critique but says the blackface bit is so offensive as to obscure it. I agree with this, but in 2000, mainstream Hollywood movies were still doing actual blackface gags! A year ago I was shocked to see one in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I admit the first time I saw that film, it didn't register, just like it it didn't seem to with Ebert.

  After seeing Bamboozled I went looking on IMDB, as well as Screen It ("Movie Reviews for Parents"), and it looks like after an O Brother-esque bit in Zoolander (2001), Hollywood blackface gags died out. This surely would have happened eventually, but I'm gonna argue that Bamboozled is the reason they stopped when they did. Movies with systemic critiques are not uncommon: Bamboozled is unusual in that it got some results.

  Of course, artists are always pushing the boundaries, and the easiest way to address a topic that becomes taboo is to slather on a layer of indirection or irony. So we do see Jack Black play a character who angers his neighbors with a blackface act in Be Kind, Rewind (2008). We see Robert Downey Jr. play a character who goes way too deep into Method acting in Tropic Thunder (also 2008) and apparently some damn thing or other is going on in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassas (2009). But that seems to be about it.

  In these post-Bamboozled cases, real people are making a movie in which a fictional character makes the bad decision to wear blackface. (That's the joke.) Then the real people are saying "That wasn't me, it was the dummy!" to soften the blow.

  Pre-Bamboozled, the blackface itself was generally not the joke. It was a way of creating a fictional construct, a kind of ventriloquist dummy, that could be used in other jokes. See Silver Streak in last month's Roundup for an example. Bamboozled is saying, over and over with no subtlety, that it is an act of real-world evil to create that ventriloquist dummy, and that any jokes you might have it tell are drawing from a well of evil, not from your comedic genius. So just don't build the evil ventriloquist dummy.

  This is why I'm saying so-bad-it's good. To succeed artistically, Bamboozled has to be a bad movie. If it was somehow good, it would enact the nightmare scenario it depicts. As it is, I think there were a bunch of scripts in the early 2000s where a white producer read a draft and said "uh, hey, did you see Bamboozled (2000)?" and long story short, there was a rewrite. Around 2008, Hollywood figured out a workaround: have a fictional character build the evil ventriloquist dummy, just one of many bad decisions a fictional character might take. But it didn't get a lot of traction.

• Ocean's Eleven (1960): Watched as a fluffy palate cleanser after Bamboozled but of course there had to be an O Brother, Where Art Thou? style blackface gag in this movie. Ugggh! Otherwise it was okay. Cesar Romero was a nice surprise. I expected everything would be super stylish, but it's more like the ambient stylishness of 1960 was higher. Frank and Sammy look cool even when they're just hanging out in the rec room.

  However, why not watch a stylish 1960 movie that's also really funny, like The Apartment? Oh, look, there's Shirley Maclaine, showing up for a cameo in this movie while filming The Apartment. I'm not saying people should always watch The Apartment instead of watching this, because you gotta have variety, but... maybe the Soderbergh remake is better.

• The Whole Town's Talking (1935): Previously seen in 2012 with a big theater crowd, now seen in the living room with Sumana. There were some great bits but the big, nearly continuous laughs I had in 2012 weren't there. What's the difference? On top of obvious stuff like "laughter is contagious", I think a big part of it is Edward G. Robinson using his face and body language to do the type of physical comedy that's funnier on the big screen: rapid switches between menacing and milquetoast.
• Working Girl (1988): A 1980s corporate comedy a la Big Business, but less purely comedic and with an interesting, realistic business plot. Big recommendation.

  Every major character in this movie has a big beefcake/cheesecake scene. Sometimes it's played for laughs: Harrison Ford's changing shirts in his office and all the Wall Street secretaries are looking through the plate glass window like "aww yeah." The public demands tasteful skin!

• Monsieur Verdoux (1947): I'm not a huge fan of Chaplin's films mainly because they're so sentimental, so I figured I'd like his oddball serial killer comedy. And it's pretty good! Except, stop me if you've heard this one, after a crashingly cynical final scene it goes on for like five more minutes and gets a little sentimental for my taste. Overall, a good mixture of tension and comedy that put me in mind of all those Ealing movies where Alec Guinness plays a genteel criminal.
• We went to a Sesame Street Lost and Found event at the museum, but we were sworn to secrecy about the forbidden clips that were screened at the event, which saves me the trouble of having to write it up.
• Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019): Incredible documentary about a person who seems really difficult to be close to, told mainly by her surviving staff—sort of like Filmworker. Soon to be supplemented by the amazing collection of data Marion Stokes spent so much of her life on. I know the feeling: sometimes you get an idea and you gotta run with it and it consumes your whole life.

  Content warning: this film includes harrowing recorded-live TV footage of 9/11, which is how I ended up seeing the second plane hit the tower after 18 years of successfully not seeing that footage.

• Kung Fu League (2018): This had some really good comic bits, especially the Batman '66-style relationship between Huo Yuanjia and Chen Zhen. It was also really refreshing how quickly the members of the titular Kung Fu League figured out they'd been transported into the 21st century, and accepted it, allowing the movie to continue.

  Unfortunately, nearly every character not in the League was tiresome. If they'd spent ten more minutes running around the movie set (great Blazing Saddles bit here) or figuring out how McDonalds works, that would have been ten fewer minutes spent with the tiresome characters.

  While doing research for this post I discovered a big conceptual problem with the nerd wish-fulfillment in this movie. While watching the movie I saw the formation of the League as a magical time-travel thing that brought real historical figures forward in time. But when writing this Roundup I learned that Chen Zhen is a fictional character. I'd assumed that Kwok-Kwan Chan in Kung Fu League was playing Chen Zhen as a parody of Bruce Lee's Chen Zhen from Fist of Fury, but he's playing the fictional character Chen Zhen come to life.

  Huo Yuanjia was a real historical figure, but within Kung Fu League he's the Batman to the fictional Chen Zhen's Robin: another Fist of Fury reference. And he and Wong Fei-hung (real person) are rivals for the heart of Thirteenth Aunt (fictional character from Once Upon a Time In China). So I give up on the time travel idea, and figure the magical event at the center of this movie actually calls forth Last Action Hero-style versions of these fictional/fictionalized legends from the Shared Cinematic Universe they all inhabit.

  Except a) the nerd in this movie is a comics artist, not a filmmaker, b) at the end of the movie the Kung Fu League "goes back" to... being fictional? and c) there's a joke I don't get about Ip Man which is probably really funny but which seems to make it impossible to formulate any coherent explanation at all. Which, I must admit, good job leaving it all on the field, comedically speaking.

• Puppy Love (1985): A.k.a. "Dou qi xiao shen xian" Sumana and I watched this on a date back in September and I forgot about it, even though it's really fun! It came back to me because Gregory's Girl (see below) is similar in a lot of ways. It's basically a sequence of skits. The skits are funny and cute, with lots of female eristic energy a la Celine and Julie Go Boating. There seemed to be a strong "you had to be there" element: others in the theater were laughing really hard at what appeared to us as random Hong Kong 1980s stuff.

  This movie's pretty obscure, to the point where the best English-language description is on the Metrograph web site announcing the showing we saw. I recommend this film but not sure how you'd go about seeing it.

  BTW films I see at Metrograph are at high risk of being forgotten because I don't see a lot of films there and they don't have a convenient "everything we showed" list I can go through at the end of the month. I remember them eventually though!

• Gregory's Girl (1980): This is the same kind of funny, cute, skit-based high-school romcom as Puppy Love, with one big asterisk: there's a skit early on where a teacher talks about his female students in a really gross way. Fortunately this doesn't become a theme, but it changed the tone of the whole movie.

  I'm not even talking about the boys being gross. Teenage boys are frequently horny and gross, you can get comedy out of that, and although I'm glad this isn't the main goal of Gregory's Girl—it certainly isn't the high point of its comedy—I think they did an okay job with it.

  Because it's so great that so many of the characters in Bill Forsyth movies are good-hearted, the appearance of a creep is more of a bummer than it would be in another movie. Burt Reynolds' character in Breaking In has one moment of creepiness which is earned in a character sense but brings the mood down a bit. Judging from IMDB reviews, my attitude about this doesn't bode well for the 1999 sequel to Gregory's Girl, in which a grown-up Gregory inherits the mantle of the creepy teacher from the original movie! Boo.

  Anyway, the last act of Gregory's Girl is ambiguous in a way I don't associate with romcoms, but I think what happened is that another girl has a crush on Gregory and so gets her friends to basically heist Gregory out of his date with Dorothy. And because he's so easygoing and trusting he doesn't even realize he's been heisted. That's really clever. That's the kind of thing I come to a Forsyth movie to see.

• Gaslight (1944): The ultimate trope namer. I feel like you could have explained gaslighting to, say, Shakespeare, and he would have recognized it, but it took the era of the Big Lie to bring it into consciousness and another 25 years for it to become a term of art. BTW I also feel this way about the card game "Dominion". It could only have been invented in the 21st century, but you could explain it to someone from the 1920s and they'd totally get it (although they'd be annoyed by the sheer number of cards).

  Anyway, the movie. The first half is masterful in setting up the suspense but the back half is... a police procedural? This dude isn't even manipulating the gaslight to mess with his wife; it happens by accident. On the plus side: Angela Lansbury's film debut!

  (TV Tropes claims that Petruchio gaslights Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, and it is a similar form of manipulation, but I don't think he's trying to get her to doubt her own sanity.)

• Beetlejuice (1988): Without a constraint like historical fact (Ed Wood) or a time-consuming filming process (The Nightmare Before Christmas), Tim Burton movies are at risk of heading off into a ball pit of cool but disconnected ideas. This film jumps into the ball pit almost immediately and we get some fun set pieces that make me think this film would have been better as a series of shorts.

  The third act, in particular, has a lot of scars on the screenplay where they cut all the exposition. Of course they still had time for Beetlejuice to set up this goth shotgun wedding with Gregory's Girl-age Lydia—just no time to convince the audience that it would solve any plot problem. It's clear Beetlejuice is exactly the sort of person who would do this, so at least it makes logical sense, but it's less clear why they followed up this movie with a children's cartoon—the main thing I remember about Beetlejuice from my childhood—where Beetlejuice and an aged-down Lydia are best pals. I guess that comes from the same place as the Robocop cartoon.

  Uh, to say a nice thing about this movie: the main villains are redeemed, and one of them is even redeemed before the ending. I've also heard good things about the Indian remake, Beteljuice.

• The Informant! (2009): Up until the end of the opening credits I was assuming this would be like The Conversation, possibly because of Matt Damon's dorky moustache, but I wasn't disappointed to see a much different film set in the 1990s, in an office culture that I got the barest glimpse of tagging along with my father to clients and working my first summer programming jobs. I liked the twists and enjoyed watching Scott Bakula's long-suffering FBI agent. I laughed really hard at "You don't know how to read a lie detector!"

  Sumana had seen this movie already and when I told her I was watching it, provided this Bakula-ready joke: "Archer Daniels Midland is the spot where Captain Archer and Crewman Daniels agreed to meet." Yes, a Crewman Daniels reference every month, that's the Film Roundup promise!

  I see why they had to add the exclamation mark to the end of this movie's name. (The book was just called The Informant.) The exclamation mark shows that the film has a strong comedic element; otherwise it looks like a Robert Ludlum adaptation. This got me to thinking: if you have a film with a question mark in its title, but you also add an exclamation mark, does it cancel out the (totally imaginary) question mark curse?!

  I found about 30 feature films on IMDB that have adjacent question and exclamation marks in their title, but the only ones I recognize are The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? and What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?. So it looks like a reliable signal of a very bad movie.

• My Dinner With Andre (1981) This film hasn't aged well (the subject matter is... very Age of Aquarius) but I was amazed by how natural the dialogue feels. Gave me the vicarious thrill of listening to a smart crackpot present his theories on a topic I don't care about. Maybe his crackpot theories are correct! Who knows? Wallace Shawn was of course the big draw for me, and he doesn't have much to say until the last half-hour, but I was entertained. A production assistance credit for Troma (one of their first credits) was a nice surprise.
• Silver Streak (1976): The disappointing essence of stagflation-era comedy. After a rocky start (primarily caused by movies like this one in heavy rotation on Comedy Central) I've come to appreciate the cinema of the 1970s, but the comedies rarely make me laugh. No matter what they try, I'll never see Gene Wilder as a romantic lead or even a great comic actor. I think I found out about this from a "list of overlooked comedies" and now I'm questioning the judgement of the entire list. Plus, blackface. IMDB trivia: "Richard Pryor was uncomfortable with the scene." No kidding! Oh yeah, Richard Pryor's in this, eventually.
• Hausu (1977): This has a lot of stuff I don't like in horror movies (like... horror...) but it's so over the top and ridiculous I can't stay upset. My favorite scene was at the beginning where the backstory is laid out in a different filmic style. Every Disney animated feature does that now, but it doesn't happen a lot in 1977. And Hausu does it in an unusual way: one character is narrating the backstory, laying down the backbeat for the film-within-a-film we're seeing, but instead of listening to this narration, the other characters are also watching the film-within-a-film and commenting on it, MST3K-style? I guess this is to say that right from the start, Hausu is really weird, moving really fast and demanding a lot of the viewer. Once the blood effects start kicking in I've kinda had my fun.
• The Coca-Cola Kid (1985): I'm gonna put it out there: this, not Mad Max, deserves to be considered the true prequel to The Road Warrior. It was pretty fun, showcasing both the glorious high-tech of the 1980s and steampunk turn-of-the-century low tech. I can't confirm this 100% but this feels like a "low-budget non-American director gets big movie-industry money for the first time" film, a genre I'm becoming interested in after seeing Housekeeping last month.
• Little Caesar (1931): From the golden age of "every screenplay is based on a novel, and we're going to show you a picture of the novel on the title card". Also from the golden age of opening with a Bible quote, perhaps to appease the Hays office. I watched this because I really like Edward G. Robinson in non-gangster roles but I hadn't really seen the gangster roles he's best known for. It's a "great" performance—sixty years later, Robinson's accent still meant "gangster" at my middle school—but I think this movie is now basically obsolete. You got The Godfather series and both versions of Scarface telling this story with better character motivation than "gonna do some crimes, see?"
• Key Largo (1948): "Let's rip off the last scene from Key Largo, Mitchell!" That was going through my head the whole time, so suffice to say I knew how this movie ends. Has aged better than Little Caesar, with some nice noir moments regarding corruption and human weakness. Johnny Rocco has a super-petty speech about how ungrateful are the politicians he buys, which is exactly what I wanted when I went looking for "Edward G. Robinson gangster stuff".
• Re-Animator (1985): Kind of a repeat of my Reservoir Dogs dilemma: I'm not into horror films, but I am a big fan of Jeffrey Combs, who works almost exclusively in horror. I gotta at least watch the movie that started the typecasting, right? For an 80s horror flick you could do a lot worse. Combs met all my expectations: sinister with great comic delivery. The practical effects are goofy, but more "realistic" and less inventive than in Hausu. In further "random unexpected production assistant credits" news, Re-Animator has one for Rick Berman, of all people. Has anyone asked him about this?
• Gaslight (1944): A boring, train-ride-heavy first half sets up a reign of claustrophobic gothic terror in the second. A real thrill to watch. Plus, Angela Lansbury's film debut! Sumana hasn't seen the film but recommends "Just in Spring", a Yuletide fic dealing with the aftermath.

• Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982): In movie terms, this is the Crewman Daniels-esque car that Johnny Cash builds in "One Piece at a Time". The Steve Martin/Carl Reiner brand of comedy is able to drive the weirdo car a pretty good way, but I was left a bit disappointed. Like a Mel Brooks film, this is really sentimental about The Movies in a way that probably touches the hearts of those people who go in to work every day to make The Movies. But most of us have different jobs, and the technical achievement here rarely serves the comedy or the plot (in fact the plot serves it, big time). The one genre of joke I think they really nailed is the "noir narrator" joke. Just off the top of my head I can remember two great gags that came out of fooling with the narration.

  As an interesting cross-reference, the mailing list manager Enemies of Carlotta is a reference to this film.

• Steven Universe The Movie (2019): I'm reserving judgement until I see the next season of the TV show because this movie sets up one of my favorite SF conceits -- aliens living alongside humans on Earth, c.f. Constellation Games -- and doesn't do much with it. Wasted opportunity? Not if they go on to spend a large number of ten-minute cartoons exploring the topic! Otherwise... this was a fun kid's movie. I'm not a kid anymore and I know this isn't designed for me, I'm just watching over your metaphorical shoulder.
• Shadow of the Thin Man (1941): At this point we're just watching for the comic relief scenes. Dashiel Hammett doesn't have so much as a "based on an original story by" credit anymore and the mystery bits are pretty dull. Nick and Nora were fun in New York, fun in San Francisco, but in this movie they live in an unnamed split-the-difference city that feels like pure backlot. William Powell's still funny. though.

  The only thing that would convince me to watch the rest of this series is 1) Sumana might want to, 2) eventually a young Dean Stockwell starts playing the kid!

• The Phantom Carriage (1921): A century before The Good Place, there was... this. There's some cool technical wizardry (In its day, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid was hailed as "A new The Phantom Carriage"), and it's always nice to watch a silent film with live accompaniment, but overall I wasn't sold on the melodrama and the moralizing. The museum handout intepreted the whole supernatural element as a metaphor for the main character's alcoholism, and although readings like that generally annoy me, I think it makes a lot of sense here.

  Having to drive Death's carriage for a year seems horrible, what with being endlessly confronted with human frailty and misery, but is it really worse than spending that same year in the Bad Place? One of many worldbuilding questions not considered by this movie, perhaps confirming the "metaphor for alcoholism" theory.

• Comfort and Joy (1984): This was my introduction to Bill Forsyth, who's already one of my favorite directors. I'd never heard of him before this month. Now I've seen three of his films (see below) and am eager to see the rest. His work is really consistent, but he doesn't have a ton of credits and hasn't directed since 1999, which made me suspect an Elaine May "movie jail" situation. Best I can see looking around the web is he just got tired of making movies.

  Getting down to specifics: Comfort and Joy is a light comedy about mob violence where nobody gets hurt. It's all property damage. I'll say two negative things about it: the ending is really slight and although any resemblance is purely coincidental, etc. etc., there was real ice cream mob violence in Glasgow around this time and it's hard not to see this movie making light of it—a criticism that would have less bite if the movie was more satirical and less fluffy. Apart from that, a really good time.

  As in many movies, there's a dream sequence in Comfort and Joy that is shot as though it were actually happening, ending with a smash cut to the sleeper waking up. Unlike most movies that do this, here we've also got a second dream sequence featuring the same characters, in which one of the characters is loudly suspicious that this is a dream, is finally convinced it's not, smash cut—they were right, it was a dream. Pure comedy... I'm gonna say comedy thallium.

• Breaking In (1989): I saw this one with Sumana and it blew us away! Great gags, great performances, a good heart, minor characters get their chance to be funny, awesome Portland locations. Sumana proposed this film as a model for Breaking Bad, and it's very plausible. Unlike a lot of stories of mismatched partners, it's clear here what each party gets out of the relationship, and at the end they both think they've come out ahead. Overall I'd compare this to Big Business—a hilarious but forgotten 80s comedy that's miles ahead of most of the stuff people remember. It's even got some subtle Edgar Wright-style jokes—(Delphine:Carrie::Ernie:Mike):::Shaun:Yvonne. Yes, I had to use parentheses and the rarely seen triple-colon to explain that analogy.
• Housekeeping (1987): This movie was not a laugh-a-minute crime comedy, so I didn't love it as much as Comfort and Joy and Breaking In, but it was solid. I was taken aback by the audacity of flooding the set, something I don't think I've ever seen. Though I imagine most movie ships are sets that can be flooded. Anyway, good mischief—comic and otherwise—in a less comedic universe than the other two Forsyth movies I've seen.

• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000): A really fun action movie. Most of the martial arts movies I've seen are either significantly newer or significantly older than this, and after calibrating for that, I think I agree with the givers of prestigious film awards that this is above average for its time period. Not a lot to say beyond that.
• Jupiter Ascending (2015): Bits of this movie have a fun Hitchhiker's Guide vibe but it has a very tight focus on the two things I dislike most in space opera: Chosen One plots and great-house politics. The Wachowskis don't exactly hide their affinity for Chosen One plots, and obviously there's a market for great-house politics. It just feels like a dereliction of duty to use the grand scale of space opera to further explore one of the most heavily-explored societal organization mechanisms. Basically, I wanted this film to take a hard turn at the bees, do some kind of hive mind or something. All I remember from this movie's initial release was people making fun of the bee thing, but the bee thing is great!

  This movie has two adjacent action set pieces where Channing Tatum busts in and stops Mila Kunis from signing some paperwork, so if that's your kink, this is the movie you've been waiting for. However, this movie is probably where you developed that kink, back when you saw it in 2015, and it's probably not going to happen again in modern cinema. Good thing there's deep fakes now!

  PS: Walter John William's The Praxis does a good job of showcasing the dysfunction you'll find in one of those great-house societies, but even then I didn't finish the series.

• Walk, Don't Run (1966): Dateline: 1964! Cary Grant is lured out of retirement by the promise of a free trip to the Tokyo Olympics, all expenses paid. He just has to do some location shoots for his matchmaker role in this bedroom farce movie, and fill in the rest in a studio Stateside. Seems like a prime opportunity to phone it in. I'd phone it in if it was me. But that's just one of the many reasons why I'm not one of the most beloved actors of the twentieth century. Grant turns in a game performance with a lot of physical comedy, and the overall movie's really fun in a 1960s "international cooperation" way.

  But the best part is that pre-Trek George Takei is in this movie! He's only got one scene but it's a pretty good role. I don't think I've ever seen him in a role other than Sulu or George Takei As Himself.

• I Was a Male War Bride (1949): We wanted to see more Cary, and thanks to this movie, our wish was... granted. I missed out on this film in 2013, and I'm pleased to report that it's funny and Cary Grant doesn't try to do a French accent. Easy no-prize explanation: his character speaks really good English which he learned from a Brit, a la Jean-Luc Picard.

  There are two distinct phases to this movie. It starts with the typical Howard Hawks rom-com stuff where the two characters who can't stand each other fall in love. Once Grant's character becomes a Male War Bride, we switch to more "Humor in Uniform" jokes and gender stuff. It's all good fun, and there are some really moving bits near the end.

• Goldeneye (1995): The latest in our "Sumana asks Leonard if he wants to watch a James Bond movie and Leonard says sure" series. This was fun. Again, not much to add. Except: before checking IMDB I assumed Joe Don Baker spent 20 years appearing in Bond movies as Jack Wade, but no, he's in two and we happened to watch both of them.
• Three Kings (1999): This was really powerful, but also a good object lesson in exactly what type of power art has. Four years after this movie came out, we started a stupid, pointless follow-up to the Gulf War, at great human cost. At the time there were, in fact, people saying "didn't anyone see Three Kings (1999)?", but it didn't make a difference on a geopolitical level. Not saying a better movie would have gotten a different outcome. The Great Dictator is a great film and it didn't stop anything. Art works on the level of the individual, and there it does have power, for good and evil. We just don't have the counterfactual of all the individual decisions that were made differently because someone saw a movie.
• It Happened One Night (1934): Okay, back to romcoms. Clark Gable rides the knife-edge between "romantic lead" and "obnoxious jerk" in a way that guarantees lesser actors will spend the next 80+ years trying to surf this wave and falling down on the "obnoxious jerk" side. Really enjoyable to see someone who can pull it off, though. I think the key is in his famous striptease, surely the inspiration for Magic Mike, in which he compels behavior from Claudette Colbert's character not by controlling her body but by aggressively making his own body vulnerable.

  A line from this movie is currently a catchphrase in our house: "Five Gs, or I crab the works!"

• Finally, we borrowed DVDs of the first four Thin Man movies (1934-1941). As of writing we've watched the first three and I don't think the fourth one is going to hold any big surprises, so I'll sum them all up as though they were one movie. The murder-mystery part is pretty bland but we love the dynamic between Nick and Nora, a dynamic you rarely see in romcoms, which focus on the start of a romance. It's not just that they're happily married: it's a collective power fantasy of being in a relationship so secure and with such good communication that you can pull potentially disastrous pranks on each other and team up to take on society at large.

  There's a little of this in It Happened One Night (where it's great), so it doesn't have to rely on a strong preexisting relationship -- it can be one of the building blocks of a relationship. You see a kind of Nick and Nora dynamic between Kim and Jimmy in Better Call Saul, but their relationship isn't actually that strong—an indication that the show's probably not gonna end with a big infodump and everyone tipping back a drinkie.

• Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018): You know I like an arthouse film now and again. I'm glad they tried something different, but I wasn't really feeling this one. I did like the 3D section, but it probably doesn't make sense unless you sit through the first half. The second half felt like an escape room, which is pretty cool, but the first half was the random, disconnected clues written on scraps of paper which you need to assemble to solve the escape room.
• Bathtubs Over Broadway (2018): Recommended by good ol' Pat Rafferty, this documentary is both a survey of a forgotten art form, and the story of a snarky person who discovers sincerity. I was hoping for a lot more in-depth on the survey, but I liked Steve Young's term of "comedy poisoning" for diagnosing his own snark. Really fun overall.
• Any Number Can Win (1963): A.k.a. Melody en sous-sol, a.k.a. The Caper That Sank, a.k.a. Never Steal Anything Wet (just kidding). This had really fun heist planning and aftermath, but the heist itself, a dialogue-light bit clearly inspired by Rififi, was a little dull, and the romance subplot was a snoozefest. I much prefered the noir opening, where the aging heistmaster gets out of prison only to discover that Modernism has consumed the world and Jacques Tati is filming Playtime in his home town. Had a real Reginald Perrin vibe.
• The Burglars (1971): A.k.a. Le Casse. This movie starts with a huge nerd-out as the titular burglars invade a beautiful 1960s mansion and crack the safe with a specialized piece of equipment that, e.g. uses Scantron-like cards to program a key-cutting machine. Includes long sequences where Jean-Paul Belmondo is looking stuff up in the service manual, a manual which is either the most detailed prop in the entire movie, written in good manual English, or... this is a real piece of equipment with a real service manual? I guess they gotta make safe keys somehow. I would love to know more about this machine!

  Also, as long as I'm focusing on details most people don't care about, in the granary office at the end of this movie there's a hatrack which strongly resembles what Duchamp's Hat Rack would look like if it were actually a readymade.

  Often I focus on these little things because the rest of the movie was boring, but although the heist that opens The Burglars is the best part of the movie, there's a ton of good stuff here. There's a cool car chase, good stunts, excellent cat-and-mouse between Belmondo and Omar Sharif. The fashions and design are swinging '60s throughout. Bad parts: the ending is pretty weak, there's a doesthegoldfishdie.com moment near the beginning, and an ugly scene where Belmondo's character slaps a woman around and it's played for laughs—unnecessary and really hard to stomach.

• The Bishop's Wife (1947): It's no Wings of Desire, but it covers some of the same ground. The minor characters are fun. Cary Grant's character is the ultimate service top, and it's wonderful to watch him be oblivious to society's rules about who does things for whom. One of these gags is reprised twice in a way that reminded me of Billy Wilder. IMDB says uncredited writing credit for... Billy Wilder! Trivia says he was just called in to redo a couple scenes, though. You can tell he didn't have full rein over the screenplay because the characters fulfill their dreams.

• Booksmart (2019): We were pre-sold on this by the screenplay credit for Sarah Haskins, who did a hilarious regular segment called "Target Women" about ten years ago. Booksmart is really funny, but it's also got a dramatic arc that you don't see very often. I'll go into more detail at the end of this review, but I do think you should see this movie and that it's more fun to see this character arc happen than to read about it.

  This film reminded us of Brick, another very stylish movie that shows high school through the subjective experience of the students. Maybe you don't think this movie is stylish, but it totally is: every character has a carefully maintained self-image that's within their budget and the movie's budget. It's just that most of the characters are also huge dorks.

  Judging from the street address, one of the party houses is just down the block from one of the places I lived in LA as a kid. The neighborhood really has changed.

  OK, here's what I mean about the character arc. At first it seems like Booksmart has cookie-cutter high school movie villains. Then it turns out that no, this is like Clueless and there is no villain. Then, no, this is like Inside Out and the protagonist is the villain. Then, no, there really was no villain, these are all just teenagers making teenager mistakes.

• Face/Off (1997): Sometimes people say a movie is "so bad it's good". I've said it myself, and I generally mean a bad movie was also entertaining. Face/Off is more complicated: it's a movie that's bad and good simultaneously and for the same reasons. Casting the oddest actors of '90s Hollywood in both lead roles? Seems like a bad idea! But Face/Off turns it into an advantage by making Travolta and Cage effectively play each other's stock characters. Whenever either one of them is on screen (the entire movie, effectively), you get the ACTING power of both.

  Face/Off doesn't just do a good job of recreating a bad movie—Mars Attacks! tried that, and the resulting movie was simply bad. It mixes up the ingredients of a bad movie in an inventive way, creating something special. Like a Five Obstructions kind of deal.

• Born Bone Born (2018): That's the correct English name of this movie and I have the ticket stub to prove it. IMDB has the wrong title (Bone Born Bone). The name sure is confusing, though the ending sorta gives you a mnemonic. It's not a literal translation, which means they could have eliminated all possibility of confusion with a super-verbose title like "Mom Died, But We'll See Her Again At The Family Reunion? Two Worlds Meet On Okinawa!"

  Anyhow, this is a really excellent family dramedy that got much bigger theater laughs than a family dramedy usually does. It's got fun characters, great timing, and it does a good job of putting the audience in the anxious ready-to-laugh state with its up-front treatment of death.

• Set It Off (1996): This had been on my list for a while and it was nice to see it on the big screen with Sumana. I came in expecting an Oceans-style heist, but I got a quality modern noir. The Thelma and Louise-esque authority figure is a little more bearable than in Thelma and Louise, but who goes to these movies to watch the cop?

Addendum: After last month's The Bit Player experiment, I've found that Film Roundup is the best place to list interesting films that I can't put on a wishlist because they're not yet products you can wishlist. This month's entry: Dance with Me, the tragedy (?) of a woman who's cursed to live in a musical. It's showing at the Japan Cuts festival later this month, but I was slow on the draw and all the tickets sold out. We'll see it later... and I'll see you later!

• Spaced Invaders (1990): One evening I had a drink when I maybe should not have had a drink, and I decided to rent a movie whose trailer I had seen on television when I was a kid. For about two weeks in 1990 I really wanted to see Spaced Invaders, but trekking to Bakersfield to see a movie that no other family member wanted to see? The movie might as well have been showing on Mars (where, ironically, it was banned).

  It's a shame because I would have liked this movie in 1990, but its time has passed. It's watchable, they really tried, it has some fun miniature effects and set design and a really good Uhura costume, but it's not funny or scary or surprising. Around the 70 minute mark I abruptly started wanting them to wrap it up. That's also when the alcohol wore off, so the booze was probably contributing a lot to my enjoyment. That said, there are a few things to like about this movie:

  1. It's better than Mars Attacks! (1996), on a much lower budget. Although most people don't like Mars Attacks! I imagine this is a minority opinion. I'll stick with it because I think I hate Mars Attacks! more than average. I mean, Mars Attacks! has Jack Nicholson, Spaced Invaders has an alien doing a Jack Nicholson impression. I ask you: which is funnier?
  2. Pretty sure this is the only movie I've ever seen where a military unit has a political officer. I'm also pretty sure it happened by accident because they were ripping off something else, but I'll take it.
  3. The kid in the duck costume is funny; I liked the actor's delivery.
• What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Deep Space Nine (2018): DS9 fans need to see this, non-fans don't care. It's predetermined! Sumana and I are huge fans so we had to see it on the big screen as part of a Fathom Event. Certain bits of this movie (remastering a big space battle in HD) went right past us, although according to IMDB trivia (aka the opinion of someone on the Internet) this whole movie is a ploy "to convince CBS to remaster DS9 in High Definition." That seems like the sort of stunt fans pulled to try to get Nintendo to release Earthbound on Wii Virtual Console, so I'm skeptical. Although Earthbound eventually did happen, so maybe.

  Overall this was a great time. Best parts of this were the interviews with actors and producers. In particular, Nana Visitor and Andrew Robinson are great. Speaking as a writer... we don't necessarily work well live. We need time to find the best version. The day where the DS9 writing staff breaks an imaginary season 8 provided representative footage. Some really good ideas and discussion, some good starts that would need refinement after day one, and some end-of-BSG specials—bad ideas that probably can't be fixed precisely because you think they're great. It worked as a behind-the-scenes, but I found it very awkward.

• Aliens (1986): I was really skeptical that some space marines were going to be able to deal with a whole bunch of xenomorphs when the whole point of Alien is that a single one is unstoppable. But Aliens is in a different genre, plus the marines have heavy firepower where the truckers were trying to kill an alien with a mop and a Leatherman. And in the end, they weren't in fact able to "deal with" anything, so it checks out. Alien is a better movie because it did the worldbuilding, but this was fun, and a more even film overall. Paul Rieser a nice surprise.

  In my Alien review I made fun of Ridley Scott for an IMDB trivia item saying he'd envisioned the xenomorph peeping on Ripley voyeuristically, but in Aliens trivia I learn: "Sigourney Weaver asked that in the film her character should... have sex with the alien". That's also a bad idea, but at least it's not Porky's bad. Keep it in the subtext, folks.

• The Sting (1973): Scott Joplin is buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in Queens, and every year the cemetery hosts a concert in his honor. I really like this sort of tradition, but Burns Night is the only other example I can think of.

  Anyway, Sumana had recently gotten into Joplin, so we went to this year's concert and had a good time. Upon returning home I proposed that we rent The Sting, the film that anachronistically contributed to the Joplin revival of the 1970s. Thus, our watching experience—and my actual review—began.

  This was a fun ride full of heisty Hamlet cliches and few surprises. Having read a book on old-timey cons I knew how these things go, but Sumana, who AFAIK has not read a book on old-timey cons, also immediately figured out the climactic twist as soon as it was introduced. But it's fun to see the classic cons put into action without actually losing all your money.

• Five on the Black Hand Side (1973): Sometimes I hear about an interesting obscure movie playing at Film Forum or such, and I can't make the showing so I file away the movie for a later rental. This was such a movie, a fun domestic comedy based on a play. Classic low-budget 1970s fare, but not something you need to pay to see on the big screen.

  This movie was shot in L.A., not far from my old neighborhood, but the play clearly takes place in N.Y.C., in what I think is an example of sticking too closely to the original script. But playwright Charlie L. Russell also wrote the screenplay, so he had his chance. Unless they didn't tell him where they were going to shoot? I dunno, feels like there might be a story there.

  Godfrey Cambridge (previous Film Roundup appearances: Bye Bye Braverman, Cotton Comes to Harlem) is in one brief scene at the start of this movie, and not only is he given major billing, but in his one scene he rear-ends some other guy's car and the first thing the other guy says is "Hey, you're Godfrey Cambridge!" A true star.

• Blankman (1994): Another movie I wanted to see as a kid. I rented this one sober and maybe that was a mistake, because it's pretty bad. The best I can say is there are some fun "wacky gadget" practical effects and homages to Batman '66. Everything else is awful. I won't enumerate it all because I chose to see this movie, knowing it was probably bad, so I have no cause to act outraged. Curiosity: SATISFIED.

• Tomorrow Never Dies (1997): Not a big Bond fan—I've now seen three movies and read one of the novels—but another member of my household enjoys the action set pieces, and these action set pieces were pretty good. I liked how Michelle Yeoh randomly went in and out of scenes before showing up permanently, implying a whole other movie going on in the background. Yeah, it was fun.

  According to IMDB trivia this title changed from Tomorrow Never Lies because of a typo. The producers adjusted their monocles and said 'I say, this plucky typo has the right idea!'. I think that's emblematic of how little care the Bond franchise takes with its titles. If they don't care, why should I?

• Thelma and Louise (1991): I usually enjoy movies where the problems start small and escalate out of control, so this was a good time. Really good pacing: the breaks in the action let you breathe but they're also setting up the next escalation. As in Mad Max: Fury Road, the episodic 'road trip' format maps well onto a chase.

  I watched this with a friend who was really confident they knew what happens at the end but who was surprised! So I got a nice surprise-by-proxy.

• The French Connection (1971): This movie really puts the 'procedural' in 'police procedural'. Lots of waiting, and running around on crowded sidewalks. I'm not complaining; this is some classic crime-and-grime. Plus, there's a chase scene between car and subway train! But the thing I want to tell you about is the song near the beginning of the film.

  This blog post has the movie clip plus a live version of the song that's easier to follow. It's called "Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon", it was written by Jimmy Webb (of "MacArthur Park" fame) and originally sung in 1969 by Thelma Houston in a version that starts out pretty nice but turns way-too-clever in a way that's distracting. Maybe that's why it wasn't a big hit. But the Three Degrees rehabilitate it, speed it up and put a lot of energy and joy into it.

  I think this song appears in The French Connection solely to set up a dramatic contrast between space-age optimism and the moral rot of the "real world". But this song is the best thing about the movie! It's almost fifty years later and we've been making gritty cop movies nonstop, some of them are pretty good, but we haven't done much that goes on the same shelf as "Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon".

• Heaven Can Wait (1978): I saw this a couple months ago but forgot to review it. I remembered it when Sumana mentioned the admiral in Mary Poppins who fires a cannon from the top of his house every day. The millionaire in this movie has his servants fire a cannon every day! Is this a common thing? Is this why rich peoples' houses are spaced so far apart? Or maybe there was one obnoxious dude in Beverly Hills who did this and a lot of movies from the 60s and 70s are mocking him.

  Moving on to the film itself: Elaine May's screenplay is really funny and misanthropic, except the last act, which seems written by someone who's a lot less funny and doesn't hate humanity at all. Thus, I left the theater disappointed and in a mood to forget that I'd ever seen this movie. There is a character in the last act who randomly drops dead just so the plot can work out, and I admit that is both funny and misanthropic, but not the kind I want to support with my ticket purchase. But up to, I'm gonna say, the 100 minute mark (the length of a normal, sensible movie), Heaven Can Wait is a great comedy.

• Captain Marvel (2019): Another month, another Marvel movie. I really liked seeing 90s LA—a little bit of home! And I know just enough about Marvel canon (from reading She-Hulk) to appreciate the little twist. Downsides: although this is a space opera Marvel movie it focuses entirely on the parts of that toolkit I don't care about: the galactic empires with their huge cities and clashing militaries. Are these the same people who dragged down Guardians of the Galaxy? (Answer after checking wiki: they are one such group of people. Geez.) Bring back garbage planet! (In fairness, there is a garbage planet here: the Earth.)

  Near the end, when the villain... well, he's not 'the' villain, he's pretty minor, sort of an Assistant Undersecretary for Villainry, but real annoying. He's trying to taunt Carol into hand-to-hand combat, clearly setting up an Indiana Jones moment where she bypasses the fight scene by zapping him with her superpowers. The taunting goes on for a while, and before long I was pounding my fists on the theater armrests quietly chanting "Zap! Zap! Zap!" She does zap him eventually and it's cathartic. Anyway, I offer "Zap! Zap! Zap!" as an all-purpose attempt to fast-forward a narrative to its inevitable conclusion. Hasn't worked yet, though.

• Wings of Desire (1987): I was skeptical about this one, and saw it for two reasons: 1) Sumana wanted to see it, 2) Peter Falk. I'm glad I saw it. It's moving, humane, thought-provoking, beautifully shot, Peter Falk is a perfect choice. I don't have a lot to say because (as I feared) this film doesn't have a whole lot of plot. But I loved it anyhow; that's how good this is.
• Some Like It Hot (1959): This was my third viewing, the first on the big screen, and just to get it out of the way, this movie is funny as heck. Okay? That's a given. Top tier comedy. Big recommendation.

  Now, I want to discuss two other facets of this movie: one good and one bad. The good is that this movie shows a character discovering their queerness and struggling to understand it, and the attitude of this 1959 Hollywood movie is total acceptance. I won't presume to try to fit Jack Lemmon's character's journey into modern categories, but it's clearly different from what Tony Curtis's character goes through, and Some Like It Hot is 100% sympathetic to it. The last time I saw this, I hadn't seen enough other old movies to realize how unusual this is.

  The bad: the gangsters. Compared to the rest of the movie, the gangster plot is sloppy and lazy. The gangsters provide the thanatos that you want in a Wilder movie, but it's not well integrated. Just feels like a bunch of stereotypes and coincidences and references to other movies now forgotten. I'd like to see an edit that loses the gangsters after the speakeasy scene, but I don't know if you could do it without new footage.

• Us (2019): This had a ton of cool ideas, but I'm feeling some regression to the mean after the all-around fave Get Out. This was less science-fictional and more like a normal horror movie, with all the fridge logic that implies. I admit I don't watch a lot of normal horror movies so I don't know whether certain things are innovative here. Like, I have the feeling that a lot of horror movies take place over one night and end with the sunrise. Whereas in this movie, when the sun comes up it's just an act break and a change to a different horror subgenre. There's also some Edgar Wright type stuff where horror is filmed as though it were comedy; that's probably pretty common? Overall this was decent, but my "seeing it live in a theater" experience was nowhere near what I got out of Get Out.

• Black Panther (2018): It's a superhero movie, but with a difference: Wakanda is great! As usual, I have a limited interest in the people solving their problems with fight scenes. But I totally want to see the effect on the MCU of Wakanda stepping onto the world stage! When Iron Man shows up, we know it's a one-off. We're not going to have everyone flying around in suits. But Wakanda is a full scale science-fictional invasion of a world like our own, the sort of thing for which I longed in Thor: Ragnarok. I definitely want to see this.

  But apparently everyone dies in Infinity War, so it won't happen and I watched this movie for nothing? Man, no wonder it got snubbed for Best Picture. You think they're going to make a sequel to Green Book where an alien kills everyone?

• The Wandering Earth (2019): a.k.a. "Liu Lang Di Qiu". Finally, we've found it: a good version of Armageddon. Could this be the one that heals the wound? It's got the scope: the plotline of the first half of the movie is repeated four thousand times across the planet, but we only see the struggles of one group. It's got the visuals, solving a common problem of 'realistic' science fiction by turning Earth into both an alien planet and a dingy space station. It's mostly stupid, as befits a blockbuster, but really clever in a few places. You may think that Deep Impact is the good version of Armageddon, but as someone who recently saw part of Deep Impact while getting a haircut, I say nay.

  Downsides: the action scenes are way too long and I found them hard to read for similar reasons to Armageddon. Like Interstellar, this movie continually reminds you of the better movies it's ripping off, and in fact it's the same movies, plus Gravity. Special caution to doesthewhaledie.com premium subscribers: there's a dead whale in this, but it's been dead for a really long time. Like, are we upset by a whale fossil? There's got to be some limit, right?

  Old video game watch: the black market guy is playing Contra on a Famiclone. Yes, even in post-apocalyptic deep space, the 80s classics never die. Also, Zhou Qian has eight Zelda heart stickers on the chest of her spacesuit. It's never explained, but talking it out with Sarah afterwards, I speculated that it's like the kill marks on your fighter plane, except Zhou Qian hates killing, so they're tally marks of the lives she's saved.

• The Net (1995): Like Antitrust, this movie has a bad technical rep. Sumana and I saw it because of this bad rep, in search of cheesy fun. (Here's her review.) But apart from the McGuffins, it's not too bad. The basic point is totally accurate; in fact the movie now seems prescient in some ways.

  The McGuffins are real nonsense, though, and the film has some ghost jokes, a la Clueless. Sandra Bullock's character buys pizza and plane tickets online and we were like "hmm, yes, an interface such as that would have required Javascript, which wasn't around yet" instead of "damn, what a NERD!"

  Overall, this was the expected cheesy fun, and it reminded us of The Parallax View (1974), a much better thriller that's also a better metaphor for the destructive power of the Internet.

• Sweet Charity (1969): This month's pleasant surprise. A cynical musical, but not nihilistic like Pennies From Heaven, with snappy Neil Simon banter. It's pretty long, but set pieces keep it moving, and outside of the first scene there's no real villain.

  The choreography is incredible, all designed to point out how ludicrous the human body is. The "Big Spender" number looks like something Bertolt Brecht or Fritz Lang would do. One of them Weimar guys. I guess it makes sense since Bob Fosse would go on to do Cabaret in 1972.

  Sumana and I were disappointed by the ending, which the best thing you can say about is it's faithful to the musical and not the cop-out alternate ending that was filmed in case of studio interference. While playing our frequent game of "fix the bad media thing" (most recently deployed on a terrible Star Trek: Discovery episode) Sumana came up with a much better ending: bring back Ricardo Montalban's character, not to swoop in and provide replacement romance but to pull Oscar aside for a man-to-man. It's the sixties, brother, Women's Lib is on the way, and Oscar needs to get over his hang-ups and just marry the girl.

  Don't sleep on the elevator scene. Pure comedy niobium!

• Funny Face (1957): I don't know what Discovery's computer sees in this one. It starts off fun with a couple good numbers, but rapidly becomes dull. The idea that Audrey Hepburn isn't model material because of her "funny face" is ludicrous. Also the funniness of her face is strictly of the "you had to be there" variety, and that whole concept is grafted on from a different musical. But not grafted in a cool way, like in Face/Off. Seriously engaging with continental philosophy would have made the film interesting, but that didn't happen--Empathicalism here is the humanities equivalent of the computer in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

  The final blow: the poster for this movie says "Presented in a real new dimension in motion picture entertainment". Are they trying to trick people into thinking this is a 3D movie? Cause it's not. Although there is a scene where someone throws spools of cloth at the camera, a classic "gratuitous 3D" technique.

• Raising Arizona (1987): This one's on the 'goofy' side, and it's fun. IMDB trivia says this was made to be as different from Blood Simple as possible, and those two movies do span the early Coen dramatic range.

  I initially assumed that Gale and Evelle were a gay couple and was disappointed when it turned out they were brothers.

• Barton Fink (1991): I saw this in, like 1998, and then I saw it again with Sumana in July 2012, just before I started Film Roundup as a regular series. So I almost Film Rounduped it last time, but not quite. A little frustrating. But Barton Fink is a great arthouse movie, and it's fun to watch up to three times. The first time you're going in cold. The second time you know the trajectory and you catch all the foreshadowing and symbolism on the way. The third time you know what you're going to catch and there's a kind of second-order pleasure in seeing it all come together.

  Don't get me wrong: I'd rather be watching it for the second time or even the first. But Barton Fink remains a real pleasure. The Buscemi/Goodman/Turturro triumvirate is in full flower, and it's great.

• Inside Llewyn Davis (2013): I love the period-ness but I can't stand the main character. Like if the Dude just complained in the bowling alley instead of trying to get his rug back. This guy's got a bunch of friends he doesn't deserve and he mistreats 'em all, but not in an innovative way, just regular entitled jerkiness. And I'm not into the music. This is a movie that shows you the ending first because that's the only part with any action, and doesn't even make it clear it's a flash-forward—seems like a decision made in the editing room.

  John Goodman as Roland Turner steals what little of the show he's in. A weird side note: Turner's henchman is named Johnny Five, an anachronistic, irrelevant reference to another movie that I don't think even Thomas Pynchon would try. It's just inexplicable. If I'm ever at a Q&A with the Coens I should make this my Q.

• A Serious Man (2009): The project finale! Another period piece, more enjoyable overall than Llewyn Davis. Takes a while to get going and the main character is another sad sack, but at least he's trying. Or maybe it's not even that he's "trying" but that bad things really are happening to him.
• Main Hoon Na (2004): a.k.a. "I'm Always Here." A Bollywood classic that blatantly mixes Tom Clancy-type thriller and goofy college romcom. It... is okay, but if I'm going to sit through a three-hour movie I want more than "okay". Sumana and I had more fun riffing than watching the movie itself. There is a really good part during the closing credits, where the crew gets to be on-camera goofing off. The producer signs a big novelty check, etc.

  Fun, spoileriffic fact: the main villain in this movie dies the same way as the main villain in Raising Arizona.

• Manikarnika: The Queen of Jansi (2019): This movie's got an undercurrent of Hindu nationalism that's kind of disturbing. Sort of reminded me of Ken (1964), but it's a live grenade instead of a museum piece. The action scenes are not all that was promised; we expected more aunties with swords. Also the British accents were all over the place, which was very distracting. During the movie I thought they'd cast a group of Eastern European backpackers as the British officers. But from what I can tell, those parts went to American and Australian actors living in India. Not that my British accent is great. I'm not volunteering.

  ---

  And now, the conclusion. For the first time in Film Roundup history I'm giving rough numeric scores to movies, just so I can compare my overall opinion of the Coens' works against the IMDB consensus:

  

  Survey says the Coens consistently produce above-average work but had a slight dip in the 2000s. What I learned from this project is how much value I put on the 1990s Coens in particular. The six movies from 1991 (Barton Fink) to 2001 (The Man Who Wasn't There) are my favorites by far, and include some of my favorite movies of all time. But apart from that ten-year stretch they're not really making movies for me. I don't think these movies are "bad" necessarily, but I like specific things and there was a magical period where the Coens were really into those same things.

  For the record, here's my ranking, with my faves at the top:

  1. The Big Lebowski (1998)
  2. Fargo (1996)
  3. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
  4. Barton Fink (1991)
  5. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
  6. Blood Simple (1984)
  7. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
  8. Hail, Caesar! (2016)
  9. Raising Arizona (1987)
  10. Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
  11. No Country For Old Men (2007)
  12. Burn After Reading (2008)
  13. The Ladykillers (2004)
  14. A Serious Man (2009)
  15. Miller’s Crossing (1990)
  16. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
  17. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
  18. True Grit (2010)

  Some miscellaneous notes on the films as a whole:

  • There's a stock character who I really like whenever they show up: the highly eloquent, super-polite character. Buster Scruggs, Professor Dorr, Ulysses Everett McGill, Charlie Meadows and Maude Lebowski to some extent. Maybe there's a character like that in The Hudsucker Proxy, it's been a while. Most of the time this character is a villain, but Troy Nelson is my favorite thing about Inside Llewyn Davis—just a really nice square with his head screwed on straight. Which I guess makes him the villain in that topsy-turvy movie.
  • In the moral calculus of Coen Brothers movies, the worst thing you can do is leave someone to die. It doesn't come up every single movie, but I believe there's a consistent pattern. This is how you find out Buster Scruggs is a bad guy. Llewelyn Moss leaves someone to die in No Country for Old Men and it's the only thing that makes him feel bad in the whole movie. The only non-self-centered thing Llewyn Davis does in his whole movie is check on Roland Turner when he ODs. Arguably "leaving someone to die" is what kicks off all the problems in A Serious Man, if you're determined to make the prologue have something to do with the movie.

    In real life, actively killing someone is worse then leaving them to die, but in Coen movies homicide doesn't usually have a moral dimension—it's the "shit" in "shit happens". Most of the body count is accidental, or else caused by Bad People like Anton Chigurh, characters who we know won't have any moral growth. The morality play happens afterwards, in how the survivors deal with it. The leaving-for-dead scenario is a good way to give big dilemmas to characters who would never realistically kill someone.

Film - There's nineteen new films on Film Roundup Roundup, but only films I hadn't seen before are eligible for the best-of awards, so no The Apartment or Fargo. Here's my top seven for 2018:

1. The Court Jester (1955)
2. Big Business (1988)
3. The Death of Stalin (2017)
4. your name. (2017)
5. Sorry to Bother You (2018)
6. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
7. Lots of Kids, a Monkey, and a Castle (2017)

Kind of a surprising result for me; I remember reading the screenplay for The Court Jester back in the BBS days and thinking it wasn't funny at all. Even now, if you look at the IMDB quotes page it doesn't seem like a terribly funny movie. But what they filmed is funny as hell. The "flagon with the dragon" bit is a good example. It's a famous movie line that I find tiring in and of itself, but that line isn't the main joke; the jokes focus on the folly of using an annoying tongue twister as a mnemonic.

Theater - Sumana and I saw a few shows in 2018, and the one I liked the best was "The Play that Goes Wrong", which we saw on Broadway. Like Big Business in the Film section, this play shows a mastery of different types of comedy—verbal, physical, character, meta... It's constantly switching things up, setting up and claiming callbacks, and exploring every variant of its simple premise. Hits all my comedy buttons, basically.

Books - Two books I read recently that really stand out for me are And There I Stood With my Piccolo and But He Doesn't Know the Territory by Meredith Willson. Willson's main claim to fame is that he composed "The Music Man", and NYCB readers know how much I love that musical. After we watched The Apartment, Sumana said: "You know, the saddest part is he didn't get to use those 'Music Man' tickets."

Territory is an inspirational book about the incredibly frustrating eight-year process of writing and producing "The Music Man". It's really nice to read as someone who's trying to work on large long-term projects. But nearly as inspirational is Piccolo, a book Willson wrote and published in 1948, almost a decade before releasing the project he's remembered for today. At this point Willson is close to nobody in show biz, just a guy who works in radio, mostly behind the scenes. But he puts out this book of hilarious stories and hot takes anyway, because who cares? The work speaks for itself. Both of these are outstanding books full of great anecdotes.

In similar "funny person makes random observations" territory I really enjoyed the second volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. I read the first volume as a huge hardcover book and it was a big chore, but reading it as an ebook is a much better experience, especially since there's lots of good stuff in the end notes. Volume 2 has lots of Twain's thoughts on copyright, and his not exactly Mr. Rogers-esque experience of giving Congressional testimony on the topic. I was saving volume 3 for the new year, but guess what—this is the new year!

In 2018 I started reading Vikram Seth's Indian epic A Suitable Boy. Sumana is a huge fan, and this gives us a fun topic to discuss while she waits for the serially-delayed sequel, A Suitable Girl. It's really funny! I'm a couple hundred pages in and finally getting comfortable with all the characters and their relationships. But they keep adding more characters! BTW A Suitable Boy is one of those late-twentieth-century works where there just isn't an ebook available. It's pretty common, but not usually a big deal unless the book is both well-known and really long. The Power Broker is another example—I haven't read that one because it isn't physically compatible with the way I read now.

Other great books I read in 2018 include Hemmingway's A Moveable Feast, Picking Up by Robin Nagle, Broad Band by Claire L. Evans, Wartime by Paul Fussell, and Lying For Money by Daniel Davies.

Broad Band starts off rehashing stuff I already knew about Ada Lovelace, but it really started surprising me after the end of WWII. There's a bit in Chapter 4 that gives me pause relating to the creation of COBOL. Like Javascript, COBOL was developed under an accelerated schedule. Unlike Javascript, the committee developing COBOL knew that everyone would be stuck for a really long time with whatever they came up with. But they decided to represent years as 2 digits anyway! I'd always assumed the Y2K problem was caused by a lack of foresight. But there was foresight, and they did it anyway! They weren't looking far enough ahead.

On that cheery note, I'll see you... in the future! Right now I'm going to go eat some food.

I saw a lot of movies this month in particular, partly due to a project I embarked upon, which you'll see near the end. You, my loyal reader, are the beneficiary. As for you, my unloyal reader—have at you! You betrayed me to that scoundrel Richelieu!

• The Apartment (1960): I. Love. This. Movie. This is a rewatch after fifteen years, which is about as much time as I like to go between viewings of a great movie. I remember basically what happened, but every scene is a treat. Sumana and I saw it at Metrograph—a new restoration, I think—and it really benefits from the big screen treatment. This movie looks great, it's hilarious, it combines total cynicism with genuine emotion. It's the kind of movie where the 'comic relief' shows up not to provide relief but to change the type of comedy, like the alternating layers of chocolate and wafer in a Kit Kat. (I was eating a Kit Kat during the showing.) And it's a Christmas movie! What more could you want?
• Supermen of Malegaon (2008): A fun documentary about can-do low-budget filmmaking. At one point the handheld camera being used to shoot the film is broken and it's a huge setback, causing delays and jeopardizing the entire project. But there's a whole film crew right here, making the documentary, with equipment much more sophisticated than the equipment being used to make the feature. If it was me I would have helped them out. I guess I'm just not a tired general.

  According to the presenter, this documentary was originally made for Singapore state television, but never aired there. I didn't know Singapore was so interested in what happened in India. Though I guess once they found out what was happening, they lost a lot of interest.

• Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982): Who better to introduce me to the work of Robert Altman than Cher? This had some great acting, but it's clearly a filmed play, which is most notable when some pretty horrible things are happening plot-wise but the characters just keep introspecting and monologuing. I guess I feel better about it if I think of this as the missing ending from The Last Picture Show—you come back to the lousy little town you left, and you've changed but all the ghosts are still there.

  Sudie Bond in this movie is a dead ringer for my late grandma Rosalie, which was nice to see.

• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018): Fabulous. Looks amazing, feels fun, good use of New York as a story mechanic. The plot is cookie-cutter, but it's just more evidence for my theory that you can't change more than one variable at a time when you make a movie. They leaned on the 'visual style' lever and they changed that variable.
• Hercules (1997): This movie should have stayed in the vault. Disney always plays fast and loose with the source material, but this one's especially egregious. For some reason it really rankled me seeing Zeus and Hera as this lovey-dovey couple, and Hercules as... their legitimate son? The one Disney hero from an unbroken nuclear family and it's Hercules?

  This sounds like I care a lot, but I don't! I barely care about this at all! I know very little about Greek mythology! But other Hercules movies make you feel smart for recognizing little bits of the stories they're mangling, and this one felt like some other story with the serial numbers filed off. I'm not a big fan of the songs, either. Best I can say is that there are some good sight gags.

  Sumana and I will sometimes place bets while we're watching something. Here, I bet that the famous Labors of Hercules would show up as a plot point and be dealt with in the course of a single musical number. Sumana bet that the Labors wouldn't show up at all. What we got was individual Labors, and references to them, showing up haphazardly throughout the movie, in musical numbers and otherwise. That's not satisfying. Anyway, the final ruling was that neither of us won the bet.

• Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990): I finally got Sumana to watch this, possibly out of guilt for her having suggested Hercules. This was my favorite film when I was a kid, and the favorite-filmness is still in there, but here's a film where they should have changed more than once variable.

  IMO it doesn't get started until the famous "Gremlin nitpicking" scene halfway through. After that scene, it's like a Marx Brothers movie where Harpo and Chico are trying to kill everybody. All the stuff in that Key and Peele sketch happens in the second half of that movie. (We re-watched the sketch after the movie. Sumana: "They weren't kidding!") The interview with Brainy Gremlin is one of my all-time favorite movie scenes. In terms of worldbuilding, character development, and verbal comedy, it's top-notch.

  But before the "nitpicking" scene, the film is way too slow and not terribly funny. Watching this film navigate the Gremlins rules, which gave a lot of tension to the first movie, is like watching someone try to parallel park a really big car. A mixed bag, is what I'm saying. Or perhaps... a mixed Gremlin? No, 'bag' makes more sense. A Gremlin was a kind of car, maybe I could do something with that... oh, I'm out of time? Last thought: the "nitpicking" scene is where it is because the Gremlins emerged in the previous scene, rendering the stupid rules irrelevant. No coincidence that's also where the movie kicks into gear.

• The Witches of Eastwick (1987): A combination of gal-pal wish fulfillment and fantasy violence that probably didn't go down well at the time, but I'd say the idea has aged pretty well. What hasn't aged well is this movie's 1980s John Updike feminism. It kinda works because Jack Nicholson provides such a sleazy contrast. But everything George Miller wanted to say in this movie, he did much better in Mad Max: Fury Road. Susan Sarandon is great.
• Practical Magic (1988): Sumana's review of The Witches of Eastwick was basically "Have you seen Practical Magic?", and we watched it right after coming back from the museum, as a cross-venue double feature. It's a disorganized jumble of different movies in different styles, but there's a lot of fun stuff in the buffet. In particular there's a few minutes where it's a supernatural version of 9 to 5; I wish they'd stuck with that. The casual sister relationship was very realistic and put me in mind of Celine and Julie go Boating.

  If you want to see what an IMDB rating histogram looks like when it has a hard-core group of fans, Practical Magic is your movie. I can see what the fans see in it, but ultimately I side with the weighted average.

• The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992): A friend of a friend watches this movie every year as part of the holidays. I saw it a couple years ago at Susanna's house and forgot to review it, so... I watched it again and here's my review: it's really fun! Michael Caine is a great Scrooge. Would Dickens approve? Who cares? Public domain, baby!
• Miller's Crossing (1990): After seeing a bunch of Coen brothers movies last month, I realized that I was within striking distance of having seen their entire feature-film output, which would put them in such rarified Film Roundup company as Elaine May, and... that's probably it. Sumana was out of town for a while so I made a spreadsheet with the goal of not only seeing all the Coen movies I haven't seen, but rewatching the ones I had seen in the pre-Film Roundup era.

  I'm not quite done yet, but I'll probably finish it up next month. In the meantime, Miller's Crossing (1990)! I thought this was basically popcorn noir. There's one cool little twist that gets un-cooled. Steve Buscemi only has one scene. I liked Blood Simple a lot, but this didn't have the same level of twistiness. I did like the soundtrack, something I don't usually notice.

• O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000): Watched with Kirk who was in town for the day. Overall this was really fun, but there's one big caveat which is that this movie has blackface. Seriously, George Clooney, in blackface, in the year 2000. It's not like Holiday Inn bad, it's well into ironic "we were doing something else and it served the same purpose as blackface" territory, but that's a stupid excuse for doing something that could have... just not been done.

  Anyway, apart from that GLARING PROBLEM, which sours the milk near the end of the movie, this is really fun. I saw this in the early 2000s and having watched Sullivan's Travels in the interim really improved my experience, so watch that one too—also, it's a better movie overall.

• The Ladykillers (2004): This was pretty fun but it turns out it doesn't need to exist. I also wish I'd made the 1955 version of The Ladykillers, but I wasn't alive then, so I work on other projects. You might say "it's time to update the riotous humor for a new generation", and that's a reasonable argument, but then you gotta look at the outcomes. This is the lowest-rated Coens movie on IMDB (6.2, which if Tom Moertel's measurement is still accurate, is perfectly average), and it doesn't exactly have a Practical Magic histogram.

  So, if you like what my cousin Camilla said about the 1955 version—"I had never before seen quiet, pious, proper good triumph over violent evil."—you'll get the same thing out of this one. That's pretty rare in a movie, but it's about to happen again, because next up we got...

• Fargo (1996): I was apprehensive about this rewatch because I've been using this movie on Film Roundup Roundup as an example of a movie I've seen but never reviewed. But also, what if the movie isn't as good as I remember?

  Well, no need to worry because this movie is amazing. A big reason for its amazingness is it's structured like a Columbo episode. You see the crime; then you see the cop; then you see the nice, polite, competent person take down the horrible fast-talking liar. But unlike in most Columbo episodes, while this is happening the crime is escalating and metastasizing, continually raising the stakes. (Also, in a Columbo episode, the villain would be the rich father-in-law, not the car salesman.)

  The Coens' movies are full of characters who are flawed and weak, and problems that can't be solved, were self-caused, or aren't even real problems. Some of the characters have good intentions, and a lot of the time that's all you're going to get. Fargo is the one where a) there is a real problem, b) one of the characters has good intentions, c) that person is able to stop the problem from getting worse. As a bonus, the Steve Buscemi level is very high (certified NISBS).

• The Man Who Wasn't There (2001): Sumana and I saw this movie at a special UC Berkeley showing on one of our early dates. I thought it was all right (and we still have a souvenir barber's comb from the showing, which we still use—durable plastic) but I remembered the plot in pretty good detail and wasn't really looking forward to rewatching what I assumed would be a Miller's Crossing type popcorn noir.

  Well, turns out this movie is way above popcorn. It captures what IMO is the essence of noir: not just a general hopelessness but the specific hopelessness of being an ordinary, weak human being whose life is ruined because they tried one freaking time to do something extraordinary. Basically, the feeling of being Jerry Lundegaard.

  This is also the film where the Coens' interest in extinct genre stories really pays off. The implicit biases of those old stories shaped Hail, Caesar! and Buster Scruggs in a way that got them a lot of deserved grief, and maybe it also motivated the bad blackface decision in O Brother, but here the investment pays off big. Of all the films I've seen in this mini-project so far, this is the only one that really surprised me.

• Attack the Block (2011): Good action, cool alien effects, lots of fun in a "simple sci-fi action film" way. The plot is something you'd see in the 80s, right? Or even the 50s. But nobody did it this way before.
• No Country For Old Men (2007): This was good but was it Best Picture good? I'd have given the 2007 Oscar nod to Hot Fuzz, so I'm clearly not Academy material. I did like the way this film ignored the sunk cost fallacy, killing characters off regardless of how much time had been spent exploring their psychologies. Very Psycho.

  The obvious symbolism is that Javier Bardem's character represents Death, but I like to think of him as representing Entropy instead. Try it out!

• True Grit (2010): One of the things I love in stories, which the Coens do really well (but sometimes choose not to do, see below), is showing someone who isn't "supposed to" be in this kind of story. Either because Hollywood stereotypes say this isn't their story (Marge Gunderson) or because they're actually unqualified (the Dude). This film starts out real strong in that area, and then not so much. The first half-hour would have been a great addition to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (again, see below). Then do a Greed-style title card and cut most of the rest.
• Infinite Football (2018): We thought this would be "17776: The Movie", but it ain't. It's not even a meditation on what "rules" are, because the bureaucracy scenes don't show the rules of bureaucracy, such as they are, in action. Sumana compared this film to The Peacemaker because it's about a guy who's really devoted to one project and lets a filmmaker get very intimate showing its effect on his life. Overall, a cut above the average meandering Eastern-European documentary.

  Also, apparently in Romania the sport called "football" is slightly different? More like soccer. Who knew?

• The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018): Loved the titular segment. So corny. Also really liked "The Gal Who Got Rattled" but felt ripped off by the ending in a way that this non-hand-wringing roundtable gets at pretty well. All these stories are taking place during an enormous heist/misunderstanding/murder spree/clusterfuck that's like every Coen Brothers movie happening simultaneously, and although the Coens are aware of this and certainly not celebrating it, they're also not giving it the treatment they'd give a convenience store robbery.
• Mama Mia: Here We Go Again (2018): Seen on a plane. A great movie to see on a plane. The 'Waterloo' segment is fab, everything else a welcome distraction from the tedium of plane travel. To answer the implicit question I had while this movie was in theaters, the dozens of people on the poster aren't new characters, they're flashback versions of the people from the first movie, like in Dongal. They're all my friends now... my plane friends... whenever I'm on a plane, I can count on them. Sorry, I fell asleep. I have a hard time falling asleep on a plane, but an easy time when thinking about being on a plane. It's my curse.

  Everyone who dies should be able to return for one last musical number.

• F For Fake (1973): Like Italianamerican and Daguerreotypes, this is one of those films that would be a Youtube video today. Actually it reminds me of Tony Zhou's Every Frame a Painting, which might would explain why Every Frame a Painting mentions it so often. Like with The Third Man, there's a piece of metadata about this film that will be a major spoiler if you notice it. But I was still along for the ride. I enjoy Orson Welles as a safely dead blowhard, his talent and his ego forever locked in a giant squid/sperm whale deathmatch.
• Inquiring Nuns (1968): The nuns are back! The film was remastered and this time I took Sumana, who loved it. To add a bit of thought to my previous review, all interview subjects are putting on an act to some extent. The highly artificial setup of these particular interviews forces people into their acts, but the nuns are serious in trying to get behind the acts. One guy in the art museum starts off sarcastic and one of the nuns asks "Is that a sincere answer?" and gets him to open up.

  Director Gordon Quinn was present at the screening and mentioned that the nuns are still alive, although neither remains a nun. One married a former priest who first saw her in Inquiring Nuns! Both women found making the film a positive experience and one of them has done Q&A at screenings. Sumana asked: when Quinn was performing meta-interviews to find the nuns to use in the film, what was he looking for? "Good listeners."

• The Brain (1988): I saw this as part of a MST3K Live event, which was really fun. Joel and Jonah brought an audience member on stage to riff with them! The film itself is great material for MST3K: long chase scenes, a goofy practical effect, a plot that's 100% cliche but could have been cool with the right execution, and not the right execution. Recommended if they're coming to your town.
• Lilo and Stitch (2002): A fun movie from Disney's "weird" period following the megahits of the early 90s. Sumana can't stand when fictional characters are jerks (also real people), so she did not have as good a time as I did, but I liked the technique of putting two jerks in the movie and making them care about each other.

  Random question: do you think Bubbles is really a social worker, or is he a Man In Black who was rushed over to the likely crash site? His presence seems like a huge coincidence, but it could be something left over from an earlier draft of the screenplay. I could go either way. Probably overthinking it.

• White Christmas (1954): A little-known fact is that Irving Berlin wrote a sequel to "White Christmas", called "I'm Dreaming of a Bunch of Very Similar Musicals About Rural New England Inns That All Feature My Song 'White Christmas', Ensuring A Constant Stream of Royalties". It's not well known because whenever he tried to use it in a musical, it always made more sense to slot in "White Christmas" instead.

  Anyway, Danny Kaye's in this one, and he's great. Good banter, fun dance numbers, mediocre songs. Unlike Holiday Inn there's no romantic blackface scene, but there is a whole song about how one misses the old-timey minstrel show. Just... keep it to yourself how much you miss that shit. Isn't there a song about yams we could be hearing instead?

• In Jackson Heights (2017): Saw the first half at the museum; I'll finish it up later. It was nice to see an in-depth look at a local neighborhood, but it was also nice to not see a three-hour movie all at once. It was really weird to see the camera pan over the exterior wall of the Trade Fair like it's the bazaar in Marrakesh or something. It's just pictures of produce!

• Filmworker (2017): A chilling film about suppressing your own personality to merge with a collective intelligence. I'm not universally opposed to merging with a collective intelligence, in a sense we all do this, but I do think there needs to be a little give and take. It really seems like Stanley Kubrick used Leon Vitali as an offboard brain, in a way that goes beyond how most personal assistants are treated, and although Vitali doesn't seem to mind, some artful omissions (there's an obvious person who doesn't show up in Filmworker) make me think it hurt the people close to him.
• Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018): I've mentioned before that I didn't grow up with Mr. Rogers, but I guess Sumana caught me up to speed pretty quickly because there wasn't much new to me in this documentary. It covers most of the greatest hits, apart from Rogers's testimony in favor of VCR time-shifting, which I guess normal people don't consider a "greatest hit".

  The main food for thought I found was someone's claim that we're afraid of how common Fred Rogers-style courage and decency is. It's the flip side of the banality of evil. If we build up Mr. Rogers as a huge outlier, we don't have to think about where we come up short.

• The Way Things Go (1987): A.k.a. "Der Lauf der Dinge". A Rube Goldberg art film, another high-concept genre that's been replaced by a type of YouTube video. It's super creative, with a lot of the physical humor you get from a Road Runner cartoon or an OK Go music video... yeah, I'm just comparing it to other kinds of videos. There's a lot of bits here based on fire and chemical reactions, which those other videos tend not to try.

  Perhaps the ultimate West German film, in that it's precisely engineered but it's filmed in this dingy warehouse and everything's filthy. Very enjoyable.

• your name. (2016): A.k.a. "Kimi no na wa." This had a dorky twist previously seen in a bad Deep Space Nine episode, but when the twist arrived I was so into the story that I didn't care. A compelling plot, lots of good character moments, beautiful animation. I especially loved the bit near the beginning where the two characters are figuring out the rules of the game, as it were.

  I'm sure this happens in anime all the time, but this was the first time I'd seen mojibake as a plot element.

• Cielo (2017): After seeing the original Godzilla at the museum in 2014 I was annoyed to overhear someone talking about how the Godzilla suit effect wasn't as good as King Kong (presumably the 1933 stop-motion one). There, I thought, goes one person who did not leave the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed by Godzilla's invincibility. I mean, maybe the rubber suit is better, maybe not, but if that's how you're evaluating Godzilla I'm not sure you were fully exposed to the emotional sandblasting that film provides.

  This went into my secret file of "stories too petty to tell in Film Roundup", but recently I saw Cielo at Film Forum and after the movie I sat to collect my thoughts, which were dominated by people in the back complaining about the recently renovated seats. It made me think of the Godzilla thing. You paid to watch a documentary about the wonders of the cosmos, a movie with some pretty incredible time-lapse night sky photography. Do you not have the emotional space to talk about that with your friends, and you're complaining about the seats as a defense mechanism?

  I realize that complaining about your fellow theater-goers is about as bad as complaining about the seating, so no more of that. Cielo was not the best space movie I've ever seen, but the photography was beautiful and the interviews with the folks who live under that sky were interesting. The new seats are fine.

• Matewan (1987): A thrilling true-story Western about union organizing. I never heard of writer/director John Sayles before; turns out he's an unusually socially-conscious graduate of the Roger Corman School of Cheap-Ass Filmmaking. I'm interested in seeing more of his stuff.
• Intolerable Cruelty (2003): The Coens made a rom-com just for men, which was... a losing proposition, box-office wise. It's a fun movie but it's got a lot of problems. Sumana: "There's some good banter but it's not, like, Lady Eve level."

  Another example: the pacing is weird. It would be normal thriller pacing if Catherine Zeta-Jones was the main character, but from the perspective of the George Clooney character the movie grinds occasionally as it switches gears.

  Like I said, it is fun but it's on the lower end of the Coen output for sure. It's funnier than Burn After Reading, but BAR is a better movie.

• Big Business (1988): Julia Rios asked us to watch this movie in honor of her birthday, and even sent us a fun care package of props used in jokes (Doublemint gum, swan-shaped soap). The movie itself is really fun, a screwball comedy with a totally predictable plot and great jokes. Physical comedy, double roles, sight gags, sharp banter... a buffet of different types of 80s comedy, like a femme This is Spinal Tap.
• The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973): Another in the 1970s "racial slur in the title" action series. This reminded me of Ralph Bakshi's 1978 Lord of the Rings, in that the premise is brilliant but it ends abruptly, like they ran out of money, and I should probably just read the novel. However there are some great bits here, notably the code-switching bank robbery.
• Mamma Mia! (2008): This is not my kind of movie but Meryl Streep and the classic ABBA songs made it fun. I don't think we're going to see the sequel, but the sequel is what reminded Sumana of this movie and caused us to watch it, so an indirect marketing success?
• Sorry to Bother You (2018): This movie was in "okay" territory for me for most of the running time, but then there was a Cornetto-esque twist which was good on its own but also made me reevaluate the entire movie as a movie full of hidden Cornetto-type callbacks. Really good overall.

• Deadpool 2 (2018): Saw it with Sarah, had a good time. Lots of silliness, some inventive action. However this franchise is getting a Muppets/Simpsons problem where there are too damn many characters. I guess it always had that problem, since the franchise is "X-Men", but before I didn't have to care because the first Deadpool was this freak long-shot thing they made with leftovers. Now it's characters galore! and the only new one I care about is Domino, whose superpower is hilarious. Fun despite my griping. In fact, maybe the griping makes it fun?! Is this the day I truly become a comics nerd?
• Daguerréotypes (1976): Sumana and I loved this quiet film made under a serious constraint: director Agnès Varda was at home with an infant, so she made a film about her neighborhood. But her camera had a fifty-yard cord and her neighbors apparently wouldn't let her use their oil-crisis French electricity, so she couldn't travel more than fifty yards away from an electrical socket I imagine was in her living room.

  I don't know which of these constraints were self-chosen and which were of necessity, but it adds up to something really fun. Like Scorsese's Italianamerican (1974), amateurs now make this sort of film casually and they're treated as ephemera, but this was made at a time when it took professionals with fancy equipment. It's an interesting piece of time travel, it sometimes seems massively overengineered by modern standards, but there are also lots of fun juxtapositions that you get from having a professional in the editing booth. (Or, in fact, having an editing booth at all.)

• Oceans Eight (2018): This movie achieved the impossible: it made me care about the Met Gala for ninety minutes (more like seventy, allowing for time for the heist to be introduced). Sumana took umbrage at this and pointed me to Genevieve Valentine's blog post about the 2018 Gala, which only made it clear to me what a success Oceans Eight is on these terms. Like Ethereum or EVE Online, it's one of those things where I'm only interested if you've come up with some clever way of robbing it. I'd surely be upset if you stole the ink cakes from the Met, but here it's just jewels.

  Anyway, a fun movie. The aftermath of the heist, with the Barton Keyes-esque insurance investigator and the clever disposal of the loot, was especially nice. I was confused by the ending, which seemed a real tonal shift, but on IMDB afterwards I learned they'd brought in a character from the other "Oceans" movies, which I haven't seen. Status: EXPLAINED.

• The Peacemaker (2016): Not the 1997 George Clooney movie but a documentary about Padraig O'Malley, who came up with an effective way of kickstarting the Irish peace process and has been trying to scale it up ever since. I'll link to the museum's page for the screening because IMDB's page doesn't have any real info on the film. This was a really amazing piece of work, very intimate, and it really spoke to the sense of futility/dedication I feel about my lifelong slow boring of hard boards. "Justice will take us millions of intricate moves."
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988): I've now seen this movie three times and I've read the book, so clearly I like it a lot, but I always come away disappointed because I feel much better stories are tantalizingly close to the one they filmed. The last action scene, in particular, is dull because the film's most interesting characters are tied up and unable to participate. There's a line like "Use the escape-proof toon rope!" What a cop-out. Spend another five million dollars on one scene, would ya? Because of this I always leave the metaphorical theater with a bad taste in my mouth.

  My other problem is the fictional world is crammed full of worldbuilding that would make for great noir but it's neglected in favor of things I found less interesting. Particularly the fucked-up relationship between humans and toons, and Judge Doom's... what's his motivation? Is he a quisling? Is he summoning some Dip-powered toon elder god? Yeah, I'm overthinking it, he's just a generic 80s movie villain, which is my actual point: they attached all this amazing technical wizardry and worldbuilding to a popcorn-noir movie with a generic 80s villain.

  That's life. You can't change too many variables at once. I'm sure they had to fight like hell to get even what we see on screen. I'm glad this movie exists, but it could have been more. I haven't seen Alien Nation (also 1988) in a long time and I'm worried I'll discover it was just a cop movie.

  An old version of IMDB trivia says: "According to director Robert Zemeckis, there's an old superstition that films with a question mark in the title do badly at the box office." However Zemeckis is the only named source of this information I can find -- current IMDB trivia just repeats this superstition without crediting it to anyone. Maybe someone asked Zemeckis about this at a con and he said "No! It's an old superstition! Ask anyone!"

  If this is an old, widespread superstition, it would explain why I haven't been able to get the green light for my awesome screenplay, Macbeth?. However, since superstitions are fears with no rational basis, I should be able to change peoples' minds about this by showing them some data.

  Using an IMDB data dump I found twenty-eight pairs of feature films whose titles were identical except for a question mark. (This includes two films called Who Cares?, which I matched against the same Who Cares.) For each pair of films, I checked which film had the higher IMDB rating and which had more rating votes. Here are the totals:

  	Higher rating	More votes
  Question mark in title	16	14
  No question mark in title	12	14

  As you can see, there is basically no difference. This is a result I would expect from comparing pairs of movies selected at random. Omitting a question mark from the title of your movie does nothing. Nothing!

  The superstition does appear to be real, otherwise it's hard to explain titles like Who's Knocking At My Door (1967). But it's not a blanket thing -- What's Up, Doc? came out in 1972 and was a big hit. And the madness only affected the United States: Shall we dansu? came out in 1996 and was remade in 2004 as Shall We Dance.

• Lots of Kids, a Monkey, and a Castle (2017) a.k.a. "Muchos hijos, un mono y un castillo". And now, the story of a wealthy family who lost everything. This movie presents in a fun way a family situation that is in many ways awful, and it's mainly possible because Julita (the mom, the focus of the movie) is hilarious. She has a dry, cynical matter-of-factness that I associate with my own mother, and thus with the general concept of 'mom'.

  In a recent episode of the Retronauts podcast, someone described the line between "collecting" and "hoarding" as the point where your stuff starts interfering with your living space. This film shows that there's a pretty big loophole in that idea—if you're rich enough you can just keep buying more space.

  Anyway, it's rare to see a movie about a family going through problems where the family sticks together and everyone basically gets along, so this one's recommended from me.

• Freebie and the Bean (1974): From the innocent days when you could put a racial slur in the title of your fun-time cop movie. There are a couple good jokes and some great car chases (including one that's right out of Batman '66) but not recommended overall. Perhaps it could be remade, pairing a veteran Chicago cop with Anish Kapoor's sculpture "Cloud Gate".

  Old game watch: there's a Commando Machine Gun game in the bowling alley.

• Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976): This film was a critical flop when it was released, and it's not a great movie, but I had a really good time with it. I like a heist movie but I like it even more when it's got a snobs-vs.-slobs element, and Michael Caine is the ultimate heist snob.

  This is also a vaudeville film, another big plus for me, but as a 70s vaudeville film there is some brief, halfhearted Elliot Gould blackface. On the bad-meter it's not as bad as Holiday Inn, but it's not exactly a reckoning with the past either. The museum handout quoted Burt Young's memoirs as saying that when they were making this movie everyone was backslapping and really self-congratulatory about how funny they were, and it really does show.

  My aunt Anne once told me a story where the punchline was her saying in a fake Southern belle voice "We are at your disposal!" Well, in this movie Diane Keaton says basically the same line in the same voice, and it's making me question the veracity of Anne's story. But maybe it's a stereotypical Southern belle thing to say. Anne wouldn't tell a story that wasn't 100% true, right?

• A Wrinkle in Time (2018): There are three series my mother read to me when I was really small: the Narnia books, the Hobbit/LotR cycle, and the first three books in what I now know is called the Time Quintet. (The other two weren't out yet during the reading-to-Leonard years, and in fact I just found out they existed.) My adult opinion of these series are: meh, awesome, and hadn't really thought about it. But when this movie was announced I did think about it and I realized how important l'Engle's work has been to me. These days there are entire sections of bookstores devoted to weird genre fiction for kids, but back in the day A Wrinkle in Time was a real oasis. Middle-Earth was real weird to my mom's generation, but by the 1980s, Tolkien wasn't just for hard-core hippies anymore. And Narnia has always had a stick up its ass.

  In comes l'Engle, mixing fantasy tropes like witches and unicorns with Christian concepts (not allegory, just the concepts) and topics in contemporary science. Just, every chapter there's another wild, original situation. Every book has a totally different concept based on the same themes. It really worked like a karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane, and Spot.

  Sadly, my epic poem about peeing, A Tinkle in Rhyme, is still unapproved by the l'Engle estate, so my appreciation for these books can only be shown through Film Roundup reviews. I really looked forward to seeing this adaptation, even though an adult nostalgic for an experience they had as a kid rarely ends well. And I was disappointed in approximately the way I expected to be, but it's a good kids' movie, they did a good job making it relevant to kids' concerns today, and kids who are going to grow up to write science fiction will read the books anyway.

  The whole movie I was wondering how they were going to handle the revelation of IT, which of all the weird things in these books is the one that stands out in my mind. I still remember being five or whatever and my mom taking a deep breath and saying "It was a BRAIN!" What a terrifying reveal. But a disembodied brain is probably too gross for a PG movie while not being that scary on the screen. Even in the book, Meg realizes pretty quickly that although an oversized human brain is disgusting, if she had a scalpel she could just slice it up. So I think they did a good job setting the movie's climax inside a brain, a more abstract but also more terrifying space.

• The Prestige (2006): Cheryl recommended this to me when my writing group met to discuss Mine, for reasons that will be obvious when you read Mine. It's pretty fun. I didn't know Christopher Nolan directed, and back then Christopher Nolan wasn't DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER NOLAN BWAAAAAAAHM, so if I hadn't had an inkling of what to look for I would have been pretty surprised by the switch from one type of genre fiction to another.

  This film has a lot of fridge logic that's mostly explainable by the fact that the two protagonists will go to almost any length to sabotage each other. A convenient way to avoid nitpicking questions, but one that means you can only tell stories about certain types of people.

  I remember around the time The Dark Knight came out Sumana mentioned Michael Caine and I had no idea who he was. We went through his entire IMDB page; I'd never seen a movie with Michael Caine in it. By this time I've seen several (two this month, even!) and it was nice to see him in a role where he's not always cool and in command of the situation.

This month the Television Spotlight focuses on... a frosty mug of beer? Oh, it's "Sunshine Sento-Sake", which I found about through this 2017 review and then kept in my queue until the perfect moment. That moment is now: I'm dieting and there's a vicarious satisfaction in watching someone enjoying food I myself wouldn't want to eat. I don't like beer and am not big on Japanese food, but watching Takayuki Utsumi ditch his meaningless job, slack off in a bathhouse and then rehydrate with a cold one at a nearby dive is really enjoyable. It's also really repetitive. I don't know if I'll finish the series. Fun stuff, though.

• Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017): This was a nice slow-paced thriller. For decades other countries have been adapting the themes of the American western, and this movie does it really well; you get the loneliness, the lawlessness, plus the human connection you get in the better westerns.
• Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015): Cute and fun. Not complaining about this per se, but one of the things I love about the Wallace and Gromit animations is the buddy relationship, and the relationship between Shaun and the farmer amped up the part of that relationship I dislike (Wallace being really helpless and Gromit having to do all the work).
• Legally Blonde (2001): A fun movie with a satisfying wish-fulfillment twist you rarely see: the main character's incredibly smart but didn't know it because it's just kinda never come up. Less enjoyable: a crucial plot point relies on bisexual erasure. A mixed bag, I guess I'm saying. Clueless remains the champion of this mega-femme subgenre IMO.
• The Death of Stalin (2017): For so long I've been waiting for this to come to the US, because Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev is my dream role. And it delivers—he's the Buscemiest! The Mr. Pink of the postwar Soviet era. I'm not a big fan of The Thick of It, but that's partly because the stakes are so low. Ramping it way up makes the cynicism more sit-throughable, I think. Recommended overall. In my review of Muppets Most Wanted when I said "I don't think massive human rights violations are totally off-limits for humor," this is more what I was thinking of.
• The Court Jester (1955): Recommended by Cheryl, who said this and The Princess Bride were the movies she watched over and over again as a kid. We saw it with Sumana's mom during a visit and... a huge hit! Great songs, great physical comedy, good verbal sparring, decent actual sparring. Danny Kaye's split-personality bit puts The Nutty Professor to shame. My favorite film of 2018 so far, not that that's saying much.
• The Inspector General (1949): We doubled down on Danny, but this film wasn't nearly as good as The Court Jester. "Good bones", as they say in real estate, but a lot of the humor probably originates from the sparkling pen of Nikolai Gogol. I'll just check Wikipedia... "The great originality of [The Government Inspector's] plan consisted in the absence of all love interest and of sympathetic characters." Huh, okay, I guess the movie did come up with its own jokes, and it has some good ones. But the musical numbers are not fun, and way too long. That really drags.

Previously, the MST3K-IMDB effect could only be observed through its gravitational tug on one movie out of a director's oeuvre. But in 2017, Mystery Science Theater: The Return took movies that for years had sat in the dustbin of history and turned them into well-known "MST3K movies". Thanks to my trusty 2015 IMDB data dump, I'm in a position to compare the ratings of all these movies before and after they were on MST3K, providing the first direct images of the MST3K-IMDB effect.

First, here's my control group: a comparison of the 2015 and 2018 ratings for some random movies that weren't on MST3K:TR. As you can see, IMDB ratings for old movies are normally very stable, not changing by more than a couple percent over three years.

Title	2015 rating	2015 votes	2018 rating	2018 votes	Percentage change in rating
Night of the Lepus	3.9	2782	4	3484	2%
Embryo	4.9	824	5	1052	2%
The Ninth Configuration	7.3	3486	7.2	4893	-2%
Gorgo	5.5	1846	5.6	2479	1%
O Fantasma (2000)	5.9	1859	5.7	2449	-4%
They’re A Weird Mob	6.6	550	6.6	686	0%

My methodology: the first two movies in that list are the sort of thing you see on MST3K. The Ninth Configuration is a more highbrow obscure film. Gorgo was on MST3K a long time ago, so presumably the MST3K-IMDB effect is already priced in. The last two are movies of MST3K-level obscurity chosen at random. I would love to do this for every single movie in the 2015 data dump and just take an average, but I can't because IMDB doesn't offer full data dumps anymore.

Update: I took another look and this analysis is in fact possible once I write some code to compare the old and new IMDB dump formats. For non-porno feature films, the mean rating change between 2015/01/31 and 2017/12/24 is 0.13 stars. The median is 0.10 stars. Percentage-wise, it's 3% and 1%. So on average, IMDB ratings go very slightly up over time—a phenomenon I also noticed with Board Game Geek ratings.

Now, the moment I've all been waiting for, the experimental group. This table compares the 2015 and 2018 ratings of the movies that appeared in the first season of MST3K:TR. I've also included the rating of the MST3K:TR episode itself, as well as the number of votes IMDB used to calculate each rating.

Here, the percentage change in rating is largely due to the MST3K-IMDB effect. This is the percentage of a movie's previous rating that it lost just by being mocked on MST3K.

Title	2015 rating	2015 votes	2018 rating	2018 votes	Percentage change in rating	MST3K:TR episode rating	MST3K:TR episode votes
Reptilicus	4	1599	3.6	2962	-10%	7.8	498
Cry Wilderness	5.2	37	2	877	-62%	8.3	819
The Time Travelers	6	753	5.1	1682	-15%	7.4	256
Avalanche	4.2	594	3.7	1352	-12%	8	261
The Beast of Hollow Mountain	5	509	4.2	1182	-16%	7.4	230
Starcrash	4	2946	3.9	4699	-3%	7.7	235
The Land Time Forgot	5.7	3085	5.7	4558	0%	7.4	197
The Loves of Hercules	3.2	349	3	787	-7%	7.2	181
Yongary	4.3	592	3.9	1102	-10%	7.8	201
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom	2.6	502	2.6	1037	0%	7.8	187
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II	1.8	297	1.8	716	0%	7.4	168
Carnival Magic	3.8	120	2.4	463	-37%	7.2	167
The Christmas that Almost Wasn't	5.5	204	3.8	541	-31%	7.1	148
At the Earth's Core	5.2	2276	5.2	3410	0%	7.2	134

The MST3K-IMDB effect is real, but it's not a constant. In the control group we saw movie ratings vary up and down, seemingly at random. With MST3K:TR movies the trend is clearly down. But for five of the fourteen movies we see no effect, or an effect so small that it could have been due to chance.

I wasn't expecting this result! I don't see a pattern in the five movies that lack an MST3K-IMDB effect; they aren't the best-rated movies or the worst, they weren't in better- or worse-rated episodes of MST3K, they aren't from a different time period than the others. Sometimes MST3K just doesn't change peoples' opinion about a movie.

But sometimes it does. Take a look at Cry Wilderness, which lost over half of its IMDB rating due to being on by far the highest-rated episode of MST3K:TR. It went from a regular bad movie to being Manos-level. Part of this is just that its pre-MST3K rating of 5.2 was taken from a very small sample of just 37 votes—the kind of super-obscure film I usually omit in IMDB analyses. But two other movies—Carnival Magic and The Christmas that Almost Wasn't—also have very large rating shifts.

Here's the closest I can come to a unified theory of what happened to those three movies. I took the number of post-2015 votes for each MST3K:TR movie and divided the post-2015 change in IMDB rating by that number of votes. This gives a guess at an incremental per-person MST3K-IMDB effect. So, every time someone saw a movie on MST3K and then rated the movie, we can say its rating went down by an average number of stars.

For most of the movies this number is zero (people gave the movie the same rating as if it hadn't been on MST3K at all) or infinitesimal (a lot of people voted and the IMDB rating went down a little bit), on the order of -1.0*10^-3 stars. But three stand out. For Cry Wilderness the per-person MST3K-IMDB effect is -3.8*10^-3 stars. For Carnival Magic it's -4.1*10^-3. And for The Christmas that Almost Wasn't it's an amazing (relatively speaking) -5.0*10^-3 stars.

So in a sense the negative ad campaign against The Christmas that Almost Wasn't was the most successful one here. That was the episode that got people the most riled up against the movie they'd just watched. But that movie's IMDB rating didn't go down as much as Cry Wilderness's, because the Cry Wilderness episode got more people to actually go vote the movie down.

But beyond those three movies, the per-person MST3K-IMDB effect is a lot smaller. What's the difference? Are those three movies unusually MST3K-compatible? Are those episodes meaner? It probably has something to do with the content of the movie, since the two Wizards of the Lost Kingdom movies have identical MST3K-IMDB effects of zero. Beyond that, I don't know.

Obviously there is no real propaganda campaign; no one set out to lower these obscure movies' ratings by making fun of them on Netflix. But I think this is a natural experiment showing what can happen to ratings and metrics even when the stakes are very low and no one has malicious intent.

• Newton (2017): This the closest I've seen to an Indian version of a Billy Wilder movie, which (see Fig. 1) means it's my favorite Indian movie. It's made with a mix of cynicism about and sincere belief in democracy. It sets up two characters on a course to romance, but doesn't actually show the romance and there's no guarantee it happens. Shorter than two hours, falls into the same "low violence, high suspense" quadrant as Dog Day Afternoon... just great stuff all around.
• The Heartbreak Kid (1972): I've now completed the quadfecta of Elaine May films. Sumana and I saw this one on a date; our relationship is at the point where we can have a date where we watch a movie about catastrophically bad relationships. You might not want to see this movie on a third date, or if you got married less than a year ago.

  The film is good, but not a classic like Ishtar or A New Leaf. However, one thing those movies didn't have was Eddie Albert stealing the show as Mr. Corcoran. A funny character and great delivery in every scene. For the final time, I'll use this review as a soapbox to say that Elaine May is a really good director who should not be in movie jail. On a positive note, Ishtar's IMDB rating has gone up from 3.9 to 4.2 in the past five years.

• The Greatest Showman (2017): Saw with Susanna on a trip to California. I don't know about this one, I just don't know. The opening number is fabulous but then... yeah, I can't recommend it.

  I get that P. T. Barnum inhabits the shadow world of the American tall tale, alongside Paul Bunyan and Hunter S. Thompson, so you can do whatever you want with his story without caring about things like 'accuracy'. But why spend the first act of a movie humanizing a con man, when you could not do that and have an awesome con man musical like The Music Man?

  This movie just made me think about how great The Music Man is. How Harold Hill starts off with no redeeming qualities but is civilized by the decency of the people he interacts with. That's how you humanize a con man in a family-friendly musical. At any rate, I think you could write a screenplay that stuck closer to this classic biography of Barnum but left most of the musical numbers intact.

• Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (2015): The poster for this movie looks really cool, in fact the whole thing looks really cool, with its recreation of 1940s Calcutta. However, I thought this film was paced way too slowly. It's got the amount of complexity of an American noir movie, but drawn out to Indian-movie length. So in the end, not a recommendation. I did like the appearance of Chinese and Japanese actors, something I've rarely seen in Indian films.
• Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinéma (1994): I pitched this to Sumana as "Godard makes a vid", we saw it together and it turned out to be one of those movies that "I don't regret watching per se", which is kind of weak sauce for a date movie. Really glad we caught the ninety-minute cut instead of the four-hour miniseries.

  A big reason I don't regret watching this movie is it performed a valuable service for me in dispelling some of the mystique around Godard and his peers. I don't make films myself, so sometimes I watch these New Wave movies and it feels like I don't "get it", like these dudes have some unique French insight into the human condition. But when Godard has his chance to soapbox, it turns out he's concerned with the same stuff other twentieth-century creative types are worried about: war, corruption, ephemerality. So even if I don't get it, I feel at least the "it" I don't get is something that I've come to understand through other means.

This (last) month the Television Spotlight turns to "Forged in Fire", the improbable History Channel reality show that is even more relentlessly positive than "The Great British Bake-Off". (Especially as Paul Hollywood has become meaner and meaner, taking on the aspect of an out-of-control death computer from a ST:TOS episode.) "Forged in Fire" is all about creating knives and other instruments of slicy death, but the contestants and judges are all super nice and supportive of each other.

Someone's sword will shatter on a pig carcass and the judge will say "Well, we had a little problem here." We recently saw an episode where a guy sounded like he wanted to start some typical reality-show drama, and either no one took the bait, or they edited it out, or he wasn't able to try anything because the whole time you're on camera you have a physically demanding task to focus on. I don't know how high our tolerance will be for a really formulaic show, but we're not tired of it yet.

Miracle Mile evokes the fear its protagonist is feeling by making the experience of watching the movie congruent with Harry's plot arc. As he flails around looking for a loophole in the end of the world, you're flailing around trying to figure out what kind of movie this is and how to watch it. The normal plot components from a zombie movie—the vehicles, the weapons, the hyper-competent Denise Crosby—are shown and then taken away. Landa (Crosby) leaves our protagonist in the dust and Harry spends the rest of the movie trying to catch up with her. Of course, it doesn't work, and even if it did, it's far from clear that Landa will live much longer than Harry. This is the nightmare where you try things and none of them work.

It is also my personal nightmare. I grew up in the Los Angeles of this movie and my father's postcards: Wilshire Boulevard, Fairfax, the La Brea Tar Pits. It's a place of bright lights and high contrast: malls frosted in neon, sunsets and fountains. Film noir shows the corruption beneath this bright facade; Miracle Mile allows us to believe the facade, shows the blossoming of love, and then just blows it all up.

This is what to be afraid of in 1988, and now. This thing we've built could just go away, forever, in moments, for no reason at all. The bad things in other movies are just metaphors for this.

The worst part in Miracle Mile isn't even the nuclear explosions; those are the gravestone on a civilization that has already collapsed. It collapses in minutes, like, when Harry's in the bathroom or something. There's a pretty good comic miniseries called "Memetic" which covers the same ground but also introduces a lot of body horror, so YMMV.

In a normal emergency people will band together and help each other, but Miracle Mile says that in the apocalypse all bets are off. This Prisoner's Dilemma will not have any further iterations, so you might as well go out with one last Defect. Despite it all, a few people choose Cooperate. It does no good, but at least they die well. That's what passes for hope in this movie.

• Psych: The Movie (2017): Absolutely no reason you should watch this unless you're a big Psych fan, but it's pretty fun if you are. It was always going to be a big love letter to the TV show, but it could have also been a sharp parody of Hallmark Christmas movies. I feel like that's what they were going for. But after Timothy Omundson had a minor stroke, James Roday had to rewrite the entire screenplay at the last minute, which, good job doing that on such short notice, but it really shows and it threw a wrench into any larger ambitions this movie may have had. Kurt Fuller is funny as always.
• Timecode (2000): This is a formally impressive work that has some fun Easter eggs and improvised bits but doesn't offer much in the way of plot, or interesting characters. Instead it relies on there being so much information on the screen that you can't process it all. As we as a society get better at dividing our attention (albeit at the expense of other skills), the trick becomes less impressive. It's tough to make something under such an intense constraint and also have it tell a cool story, but that's the difference between an interesting movie and a great one.

  I liked the 'cool' security guard who was also everyone's drug dealer, and Kyle MacLachlan is delightful. Also, I wonder whether this movie came out at a specific time: when the quality you could get from a digital camera was about 25% that of film, such that four tiled digital images would look like a regular film.

• Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017): Look, nothing will give you back the experience of being a kid and watching Star Wars for the first time. Chasing that feeling is a fool's errand. If you want a new Star Wars movie, one that engages with the material in an interesting way, then this is your film. Giving it to Rian Johnson was the right move.

  If you just don't like Star Wars, this movie won't convince you. The franchise is still really slight, and they're giving it right back to Abrams for Episode IX. But The Last Jedi is the most fun I've had with a Star Wars movie since I was a kid.

• Coco (2017): Fun enough, but a reversion to the Pixar mean after the really innovative Inside Out. No complaints, though, I liked it the whole way through. Enjoyed all the antique tech.

This will have to suffice for a Television Spotlight: today I went to the museum and watched the solstice episode of "Fraggle Rock". I'd never seen "Fraggle Rock" before and I understand it's kinda didactic but I was not prepared for the sheer heaviness of the humanist message here. They're 'ringing' the Great Bell by using their own little bells to make a resonance chamber out of a bell-shaped empty space. Right? That seems like the correct read here. Unbelievable that they got away with that, but I'm all for it.

If you're sick of watching It's A Wonderful Life every year, then mixing it up with Die Hard might be nice, but once you open that door you've got a lot of additional possibilities, and watching Die Hard every year just to stick it to Capra fans is silly. As a public service, I've used IMDB data to find the top-rated 'Christmas' movies for use in your holiday counterprogramming.

I used an IMDB data dump (see postscript) to find every movie tagged with the christmas keyword, excluding documentaries, movies with 'Christmas' or 'Holiday' in the title, and movies in Wikipedia's "American Christmas Films" category. I went through what remained and picked out films that were set as a whole over the Christmas holidays or otherwise had a pervasive Christmas element—a lot of top movies like Goodfellas and Full Metal Jacket and Citizen Kane seem to only have one memorable Christmas scene. Here are all the matching films with an IMDB rating of 8.0 or higher.

1. The Godfather (1972)
2. The Apartment (1960)
3. Pelísky (1999)
4. Plácido (1961)
5. Jagten (2012)
6. The Thin Man (1934)
7. The Lion in Winter (1968)
8. Twelve Monkeys (1995)
9. The King's Speech (2010)
10. Ma nuit chez Maud (1969)
11. In Bruges (2008)
12. C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
13. Brazil (1985)

I've seen seven of these movies and I'm pretty happy with these results. If I wanted to watch a movie that fits this niche it would definitely be The Apartment, and The Godfather is kind of a marginal case.

Postscript: unfortunately, IMDB changed their data format recently to a format that is a lot easier to parse than what they had before, but which is missing important pieces of information like movie ratings and keywords, which makes a project like this impossible and renders the dataset as a whole nearly devoid of interest. It's been a fun ride, IMDB data dumps. From Ghostbusters Past to Worst Best Picture to The MST3K-IMDB Effect to You Can't Be Serious to I Should Be In That Spoof to Where's that Golden Age? to Worst Episode Ever, the old, hacky, IMDB dumps from an FTP site have provided me with quality data and my readers with much entertainment.

But we all knew it was only a matter of time until someone at Amazon said "Wait a minute..." and had a meeting with someone at IMDB. So from this point on, all of my IMDB projects will use the last full IMDB dump I got, for Ghostbusters Past in early 2015.

• This is Spinal Tap (1984): My third viewing, and possibly the most fun I'll have watching this movie because my second viewing was like ten years ago before I had a lot of practice at watching movies. I remember all the big-ticket set pieces, but I forgot that this thing is full of comedy at all levels, from subtle character conflict to stupid puns to dick jokes, and it's all funny. Like a Monty Python movie, Spinal Tap just tosses out one classic bit after another, not realizing that entire cults are going to grow up around individual gags.
• Hellzapoppin' (1941): I've been wanting to see this film ever since learning about it in The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide in the nineties, and short story research finally provided the excuse I need. This is... uneven. The first, let's say, nine minutes is some of the funniest footage I've ever seen. Then it turns into a dull slog of a young-lovers weekend-party movie, livened up only by the occasional hilarious joke. It's worse than a Marx Brothers movie in this regard.

  Olsen and Johnson seem to know they're heading in to trouble here. They throw up framing devices and lampshades to make light of the fact that they're squeezing their round Broadway show into a Hollywood square, and that this movie is no good when they're not on screen. But lampshading a fact doesn't make it go away. It's so bad that I questioned whether the Broadway show was also a big bait-and-switch, but no, according to this 2007 attempt to reverse-engineer the show, Hellzapoppin' was basically all like those first nine minutes, and it was the longest-running Broadway show until Oklahoma!. So, I guess I recommend going back in time (if only to 2007) and seeing it live.

Not a lot of films last month, and there wasn't even going to be a Television Spotlight, but it turns out the show we were watching, "The Good Place", doesn't have as many episodes as I'd assumed. We generally only start watching a show once the hype builds to a certain point, which usually gives us two or three seasons to catch up on, but "The Good Place" is so great (and the episodes are only 22 minutes) that the hype started early, we blew through it and we're stuck in the season two mid-season break with everyone else. So now I'm going to use my soapbox to add to the hype. It's really good—the characters change over time, individual episodes burn huge chunks of plot, and every episode ends with a cliffhanger. It's like a Greg Egan novel turned into a sitcom.

For comparison I'm going to bring in a show we watched and loved in the pre-Film Roundup days, "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin". In a sitcom every episode presents the same basic scenario, but "Perrin", along with "The Good Place" and "Arrested Development", create plot arcs by breaking the sitcom reset button and forcing the characters to deal with the consequences of previous revisions of the same basic joke. This also allows the writers to approach the premise of a given sitcom from all different angles. Sumana sums up these three shows as: "What if your karass were also your crab bucket?", which is the subtext of most sitcoms made explicit.

• Good Time (2017): Y'know, when I see a movie like Dog Day Afternoon, part of the fun is reveling in the problems of a bygone era and not thinking about the problems of my own. In 40 years, if mankind is still alive, Good Time may be that type of movie but now I feel the despair of someone who watched Dog Day Afternoon in 1975. Everything's falling apart and there's no hope. So... a good modern noir, I guess?
• Underworld U.S.A. (1961): By contrast, this noir is nothing special. The bold move of putting a chart on the movie poster made me think this film would have the hard-core attitude that there's no moral difference between organized crime and "legitimate" business, but the attitude was more of a scandal that organized crime was ramping up by taking on the management structure of big business.

  You could really sense the boundaries of the Hays code in this film. Having a hoodlum as a "hero" was pushing the envelope, so they spent a lot of time rehabilitating him and farming off unpleasant hoodlum duties to other characters, to the point where I don't think we actually see him take any morally questionable action. Which, y'know, fish or cut bait, noir movie. Also, I don't think I can trust a chart in which "vice" is one of the things being measured. The chart format implies a level of precision which is not present.

• Portrait of Jennie (1948): Gets credit for being a very early paranormal romance, but the romance starts with an atmosphere of ickiness, and even without the ickiness the IMDB summary of this movie is "A mysterious girl inspires a struggling artist" and who needs another one of those? I would rather just watch the scenes with the supporting cast; they're fun.
• Love and Taxes (2015): Sumana is a Josh Kornbluth fan so we watched this film adaptation of his monologue, which took an Adaptation-like twist and started becoming about the film adaptation of one of his earlier monologues. It was a pretty fun time. I'd like to call out the character of Bob for being a rare example in narrative drama (not sure if this is "fiction" or what) of a really supportive boss.
• I saw a series of horror movie trailers at Metrograph, and am excited to some day see The Manitou (1977), Wicked Wicked (1973), and Lady in a Cage (1964). Most of the rest of the trailers were kinda meh, but it was fun to see a big-screen trailer for The Giant Gila Monster (1959). If you think about it, the gila monster really does become giant when footage from the movie is projected onto a screen.

  I never knew that Joan Crawford was in so many genre films. (She's not in any of the ones I just mentioned, that's just a general observation.)

This month's Television Spotlight focuses on Terry Jones' Great Map Mystery (2008), a documentary miniseries that seems to have been funded to provide local content for BBC Wales. It was eager to present Welshness and Welsh things in a way that's familiar to me from Canada. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, most of it more or less irrelevant to the Big Question of the documentary, which is fine because the Big Question turns out not to be all that big. It's definitely a cut above what we find on most of our lazy "see what's free on Amazon" trawls.

• Baby Driver (2017): This film serves as the counterpoint to Paul (2012): it shows the downsides of letting Edgar Wright direct a film without having Simon Pegg and Nick Frost to weigh it down with likeable characters. It's formally impressive but I didn't care about any of the characters. If you don't like Scott Pilgrim you could say the same thing about that movie, but... I do like Scott Pilgrim.

  I caught a lot of hype for this movie and I always expect a lot of Wright, so I was psyched up, but it falls into the familiar territory of popcorn noir. It was fun to watch, but its "innocent pulled in life of crime" plot is right out of the black-and-white era and hasn't been spruced up much.

• The Teacher (2016): A.k.a. Ucitelka. An effective horror movie where nobody dies. By horror movie standards, the things that happen aren't even that bad. But it's creepy as hell. I would compare this to Get Out in the way it exploits an underused fuel source for its horror.

  IMDB classifies this as "Comedy, Drama" but based on the poster and the final scene I'm comfortable with my opinion that it's intended to read as a horror movie.

• Run Lola Run (1998): A lot of fun, lots of eyeball kicks. I thought there were going to be four runthroughs, but three works better. I'm always pleasantly surprised when a movie is shorter than I predicted. Has some of the same problems as Baby Driver but I'll cut it more slack because it was made twenty years earlier and it's a half-hour shorter. Come to think of it, my favorite part of Baby Driver was the scene where he had to get out of the car and run.
• Jaws (1975): I absolutely loved the first two acts of this movie about a society so focused on short-term economic gain that it jumps through hoops to rationalize away an ecological threat. Then act three was a couple guys on a boat and I fell asleep. If I were this film's hotshot young director, I would have spent about ten minutes on that boat and then come back to shore to focus on the mayor's ass-covering, trying to hang the fiasco around the necks of the people who noticed the problem and did something about it.

  Overall this is a fine film and I recommend it, but with one big asterisk: I believe Jaws is the movie that caused Hollywood execs to say "we found it!" and pull the lever that eventually stopped all that lovely 1970s experimentation. (c.f. my Die Hard review) So watch it with a pretentious tear in your eye.

  Old-computer watch: includes an outdoor arcade that features the Sega mechanical arcade game "Killer Shark" and, more relevantly, a Computer Space cabinet. You can see the arcade in the trailer. Tragically no Shark JAWS.

  D'you suppose that Computer Space cabinet was there at the beach where they filmed, or did they bring it in as a prop? They were so expensive, it's hard to imagine sticking one outside to get salt-crusted.

• Logan Lucky (2017): This film is the king of fridge logic but it's really, really fun. I try to tell stories about people who are more or less ordinary, no special societal status, so I'll always be there for a movie about NASCAR fans over a movie about NASCAR drivers. There are little bits of this movie where you see Talladega Nights sort of happening in the background, and although both movies are really funny, Logan Lucky's focus on its characters' real concerns puts Talladega Nights to shame, the way the second half of Sullivan's Travels shames the first half.

  Basically, this movie over Baby Driver any time. For me, a super-complicated heist with a normal drive home will always beat a smash-and-grab that ends in a car chase.

• I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story (2014): A surprise tear-jerker, and I say that as someone who isn't moved by Spinney in costume singing "It's Not Easy Being Green" at Jim Henson's memorial service. (I'm sure it's what he wanted.) There's a couple stories in here that hit me right in the gut. Definitely the most depressing documentary I've ever seen about a happy, successful person. The Norman Lear doc wasn't like this. Recommended??

This month the Television Spotlight completes its examination of Angels in America (2003). Overall this was a fine production but the Mormon stuff was really a mess. I think I can trace the problem back to the event described in this IMDB trivia item:

In a 2008 interview, Tony Kushner said that the idea to entwine Mormonism into the plot of "Angels in America" started when he saw some young, ignored Mormon missionaries near his home in Brooklyn: "There were these Mormon missionaries that I used to see at my subway stop, in Carroll Gardens, around 1983. One of them was, I thought, kind of hot. They were always there in the morning, in front of a bunch of people who could have cared less about the Book of Mormon. And I was kind of touched by that."

Not touched enough to talk to any Mormons, apparently, because the Mormon characters' dialogue doesn't ring true and all the imagery looks like it was taken from a book that didn't have diagrams. The angels aren't Mormon angels, they've got a Gnostic thing going on, which is cool, but Gnostic angels shouldn't be giving out golden plates. It feels like someone tried to put Mormonism into their preexisting D&D campaign to make the new player feel welcome.

The casting of Patrick Wilson as Joe Pitt is spot-on, and he does have the Mormon body language down pat. But when you show a Mormon character in 1985 drinking a Coke and I have to wonder "Is this a shocking, subtle piece of foreshadowing, or did someone not do their homework?", I'm going to err on the side of undone homework.

On the plus side, Emma Thompson's barely-keeping-it-together angel is great, and captures the "this is no way to run a railroad!" attitude I associate with Gnosticism. I'm aware that my knowledge of Gnosticism is approximately on the level of Tony Kushner's knowledge of Mormonism, but ever since I saw those hot Gnostic angels at the subway stop I've wanted to watch a play about them.

As a bonus, let's also Spotlight The Bronson Pinchot Project (2012-2013): I don't know if I'd recommend this, but it is the most interesting home improvement show I've ever seen. Actor Bronson Pinchot has bought a bunch of properties in a small Pennsylvania town and he spends his time restoring them according to his vision. Said vision is charming when it comes to designing relaxing spaces to chill out and hang with friends or read, but vague and handwavy when it comes to taking a shower, or storing dry pasta or more than twenty books.

When Pinchot revealed that he uses the properties he's not currently renovating to store antiques and reclaimed materials for the renovations, Sumana uttered the line that summed it up: "He's running a Ponzi scheme on himself!" This turned out truer than I knew; in 2015 Pinchot filed bankruptcy and all the properties seen in the show were reposessed by creditors. Seems like he's still making good money as an audiobook narrator, though.

• Comrade Detective (2017): The smart parts of this faux-80s Romanian cop show are not smart enough and the stupid parts are... well, they're fine. A valiant effort, but this would have been a lot better if they'd had the Romanians write the first treatment.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017): Does a great job of recapturing the original show, by which I mean the Joel show. It's laid-back, more often enjoying the cheesiness of the movie than ripping into it. That is, it's clearly on the Cinematic Titanic branch of the phylogenetic tree as opposed to the RiffTrax branch. I'd actually rate these riffs higher than the Joel-era riffs. There was a lot of Baby Boomer nostalgia in the old shows, and most of the new show's riffs take the present day as their jumping-off point.

  No real problems, but I frequently got confused who was talking in the theater because the voices are kind of similar. Thank goodness for closed captions!

  I'd like to see some fan discussion about the little weird things they show you and don't really remark upon. Who is the alternate host you see on screen for like a second? What's the significance of the spacewalk, given the other thing that happens in that episode? I guess the disadvantage of releasing the whole season at once is the Internet doesn't have time to obsess over the little details you've carefully snuck in. Steven Universe is taking this to the unhealthy other extreme, I think.

  Full disclosure: I backed the Kickstarter so my name is in the credits with thousands of others. I'm the only "Leonard"!

• The Great British Baking Show (2013????-2015????): I don't even know which seasons of this show we watched. PBS renamed the show and renumbered the seasons, and the IMDB episode guide just says "Pie", "Cake", "Biscuits" over and over for each year. Anyway, I've never watched a reality show before, and I wouldn't have watched this one except I was promised there's no yelling and the contestants are all nice to each other. And it's great! Really soothes my nerves after a long day of whatever I do all day.

  My fave: contestants who use idiosyncratic slang like "get a wiggle on".

• Angels In America (2003): We're in the middle of this one so no review yet, but a) it's really heavy, b) the Mormon stuff is extremely inaccurate, c) it looks like Meryl Streep is going to play a different character in every episode and I'm not sure what that does, dramatically speaking.

Tune in next month, when we'll have the new Twin Peaks, maybe?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Every month, Television Roundup presents the Film Spotlight, a listing of the films I saw that month. Of course, films, with their 98-minute running times, cannot compete with the many hours of entertainment that television provides. After all, one of your puny Earth "films" is but a single episode of MST3K. Nevertheless, we honor these bite-sized morsels of entertainment below.

• Trafic (1971): I'm glad that at the 2000 Academy Awards this film finally got the recognition it deserved. It's a goofy ride, doesn't drag like Playtime sometimes does, but also never feels like it's saying something Important.
• The Enchanted Desna (1964): a.k.a. "Zacharovannaya Desna". Lots of really beautiful photography and the kind of episodic, slow-moving plot that lulls me to sleep. Some nice Tom Sawyer bits in the flashback. There was some audience tittering at the Commie propaganda at the end, but I'm stunned by the scale of it and still trying to figure out what it was saying. That's a lot of concrete, comrade. We're damming up the river you grew up on? And that's a good thing? I'm overwhelmed by man's totally non-hubristic ambition! Maybe I should ask my doctor if communism is right for me. It's a weird mix of "I had to put this in" and "I'm being ironic" and "I really believe this" and "I'm a filmmaker from a different culture from Leonard and I use emotional cues differently".
• Cherry 2000 (1987): I went into this movie knowing nothing except it was by the director of Miracle Mile, and it seemed kinda sleazy. And... both of these are true. It's got the beautiful 80s L.A. aesthetic of Miracle Mile, science fictionified into little oases of yuppie or suburbanite heaven, surrounded by very drivable desert. Tons of cool eyeball kicks, especially in the first thirty minutes.

  It's also sleazy, and meta-sleazy in how comfortable it is in its sleaziness. The relationship between human and sexbot could have been done a lot better. In fact, I think I did it better, in Constellation Games. Making Cherry into a real character could have made Cherry 2000 really good. When she's a toaster, the movie is real predictable.

  In Miracle Mile you think you know what kind of movie you're watching, and then you are WRONG. That jolt disorients you, and you never recover because the movie keeps throwing you smaller twists. In Cherry 2000 I knew the major plot points as soon as the secondary lead was introduced, and throughout the movie I generally knew what scene was going to happen next. Events and characters happen because they're what happens in this kind of movie. You could cut this movie into a Macgyver episode and hit the same points.

  Overall, a missed opportunity. Also, you stick a memory chip into an abandoned robot and it powers up? Shouldn't it also need... power? Lots of hardware/software problems in this movie, is what I'm saying. It's nitpicky, sure, but those details are where the better screenplay could have come from.

• The Big Sick (2017): Sumana's a big Kumail Nanjiani fan so we couldn't miss this pretty fun rom-com...? My romcometer isn't finely calibrated but this seems more towards the "rom-dram" region than most. On the plus side, that means not as much "awkward" humor (of which I'm not a fan) as I feared. I think cutting has a lot to do with it. As I recall, in this movie Nanjiani would have an awkward moment with (e.g.) a family member but they'd mercifully cut to something else, even if just another shot of the same scene. Proving, once and for all, that you don't have to let it linger.
• In Transit (2015): A soothing documentary about being on a train. Filmed up north where (according to the movie) Amtrak is the primary form of public transit. Lots of guys in their early twenties working in the fracking boom, trying to figure their lives out.
• Lincoln (2012): This movie has its cheesy Spielberg moments but it makes the minutiae of politics super compelling, as they should be presented. I dislike the ending. Totally unnecessary. But I understand that if Daniel Day-Lewis plays Lincoln and doesn't do the Second Inaugural, a lot of people are going to want their money back. So I take it in stride.
• A Man For All Seasons (1966): Sumana and I enjoyed this tale of a civil servant who carries "If you can't say anything nice..." to the extreme. Is there a lesson in here for our time? Unfortunately, as a 501(3)(c) registered nonprofit, Film Roundup cannot take a stand on the relevance of a work of art to any partisan issue. But if you put together the first letter of every review this month, you'll find my answer. Psst, while they're piecing together the first letters, check this out: RELEVANT.
• Becket (1964): The last gasp of old-timey boring Hollywood spectacle. So many long, ponderous dialogue-free scenes with trumpets tooting away while someone walks up some stairs in the distance. Four years later, the same actor's playing the same character, and it's squalid and grimy and close-up with a deliberate lack of grandeur. Skip this one and move right to...
• The Lion in Winter (1968): Here we go, late-sixties Hollywood. They're still adapting plays rather than having Robert de Niro improvise for ninety minutes, but they're tackling "adult" topics and it's super Freudian. I saw this film in high school (like, in class) for some reason and I don't think it's boasting to say that I now understand it on a much deeper level. Lots of creepy scenes where O'Toole is interacting with people not as a human being but as the State personified. Katharine Hepburn is brassy as always. "They don't call her Hep-BURN for nothing!"—The Sumana Daily Herald
• The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974): Apparently all movies whose titles end in "One Two Three" are awesome. I'll have to test this hypothesis using this Armenian film. Anyway, this is great stuff. Constant tension without constant violence, 70s New York stereotypes, cranky Walter Matthau, subway system behind-the-scenes... it's crime-and-grime cinema gold! It didn't hurt that I saw this at Film Forum on a sweaty July afternoon with a bunch of New Yorkers who'd gotten there on the subway. Lots of camaraderie in the theater, lots of laughs at hyper-specific New York in-jokes.
• Across 110th Street (1972): My high hopes for this film were not met. The first scene had me primed for a power struggle between the black mob and the Italian mob, but instead the two mobs teamed up to take out some small-timers, in an act of serious overkill. There are also some cops I didn't really care about. The small-timers were believably down-on-their-luck. I rate the "grime" in this one highly, and the "crime"... lowly.
• The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965): I'd read the book a long time ago, but in the interim I got The Spy Who Came In From The Cold mixed up with another le Carré novel, so I was confused and accidentally found it suspenseful. Good intrigue, not as much out-and-out spycraft as I like to see in these movies. I'd been expecting more, but it turns out I'd gotten this movie mixed up with the Alec Guinness version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Is there no end to this hall of mirrors???

Today the Television Spotlight announces the entrance of anime favorite Yuri!!! On Ice (2016). After Steven Universe took its turn in the Spotlight last month, I was 100% down for more queer animation, but I'd forgotten about a little thing called "reversion to the mean". Yuri!!! On Ice is more on the level of the restaurant that doesn't punch you in the face. I did not have a good time watching slight variants on figure skating routines I'd seen two or three times previously in earlier episodes. Gimme a brittle caste-based alien monoculture any day.

• Wonder Woman (2017): You know me, I'm not big into superhero movies. But I do like women, and wondering, so Sumana and I saw this together. It was all right! Cool stunts, funny comic relief, mostly good action scenes. But we talked about it afterwards and agreed that this movie doesn't really make its argument.

  Wonder Woman is the story of Diana learning that horrible things like wars have complex historical causes and it's not just anthropomorphized concepts running around causing trouble. But what are superheroes and supervillains but anthropomorphized concepts? And what is a superhero movie without a big fight at the end between two of 'em and the world at stake? So that's what happens. The form of the movie is at odds with its content, and given Zack Snyder's "story by" credit I don't believe it even knows it.

  In a Film Roundup first, I'm proud to link to a review of this film by my sister, WWI scholar Rachel Richardson: “I’m the men who can”: Wonder Woman as a First World War heroine.

• Jurassic Park (1993): Sumana and I both love this movie. I remembered nearly every scene even though I don't think I've seen it since 1993. It's not super deep, but it's got layers I didn't see when I was a kid. Notably Muldoon's respect for the dinosaurs and Hammond's attitude as the thing he's built crumbles during the test that was supposed to demonstrate it was safe. Such a joy to watch. It seems trite to say that the most successful, highest paid people in show biz were able to provide crowd-pleasing entertainment, but... they nailed it.

  PS: This is more a fact about the book than the movie, but Jurassic Park has one of the cleverest science fiction premises I've ever seen. Love it.

• Kelly's Heroes (1970): The second museum movie I've walked out of. Not because it was horrible or offensive, but because serious technical problems threatened to interfere with my bedtime. I ended up watching about an hour of the movie proper, plus fifteen minutes of the movie with out-of-sync audio, a repeated viewing of the same footage, and about a reel of Where Eagles Dare (1968), a completely different movie. How did that happen? Did they torrent the whole Clint Eastwood war pack and click on the wrong file?

  According to film scientists, Kelly's Heroes uses an earlier war as a way to talk about the then-current Vietnam War! This movie has a good look, and since there are no women characters, it avoids the sexism of similarly situated M.A.S.H. (1972). But I can't give it a strong recommendation. Don Rickles is believable as the hustling supply sergeant, but The Americanization of Emily did that better back in 1964. Anachronistic hippies in my WWII movie? That's pretty cool, I must admit.

• Kamikaze '89 (1982) Rainer Werner Fassbinder, director of well-regarded-by-Film-Roundup film The Marriage of Maria Braun and eternal MST3K reference Berlin Alexanderplatz, does what I can only describe as "an Alphaville thing". It doesn't work out great. Alphaville has the cold smoothness of the 1960s Paris business district, a period look also exploited effectively by Playtime. Kamikaze '89 has the cheesy look of a 1980s West Berlin dance club. I'm sure everyone had a great time making this movie, and I don't want to begrudge serious European directors having their sci-fi Alphaville flings, but... not great.

  Uh, I should make it clear that Fassbinder isn't the director of this film, he's the star. Wolf Gremm is the director. So maybe it's Wolf Gremm's Alphaville fantasy, but Fassbinder is the one in the tacky outfit running around firing guns, so I suspect he's the one who wanted this to happen.

• Miracle Mile (1988): I'm about do something I've never done before on Film Roundup. I think you should see this movie, but I'm not going to tell you anything about it. I went in knowing basically what happens in this movie, and I absolutely loved it, but I think I would have loved it even more if I'd followed the directions I'm going to lay out below.

  It's pretty simple. You can rent this movie on Amazon. Don't read the description, don't even look at the poster. Just start watching and see what happens.

  I don't want you to have a bad time so I will tell you that this is a very dark horror movie. It's not wall-to-wall graphic violence, but don't watch it on a day when you need something light.

  I do have a lot to say about Miracle Mile, but I'm going to wait a while in case anyone wants to see it as recommended above. For now I will say that Kurt Fuller's presence in this movie provides an additional data point for what I call The Fuller Conundrum. See, Kurt Fuller is in Ghostbusters II, where he's not funny at all, but he's hilarious in Psych, and in Miracle Mile he's right down the middle. Apparently he was in Wayne's World but I don't even remember him in that movie. In a character actor, is this variability a weakness, or a sign of versatility?

Finally, this month, the Television Spotlight shines its television spotlight on Steven Universe. This is really good! It gives us the same worldbuilding experience we got from The Legend of Korra, but it's all new stuff, it's not that there was a prequel show we didn't see. We started watching around the time of the last Film Roundup and now we're just about caught up. Fun characters who get more complex over time. That's all I need from a show, I think.

• Antitrust (2001): Semi-hate-watch with Sumana. (Here's her review.) She saw this on a plane in 2001 and had ever since wanted to revisit it to make fun of the bad tech. But... turns out the tech isn't all that bad. Pretty accurate for the most part. The software development processes we see aren't great, but they're in line with what I saw in the 90s. The biggest technical flub (an impractical plan to spy on people as they write code) is, IMO, just a way of dramatizing GPL violations.

  Which is not to say that this is a good movie. It's bad. "Killer App" (1995), a television pilot, does a better job of just about everything that's not directly related to free software, e.g. the Bill Gates character's house-of-the-future. Not recommended unless you gotta see an old version of GNOME on the big screen.

• Bahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017): First, read my review of part 1. Now, read it again, because the sequel is another 3-hour battering of the senses with spectacle. There were some moments where the plot got more complicated than your average blockbuster, but also moments where they passed up what I considered obvious opportunities for coolness. I was never bored, not at all, but where the first movie frequently went in directions I wasn't anticipating, this movie... didn't do that.

  It's hard to stay unpredictable when half your movie is a direct prequel to a movie your audience has already seen. Sumana and I agree that the Bahubali series needs a mode where you can just watch the sub-films in chronological order. Currently it's as if you had to watch the Hobbit movies halfway through the Lord of the Rings movies, with Elijah Wood playing both Bilbo and Frodo.

• Cops and Robbers (1973): Really good crime-and-grime heist movie with just the right mix of NYC and Long Island. Nothing serious, but classic popcorn. Not a science-fiction film, but does a great job incorporating Apollo stock footage into the plot.

  There's a feeling in twentieth-century crime movies that's made explicit in Cops and Robbers. Society expects people to stay in their lane, crime-wise. You expect a cop to take bribes, a store manager to embezzle, a stockbroker to commit securities fraud. What causes a problem/creates a movie plot is when you pull off a crime that someone like you isn't supposed to do. There's this great scene in Cops and Robbers where the two cops realize that someone else has casually piggybacked a much more successful caper on top of theirs, and they react with the same New York "whadayagonna do" attitude they exhibit when stuck in a traffic jam. Exploited by the ruling class again! Wah wah.

• I saw a series of films by Charles and Ray Eames which ranged from the somnolent (House: After 5 Years of Living) to the hypnotic (Tops) to the suspiciously sexy (S-73 Sofa Compact). Powers of Ten is always a treat.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017): This movie succeeds where Interstellar fails: it turns Solaris into a summer blockbuster. I had a good time! Better than the first one (which I also liked), though significantly more violent. Still not sure why these movies bother to have villains. Isn't it enough that the heroes hate each other?
• D.O.A. (1950): An unbeatable first scene is, in fact, not beaten by anything else in this kinda dull noir. Nice dramatic structure though. The most interesting bit is how it dramatizes the white-collar nightmare that something you did at your boring desk job, something you don't even remember, has made an enemy of someone you don't know.
• Thief (1981): Another criminal-goes-out-of-his-lane heist film. Not as punchy or as... subtle?... as Cops and Robbers, but fun enough. Dave Thomas of Wendy's has a masterful turn as the evil spirit of capitalism. Wait, I'm being informed that that role is actually played by Robert Prosky of Gremlins 2 fame.

  Big bombastic Tangerine Dream soundtrack in this movie. I didn't even know that was a thing. I thought Tangerine Dream just made music to put you to sleep.

  Don't think I didn't notice the Rififi reference. I see all!

• Bottle Rocket (1996): Right from his first feature, the ups and downs of a Wes Anderson film are visible. Funny first sequence, emotionally effective final sequence, and in the middle lots of well-framed shots I don't care much about. Watch Fantastic Mr Fox instead.

  IMDB trivia: "Originally, Owen Wilson had no plans to act in the film at all." In fact, this is true of every actor and every film.

• The Cinema Travelers (2016): Really neat documentary about travelling movie theaters that go around rural India showing films at fairs. I was surprised to see that fairs in rural India look just like fairs in the United States. In retrospect it makes sense. Why would they have different rides?

  Although there was a lot of cool hardware in this movie, I felt this film fetishized the hardware, even when it was so obsolete as to be a burden. I felt bad for the guys towing a nonfunctional bus around India because their film projector was mounted inside the bus. I doubt audiences care whether the projection booth contains a old-timey reel projector or a LCD projector and a laptop. Are ticket sales in decline because everyone has satellite TV now and doesn't have to settle for 1970s Bollywood reruns? Good! You think I'm going to side with the people running the theater over the people who want to see movies? Who's your audience? By definition, it's moviegoers. You don't have a theater full of projectionists and one ticket-holder up in the booth.

  The most striking shots in this film aren't really shots, they're stills, just photos of people who are watching a movie, unaware of the camera, and having a great time. Often when you're sitting in a theater watching a film of people sitting in a theater, it's supposed to be an unnerving experience, but these photos are so full of life and joy. It's like the end of Sullivan's Travels. There's one in particular of a man with a monkey on his shoulder, both of them super excited about whatever they're looking at.

  PS: I think is the first film I've ever seen that shows someone negotiating a DRM license.

• Cabin Boy (1994): “Isn't that a Pauly Shore movie?” —Sumana. No, this is a lot more highbrow than anything Pauly Shore ever did. It's a stupid, corny movie, but it's got a lot of originality and... heart? Maybe I'm grading on a curve, but so many comedies from the 90s are so awful, that letting Chris Elliot goof off in a Ray Harryhausen fantasy seems like a gift from the comedy gods. Thalia, I guess.
• Italianamerican (1974): Really cute early Scorsese film where he gets his parents to tell all the family stories. Back in the day you couldn't just do a podcast, no, it had to be a big production. Strong recommend, good "Immigrant Experience" stories.

That's it for now, but we're almost caught up on Jane the Virgin, so maybe next month the Television Spotlight will have a new focus.

• The LEGO Batman Movie (2017): Man, you head to the movies to take your mind off the increasingly troubling political situation, and then something like this happens. Anyway, the first hour of this movie is really fun and goofy, and then it develops a plot and bogs down in action scenes that are impossible to follow. I forsee an edit that cuts 22:30 of the last 45 minutes, then slows down what's left by 50% so you can see what's happening.

  It seems really weird that IMDB lists Siri, a nonsentient computer program, as an actor in this movie. I mean, I get that that's what it says in the credits, but it seems like fodder for "Crazy Credits" and not something we should take seriously. Are there other fictional actors in IMDB? Kermit the Frog doesn't have a .... wait... why is "Kermit the Frog" showing up as a hyperlink? Dammit, he does have an IMDB actor page. The very first example I looked up.

  This makes no sense. Why is Kermit the Frog listed as having an "uncredited" role as The Minstrel in Once Upon A Mattress (1972)? If you're copying down whatever it says in the credits, that's one thing. But a fictional character can't have an uncredited role! As Kermit would say, aaaaaaah! Come out from under that Muppet and face our scrutiny!

• Boxcar Bertha (1972): Just what I needed on that day: a Roger Corman B-movie directed by Martin Scorsese. Raw talent doing its best to fulfill a crappy work order. Trains, labor organizing, and 1970s poster paint blood. Recommended but only if you're in that kind of mood.

  Film Roundup regulars will not be surprised to hear that like most movies Boxcar Bertha features John Carradine, but unlike many movies it's also got his son David. In fact there's one Oedipal scene where David mugs his dad. Overall, I wasn't super impressed with David's acting chops. It was like watching Joel Hodgson rob trains: entertaining, but not quite believable.

• Beat the Devil (1953): Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, together at... still? With Robert Morley filling in for Sydney Greenstreet, I suspect. The whole movie, I was looking for a twist that turned out not to be there. But Jennifer Jones steals the show as the bored wife who blithely surfs the edge of a hazardous Bogart-and-Lorre caper, just because it's something to do.

This month the Television Spotlight shines on Jane the Virgin (2014-), a fun, silly melodrama we picked up based on a recommendation from Julia. Way to go, Julia! A while back in Film Roundup I said that Jacques Tati's Playtime is like Brazil but with all the nastiness taken out. Well, Jane the Virgin is like Arrested Development with... most of the nastiness taken out. In fact one could do a comedic Tumblr on the topic, a la Breaking Development, but I don't know how big the overlap fandom is. Should be bigger, is what I'm saying.

I was initially disappointed that Jane the Virgin doesn't have the fantastic element I assumed it would have, but it's addressed within the show with other people incorrectly making the same assumption, so that's fine.

Whew! Let's do the books while we're at it:

• I finished The Fortress of Solitude, the incredibly long novel I mentioned last month. The first half was really good, and I started out hating the second half, but it eventually won me over... just in time for the book to end. The writing was really good on a sentence-by-sentence level; a decent experience overall.
• Four Futures by Peter Frase is basically a four-part series of blog posts. I don't think I found a lot of new information in it, but I like the framing device.

• Kansas City (1996): I went to Kansas City on a Friday. Then I had to come back to the museum on Saturday, because that's when it was showing. Anyway, I figured a gangster film would be the perfect introduction to the ouvre of Robert Altman. And... there's not nearly enough Steve Buscemi but everything else about this movie is pretty great. There are different levels of corruption in the world, from the government to the mob to the grifter. Kansas City gets a lot of mileage out of a character on one level of corruption interacting or interfering with a character on another level.
• Charlie Varrick (1973): An enjoyable crime caper set in Albuquerque, kind of the opposite of Dog Day Afternoon where there's too much money in the bank. My only complaint is it goes on a little too long. I feel Walter Mattheau's character could have cut a couple steps from his plan, eliminated a lot of the risk, and come out just as well. The dentist office burglary is great, and Joe Don Baker excels as Evil Mitchell.
• Cradle Will Rock (1999): Another self-indulgent Tim Robbins herbal cigarette, but a lot more fun and more interesting than Bob Roberts. Super-random celebrity guests, both as actors and as characters. "Who's that supposed to be, Bertolt Brecht?" Yes, that's who it's supposed to be! I remember this movie came up a while back when we went looking through IMDB for all the times someone has portrayed Nelson Rockefeller on film. Not sure why we did that, I think because I was reading Before the Storm.

  Anyway, the movie itself was enjoyable but the musical they're putting on seems, at best, comparable to other musicals of the 1930s.

• Toni Erdmann (2016): Fun, but not the laugh riot I was expecting. There are a lot of movies where a prankster character torments an uptight character, and I generally don't enjoy these, but in Toni Erdmann Ines starts tormenting her father right back in her own uptight way, so that provided some balance. I also liked that the film was almost entirely shot in Romania.

  IMDB trivia: "Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig star in a remake of this film." No thanks.

• Get Out (2017): Effective creepy horror. I don't see a ton of horror movies, so I don't know how innovative this is, but I thought the way this movie doled out its gore quotient was great. I really got into this film, in my own nerdy way: near the end I was thinking "I don't want a The Shining ending or a Being John Malkovich ending, just a regular horror-movie ending."

  Recommend seeing in the theater for the audience participation factor. There's an audience stand-in in the movie who has clearly seen it before and is trying ineffectually to stop it from happening! Just like real life.

I'm gonna shoehorn Book Roundup into this post because although I started three books on my commute, I lost interest in two of them a fair way in, and the only book I finished in February was Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. A great horrifying read with a sinister George Saunders-type feel in places.

I thought I'd also finish The Fortress of Solitude, but that book's a lot longer than I thought! I'm not even halfway through. Stay tuned!

• Hidden Figures (2017): Loved it! Not much to say. I thought it lost a little focus right near the end, where John Glenn is making his descent and nobody can do anything but hang around and look tense, but overall really solid. I enjoyed the FORTRAN fan service.
• Dangal (2016): A whole movie about copy-protection hardware? I was skeptical. But then I learned that it was spelled "Dangal", and that it was... a sports movie. At this point I was even more skeptical, but I was inside the theater so I figured I'd go with it.

  And it's... a sports movie. But it has three things going for it. First, it's also a breaking-down-the-barriers movie. Sumana liked how much screen time was devoted to Indian girls with short hair. Second, this film contains three awesome songs. Third, the hugeness of Dangal magnifies the working parts of a sports movie so that they're impossible to miss, much like the way Plato's republic is designed to make obvious the virtues that go into an individual human being.

  Characters are ludicrously fictionalized to make them fit the sports-movie villain roles. Victories that in real life were incredibly lopsided are dramatized as knuckle-biting buzzer-beaters. There's also one place where I detect a shear effect between fiction and reality, but am not sure what the reality is. These girls spend up to the age of about ten training to be wrestlers and wrestling boys on a kind of freak-show circuit. Everyone's attitude is: A girl? Wrestling? Whaaaaa? It really seems like Dad is the first person in India to have the idea that girls can wrestle.

  But at the beginning of act two they go into a gymnasium and it's full of girls doing wrestling. Turns out India has a whole wrestling thing going. Girls leagues and everything. So what's with all the incredulity in act one? Even if Dad's neighbors are ignorant hicks, it seems like a former national wrestling champion should know that he didn't invent girls' wrestling.

  A similar thing happens at the end where people are saying "If an Indian wins the women's wrestling championship, girls all over the world will know they can do anything!" Was American sports movie exceptionalism ever this bad?

  PS: The posters show Aamir Khan with the four actors who play the daughters at different ages, as though they're four different characters in the same timeframe. I love this.

• Taking Off (1971): A fun squares-go-hip comedy from the same Universal Studios indie-director push that gave us Silent Running (1972). The surest way to get me to see a film is to compare it to an Elaine May film, which Metrograph did, and I took the bait. Taking Off delivers with awkwardness, culture clash and bad original songs—it's like a much cheaper Ishtar. When a woman with a lute drops the F-bomb thirty times in the sort of singing voice you associate with "Greensleeves", you know you're in for a good time. Also features New York grime and the glorious tacky interior of a 1970s Catskills lodge.
• New York, New York (1977): With Liza Minnelli and Mickey Rourke. No, that's not right, it was Robert de Niro. Everyone's favorite video... hero. Mickey Rourke isn't in this at all. Don't know what I was thinking.

  The all-too-relevant story of a man who can't deal with the fact that his girlfriend is more talented than he is. The museum's handout claims the problem with the relationship is the "two lovers' equal musical talent", but let's go to the tape. Liza Minnelli actually is a world-class singer, whereas Robert de Niro is a Method actor who learned to play the sax for this movie. It's quite clear she is the superior musician.

  As such, the balance of power shifts over the course of the movie, and by act three de Niro is nearly out of the picture and Minnelli's character is just lapping up the fame. Basically, everything that's in La La Land that didn't come from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, came from this movie.

  Overall I was not crazy about this film. La La Land is more fun and my favorite Scorsese de Niro is still Rupert Pupkin, by a long shot. But those two musical numbers at the end really are amazing. And character actor Lionel Stander is great comic relief as the agent who speaks in inscrutable aphorisms. It was a classic "that guy" moment, where I knew I'd seen him before, but turns out the only place I've seen him before is the introduction to the TV show Hart to Hart. Not the show, just the introduction, which I've only seen once. That's how memorable his face and voice are.

• Pride (2014): As a sidelong way of talking about this movie I'm going to bring back sports movies for a bit and talk about Cool Runnings (1993). It's a film I haven't seen since it first came out, and I'm not sure why I saw it at all—I think a friend's dad took us? But it sticks in my mind as the only sports movie where I think "Maybe I should rewatch that and see if it holds up."

  Why? Because Cool Runnings is the only sports movie I've ever seen that dares to violate the ironclad rule. In this shocking film, the underdogs don't win at the sport. It's not a movie about winning; it's about sportsmanship. Other sports movies allege that it's not whether you win or lose, but if you win, who cares whether or not it's whether you win or lose? Cool Runnings strips all of that away and teaches the only lesson a sports movie has to teach, the hard way.

  (The basketball sequence in Meatballs (1979) has a more cynical take on this, and IMO is the best part of that lousy movie. One reason I'm iffy on whether Talladega Nights (2006) is a sports movie, is that it mocks the very concept of 'winning'. I admit I haven't seen every damn sports movie, although it sure feels like it, so please tell me about other sports movies that don't end with a win.)

  Anyway, I bring this up because Pride is a non-sports example of a movie where it's a matter of historical record that the underdogs lose. Like Cool Runnings, it does much better than a "win" movie would of showing the virtues that can survive a loss: community, solidarity, tolerance and old-fashioned stubbornness. It really goes for the heartstrings, but sometimes that's what you need.

  I was sure Bill Nighy was going to bow out after his first scene, having done his bit for low-budget film, but he was gracious enough to stick around for the whole movie—a nice surprise. Also, most of the women in this movie look like one or another of my relatives. The whole time I was thinking e.g. "Wow, Aunt Pat and Aunt Anne are really hating on each other."

Film: Maintaining Film Roundup Roundup (now updated with 150 high-quality films!) makes it pretty easy to come up with a top ten for 2016:

1. Man With A Movie Camera (1929)
2. Dekalog 10 (1989)
3. Tampopo (1985)
4. Inquiring Nuns (1968)
5. Approaching the Elephant (2014)
6. Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004)
7. A Short Film about Killing (1988)
8. Dekalog 1 (1989)
9. Hail, Ceasar! (2016)
10. The Defiant Ones (1958)

Look at that list, we got four documentaries on there.

My lower-tier "recommended" list gets longer every year; here's a quick stab at the top ten of my twenty-one recommended movies from 2016:

1. Moana (2016)
2. Ghostbusters (2016)
3. Deadpool (2016)
4. Caucus (2013)
5. La La Land (2016)
6. Avanti! (1972)
7. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
8. Three Colors: Blue (1993)
9. Synecdoche, New York (2006)
10. It (1927)

I'm not really happy with calling that second tier "recommended" because it implies I'll scoff at your decision to see a solid film like Arrival or Kung Fu Hustle that I didn't put on my list. Hopefully no one does the data gathering necessary to deduce (incorrectly) that I'm scoffing at you.

After several years of Film Roundup I think I can now make what to me looks like a normal person's top ten film list, containing only movies from 2016. All of these were worth watching:

1. Hail, Ceasar!
2. Moana
3. Ghostbusters
4. La La Land
5. Deadpool
6. Arrival
7. Star Trek: Beyond
8. A Beautiful Planet
9. Shin Godzilla
10. Zootopia
11. The Last Arcade

Kind of a boring list though! Where are the nuns, the fourth-wall-breaking gangsters, or the convicts handcuffed to each other? Answer: in movies from previous years.

• Blue Collar (1977): Solid work/heist movie with Richard Pryor doing a Peter Falk-like job of putting comedy and drama into a single role. In fact, the movie poster shows Pryor twice, once doing a "drama" face and once doing a "comedy" face. Like those old Greek masks, I guess. Not pictured: Pryor's co-stars. A good thriller with authentic 70s grime. Cool factory footage means this was probably Krzysztof Kieslowski's favorite Richard Pryor movie.
• Plunder Road (1957): Some films noirs claim to be LA-centric, but only Plunder Road has the guts to focus entirely on the logistics of highway transportation. High quality popcorn noir. The smog inspection scene made me laugh.
• La La Land (2016): The movie that picks up where Plunder Road left off. It's a pretty musical, a genre you don't often see in modern American films, and I was enjoying the settings and the low-tech accomplishments of craft and the fact that it's more emotionally realistic than most pretty musicals, and then the ending happened. Such a great ending! It recontextualizes the entire movie in a way that only works because you spent 90 minutes in a pretty musical with above average emotional realism. I'd go into more detail but for once I think I don't want to spoil you.

  The whole movie I was thinking "I know Ryan Gosling is a different Ryan than the guy from Deadpool, but they look exactly the same and I can't remember the other guy's name so I'm going to pretend this is a Deadpool prequel." This did not enhance the movie as much as I thought it would.

• Ghatashraddha (1977): "Such a good movie!" - Sumana's mom. A Kannada New Wave weepie in the style of the Apu trilogy. It was pretty good, but I didn't like it as much as Sumana's mom does.

  The print I saw included a hilarious subtitle. Two teenagers from the village school are arguing, the younger one runs off in a huff. The older one: "Tut! Poor fellow!" I kind of felt it didn't mesh with the tone of the rest of the film.

• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016): This year's Christmas movie with Susanna. Finally, the superb junkyard art direction of the Star Wars universe is matched by an appropriate storyline: "we got the job done but everybody died." I know they only did it to avoid answering the question of why these people weren't in Episode IV (possible alternate answer: "they were somewhere else"), but it was so good to watch some characters in this universe unconstrained by the burdens of myth. A surprisingly high recommendation.
• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964): Clearly an inspiration for La La Land, but the new film is more to my taste in a couple ways. First, Cherbourg isn't really a "musical" in the [HB]ollywood sense, it's more like an opera or a very long cantata. Second, this film has the same ending as La La Land, but because it's an understated French film and not a noisy American musical the really cool thing doesn't happen on screen.

  Unlike my Deadpool fantasy, this film really is kind of a sequel to Lola, a film I saw in 2014. I didn't notice this until IMDB trivia time afterwards. I would definitely pick this movie over Lola.

As the year draws to a close (actually, afterwards; I'm writing this addendum on Monday) let's turn the Television Spotlight on the beloved classic, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968-2001). I don't think I've said this explicitly on NYCB, but when I was growing up my family did not own a television. You might think this was snobbish behavior, but I don't think Mom and Dad went around bragging about this at parties, and looking back on 1980s TV I have to say it was a solid choice.

This means that I didn't see any Mister Rogers' Neighborhood until I was thirty-seven, but no harm done. MRN is really good for kids who have serious problems in their lives, who need an oasis of ritual and calm, and the problems in my life started right around the time I grew out of the MRN age group. Now that I'm an adult I see MRN as a good model for talking to children without condescending to them or ignoring their concerns. The thing that stood out to me is that when he shows you a potentially unfamiliar place like an art gallery or an airplane, he always takes the time to verify that there are bathrooms there. He goes into the airplane bathroom and shows you how everything works. So you don't pee your pants on the plane flight because you're afraid to use the toilet.

Of course, some of these techniques only work on television. Mister Rogers will frequently ask you a question that sounds rhetorical, and then proceed as though you had answered it. I believe is the source of the common "can you say X?" parody construct. The semi-rhetorical question is incredibly condescending when someone does it to you in person. But Mister Rogers never acts like he heard your answer. You both know it's television and he can't hear you. Instead, he'll answer the question himself. "Is this the right shape? No, certainly not." He waits for you to give your opinion and then he weighs in with his own. If you don't say anything, that also works.

In general, this show is not my thing and never would have been, but I really admire the dedication to the target audience, and the field trip segments are always cool.

• I saw a long series of Kieslowski shorts and the standout was Hospital (1977), a slice-of-life documentary shot in a Warsaw trauma center where everything is super Communist and falling apart. Even the hammers don't work properly! Unglamorous gore and unsexy nudity abound. For half these people it's the worst day of their lives; for the other half it's just a normal day of improvising.
• The Target Shoots First (2000): Watch it on Vimeo! A thought-provoking documentary about managing creative people in an anticreative environment/being creative with the disappointing materials on hand/being uncertain about the moral valence of your creative work. This film has a fun Office Space vibe, I think because of the editing. It was filmed at the last moment your boss might think "it's just home video, not like this could end up in a movie or anything."

  I loved the Aerosmith cameo. Steven Tyler saying "such a deal!" has become a catchphrase in our household. I'm pretty sure it's Steven Tyler who says that, but I admit I would fail any "Aerosmith member or random old dude of equivalent age?" test.

• The Age of Shadows (2016): Man, Korean movies, huh? This was much more violent than the corresponding American R movie would have been. You think you're out for a classy espionage movie and it's just people getting murdered from the first scene to the last. In between the murders there were some cool fights, some good espionage, lots of nice looking period sets and costumes. I do not recommend overall because the amount of gore takes it past Robocop territory, but Sumana liked it.

  There's a suspenseful scene where you don't know whodunit, but the real question is, whocares? There are maybe six characters here, we're near the end of their movie, and I'm not so attached to any one of them that I'm going to be shocked by a revelation that this one is the Cylon. And... I was right not to get attached to any of these characters. Whew.

• Avanti! (1972): Pulling out a new Billy Wilder DVD is like uncorking a vintage bottle of wine--an unrepeatable experience. At least I assume that's what it's like, from the way wine snobs talk about wine. We opened Avanti! uncertain as to the precise mixture of dark and funny in its bouquet, and... it's about 70-30. Laughs and callbacks all the way through, but it's a rom-com about a guy having an affair, handled with the attitude you'd expect from the director of The Apartment and Double Indemity.

  Caution: includes fat jokes. They don't even land anymore because Juliet Mills is not fat by 2016 standards, and probably not even by 1972 non-movie-star standards.

• Arrival (2016): Sometimes I'll tear up during a movie and I resent it. It feels cheap, like I'm just having a physiological reaction to the soundtrack. This happens a lot during trailers. Sometimes it's a good movie and the content legitimately makes me tear up. This happens pretty reliably when someone's spouse or kid dies and you have to see the effect of that death on the surviving spouse or parent. (Parent death, not so much, maybe because that's actually happened to me.) Three Colors: Blue and Waiting both did this to me.

  Because of its narrative structure, Arrival made me not just 'tear up' but full-on cry in the theater. There are things about this adaptation that I am iffy on, but the one thing at the core of "Story of Your Life" is done incredibly well, it perfectly hits my pain points, and kablooie.

  I think this is not most peoples' reaction to Arrival, so here's a review for normal people. I'd have cut some stuff at the beginning but it's a good movie overall. It does a good job showing big-idea space opera on a small budget.

  Pictured to right: the Heptapod B sentence I wrote by accident while baking Thanksgiving cheesecake.

• Moana (2016): In Albany for Thanksgiving, the family divided into two warring camps: the camp that was seeing Doctor Strange and the camp that was seeing Moana. I was in the Moana camp and even though the theater was filled with noisy children, I don't regret it. Great movie. Good songs, silly and heartwarming in the right ways. Tons of sea life, no central villain... could this be the Star Trek IV of Disney animation? There was a moment during one of the songs where I thought "Cool, they're combining animation with live action like in Mary Poppins WAIT A MINUTE THIS IS ALL ANIMATION."

  Sumana braved the 2.5-hour running time of Doctor Strange and came back with a tale of... distracted driving? Doesn't sound very 'strange' to me. I thought these Marvel movies were supposed to have Iron Man punching things. Anyway, later that week Sumana saw Moana and also loved it. I'm not wild in general about Disney animated features but I must admit they've been on a roll lately.

• Film (1965): Or as Wikipedia calls it, "Film (film)". I make the decision on a case-by-case basis whether to review shorts, so don't look for consistency. Instead, look for post-Sunset Boulevard Buster Keaton doing Samuel Beckett's version of a Buster Keaton movie. Like Dali/the Marx Brothers, it's a conceptually satisfying matchup (the great surrealists! the great existentialists!) but one that's spoiled by a lack of mutual admiration. Groucho didn't like Dali's screenplay for Giraffes on Horseback Salad, and he was correct--it sounds like a disaster. Beckett had tried to get Keaton as Lucky for the American production of Waiting for Godot (and it's even possible Waiting for Godot was inspired by a Keaton short) but Keaton turned down the part because he didn't 'get it'.

  Film isn't a disaster and it even has some really good gags, but if you don't 'get' Waiting for Godot you certainly won't 'get' this movie, even if you're the star.

• The Double Life of Veronique (1991): I saw Blind Chance (1987) a couple years ago, and it was pretty decent, so although this movie disappointed me I didn't write off Kieslowski's entire oeuvre because of it. It starts off pretty good, and then the romance subplot kicks in and both Sumana and I lost interest. On the plus side, I believe this is the first film I've seen that shows a Minitel terminal. (It doesn't get used.)
• Safety Not Guaranteed (2012): A fun date movie. Good laughs, good chemistry between the weirdo characters, is okay with leaving a couple things unexplained. Recommended.
• The Scar (1976) and Short Working Day (1981): Although I'm not impressed by Kieslowski's storytelling when it comes to romantic love, when it comes to talking about work, I think he's right up there with Billy Wilder. These are awesome socialist-noir films about the impossible job of being a middle manager in a planned economy. Their protagonists are forever squeezed between the Workers and the Party, unable to make anyone happy. Maybe it's all a metaphor for filmmaking or something slight like that, but the sheer number of films Kieslowski made about work makes me think he finds it really interesting. I'm gonna give Short Working Day the nod, because it's shorter and has more action. But they're both good.
• Shin Godzilla (2016): First, I gotta say I did not like this Godzilla design. Did not like how dinosaur-like it was. I say: classic Godzilla all the way, 90s Godzilla an acceptable substitute. Also mystified by this movie's attempt to retcon "Godzilla" as an English word. But whatever. Like all the Godzilla films that aren't completely silly, this one's about the humans, not the monster, and it's solid.

  A long time ago I suggested that the The West Wing should do an annual Halloween episode: a noncanonical story about an alien invasion or zombie attack. Well, here it is! This is a Godzilla movie done as an episode of Veep. Lots of walk-and-talk, lots of government incompetence on display. It was kind of corny but definitely closer to the original Godzilla than to the silly stuff in its emotional resonance.

  I saw this subtitled, and although I prefer subtitles in general, I gotta say a dub might be better here. There are a gazillion charaters in this movie and each is introduced with a caption giving their name, organization, and position within the organization. Some of these people are only in the movie for one shot! The same thing happens for every military unit we see, each distinct piece of hardware fruitlessly deployed against Godzilla, etc. So you have to read all that, and keep it separate from the dialogue subtitles that are on screen at the same time.

• Dekalog (1989): This is a famous series of ten made-for-TV movies, roughly modelled after the (Catholic version of the) Ten Commandments. Its IMDB rating is a near-unbeatable 9.1, meaning if it were classified in the movie list it would be the third highest-rated movie ever. But it's classified as a TV show, so it's tied for 19th place with True Detective. I'm gonna say we saw half of the Dekalog: we saw 1, 2, 9, 10, and A Short Film About Killing (a.k.a. "5: The Extended Cut"). A lot of them show how a miracle can ruin your life—a pretty solid concept.

  None of the Dekalog films we saw were "bad", but IMO the Dekalog films dealing with romantic love (2 and 9) are merely "pretty good", whereas the ones that deal with other emotions (1, 5, 10) are some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen. There's a lot of talk about A Short Film About Killing, and it is quite the punch in the gut, but I want to put in a good word for Dekalog 10 ("Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Stuff").

  Going in to the 9-10 double feature, I was thinking "Do we really need two films about coveting different things?" But I was wrong: we do! A flim about coveting your neighbor's wife is a romantic-love movie, which we've established I don't think Kieslowski does very well. Whereas coveting your neighbor's stuff... it's not a work movie, but it's close, and Kieslowski nails it.

  We had some fun coming up with the previews they must have run on Polish TV when Dekalog was airing. "A ten night television event!" "You'll cry, you'll cry some more!" But Dekalog 10 has a different emotional arc than the other films in the series. It's about two brothers whose lives are almost ruined by a miracle, but because they fundamentally love and trust each other, they make it through the Kieslowski gauntlet with only minor damage. I guess you gotta end the series on a happy note.

• Tampopo (1985): Saw this movie with Ashley Blewer (it's one of her faves) and absolutely loved it. So fun and good-hearted. Starts with a cool fourth-wall-breaking intro of the sort you used to see in American movies in the 1950s. One of the best of the year for me.

  Caution: this movie is not for faithful readers of doestheturtledie.com and doestheoysterdie.com. The turtle scene was pretty rough for me (real turtle, fer sure) and doesn't do anything for the film as a whole. I created my own "Phantom Edit" by closing my eyes when it became clear the turtle was gonna get it.

• Three Colors: Blue, White, Red (1993-1994): Gonna cover the trilogy as one item because I want to publish this entry and move on. All three films are really solid. The ending of Red was cheesy in the same way as the ending of Blind Chance, so points off for that. I'm going to give the prize to Blue, even though White is a comedy with the actors from Dekalog 10 playing brothers again! As always, it comes down to Kieslowski's treatment of romance. It seems superficial and kind of petty in White. Whereas his treatment of the aftermath of spousal death (Blue) brings nightmares to vivid life and his exploration of telecommunication and surveillance (Red) seems downright hip for 1994.

• The Seven Samurai (1954): Okay, I've learned my lesson. No more Kurosawa films that take place prior to the Meiji Restoration. I think I've now seen all the big ones and although this one is clearly the best of the lot, it couldn't hold my attention for three hours. Some good scenes, but way too slow for me, and minus points for the blah romance subplot.
• Mikey and Nicky (1976): If you're like me, nothing I can say will talk you out of seeing an Elaine May crime drama starring Peter Falk, but a used DVD of this movie goes for a hundred fifty bucks, and what do you get? A pretty normal 1970s dramedy. I saw Mikey and Nicky at Metrograph for $15, a significant savings, and I don't regret spending the money, but it's the least good Elaine May movie I've seen.

  Is it funny? Kind of. Is it awkward? Definitely. Does everything go wrong? Absolutely. It's interesting to see a woman's take on the 1970s small-time crooks immortalized by male directors like Sidney Lumet. But this isn't even May's best "Person A is person B's friend but also trying to kill them" movie. (That's A New Leaf.) It's the kind of movie that other people like more than I do.

  There's only one Elaine May movie that I haven't seen (The Heartbreak Kid, DVD also $150 used) so I'll only have one more chance to say this in Film Roundup: The fact that May is still in movie jail over Ishtar is one of the great injustices of the film industry, especially because Ishtar is a really good, really funny movie.

• I saw a number of old Vitaphone shorts at Film Forum, but they were nothing to write blog about. However, there was also a really interesting talk from Alejandra Espasande, an archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, with a (kind of too long) clip show afterwards.

  One of our New York traditions is a variety/clip show called "Kevin Geeks Out". We don't go very often because it starts at 9PM on Thursday in Brooklyn, but host Kevin Maher makes it a fun time with guests, games, etc.

  As you might imagine, "Kevin Geeks Out" has a certain attitude towards the unlicensed projection of short motion picture clips in an intimate but definitely commercial setting, and the attitude of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is... at the other end of the spectrum. However, the two clip shows were very similar in tone. Where Kevin Maher might have told the story of the infiltration of vaudeville performers into Hollywood via appropriate clips taken from... various sources, Alejandra Espasande told the story through ephemera from the collection she manages: PSAs, newsreels, and especially movie trailers.

  The Academy has a collection of about 65,000 film trailers, most of which came from a single dealer's collection. The most interesting bit of the evening was Espasande's remark that this dealer did a lot of business with people who were making documentaries, because it was easy to get movie footage via the movie's trailer, and almost impossible to get it from the movie itself!

  She didn't go into detail on this, and there was no Q&A, so I have only speculation to go on. But I could see this making sense in the pre-1972 era, when copyright had to be registered and film collectors were underground. The studio wouldn't bother to copyright trailers, so they (and the footage within) would be public domain. However, this authoratative-seeming web page says:

  A scene from a movie that also appears in a coming-attraction trailer can be regarded as enjoying the copyright protection of the movie, in cases where (as is common) the movie was copyrighted but the coming-attraction trailer was not.

  And yet, this equally authoratative-seeming page says:

  Many of these trailers also contained material that appeared to be from the movie but was actually shot directly for the trailer. That material, since it did not contain a copyright notice, would also fall into the public domain.

  Your honor, IANAL. The defense rests.

• Speaking of unauthorized screenings, this month the Television Spotlight focuses on something that never aired on television: the 1995 pilot for the Robert Altman/Gary Trudeau collaboration "Killer App". I have no idea why we thought this would make a good introduction for me to the world of Robert Altman. It feels a lot like a Aaron Sorkin joint (or mushroom, I guess). There's the ensemble cast, the snappy dialogue, the interest in work and the workplace. But it's not a ripoff--this was made the same year as The American President, and Altman does this stuff all the time (or so I hear).

  By 1990s television standards, this is an incredibly accurate look at the tech industry. The triumph, the entitlement, the douchiness, the desperation... it's all there. All the technobabble makes sense. It's really impressive. The only unrealistic element is the far-too-intelligent personal assistant AI. There's your product, folks! Put that thing on a 3 1/2" floppy and sell it! The spam filter alone is a decade ahead of its time!

  I could point out other flaws but it's a pretty fun 50 minutes and the point is moot because those flaws ensured it didn't make it to series. Check it out--it's freeonline!

• Three Days of the Condor (1975): Really solid Watergate-era thriller that holds up very well except for a certain Watergate-era naivete at the end; and the horrible, squicky, unrealistic romance subplot, which nearly ruins it. It's awful! A lot of 1970s films have squicky romance subplots, and you know I don't do this for everything, but I'm going to blame it on the proverbial male gaze. Like, compare this movie to A New Leaf (1971), a hilarious romcom about a man's attempt to romance/murder an innocent bystander. It's squicky and it works fine, it's funny and it serves the purposes of the movie, because the creepy dude isn't the hero. My point is a) there are movies that age well in this respect, even in the 1970s and b) I don't think it's a coincidence that A New Leaf is directed by a woman.

  Anyway, this film has that one big problem but if that's not a deal-breaker for you, it's pretty exciting.

• The Last Arcade (2016): Documentary about a video arcade in Manhattan started out interesting like a normal documentary about something with a lot of history. Then the arcade shut down, the documentary started skipping forward in time to show what happens to the space and the people, and it got really interesting. There's a moment where the film sets up an easy villain, but the truth is more complicated than that framing will allow. Good stuff.
• The Wild Bunch (1969): This movie was a long watch for me since I think it makes its point in the first (awesome, disturbing, non-ASPCA-compliant) scene. There are some good bits afterwards but it never made it back to that level for me. Is it possible to get a full theatrical release for a fifteen-minute film? Asking for a friend.
• In & Out (1997): Sumana watched this movie in her youth and wanted me to see it. It's... all right? There were some good jokes. The fourth-wall-breaking motivational tape was a classic. We had an interesting discussion afterwards about how stereotypes have changed since 1997, and whether Tom Selleck's character really could have travelled from LA to the middle of Indiana in eight hours. It's an open question! Does he bring a camera crew, or does he hire local stringers? Does he have to finish the Oscars telecast before he can leave, or is he just there for the red carpet preshow?

  Sorry to spoil the ending, but this film ends with the same trick used in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Misleading cinematography implies that you are watching two dudes about to get married, but no, that could never happen, it's just a pleasant/disturbing dream.

• Waiting (2015): What a sad movie. Pressed all my buttons. Variety would call it a "weepie". Then I couldn't call Sumana afterwards because she was asleep in a different time zone. Don't be like me! Watch Waiting responsibly, with someone you love.

  I think this was the first Indian movie I've seen with serious curse words. Lots of swearing in this one. And waiting.

• Big Trouble in Little China (1986): If I was a movie director... I'd make lousy movies because I never went to film school. But my life had gone differently and I was now known as a good director, I'd like to be compared to John Carpenter. His films are full of love of genre, over-the-top action, and goofy practical effects. He's not as sophisticated as, say, Edgar Wright, but I'm not known for my sophistication either.

  In my hypothetical life I'd like to be remembered for a They Live or The Thing but I'd settle for a Big Trouble in Little China. Mashing up American-style and Chinese-style action movies is a great idea, and although this movie doesn't rise to the comedy-horror level of a Ghostbusters or a Gremlins, it's a really fun experience. I didn't even have to use my 1980s racism cringe. I gotta say it was a good movie.

  IMDB trivia confirms my suspicion that the first scene of this movie was added due to studio interference. It ruins the pacing of the movie, frames Kurt Russell as the hero when he's actually the sidekick, generally doesn't make sense, and you should just skip to the second scene. Also according to IMDB trivia, "At one point, the film was going to be a sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension." Believable!

• Inquiring Nuns (1968): Inquiring nuns want to know! An adorable film about the nature of happiness and the nature of interviews. The two nuns are super engaging, trustworthy and effective in drawing out their interview subjects, but their presence heightens the artificiality of the experience to the point that I often wondered if the subjects were putting on a performance rather than seriously engaging with the question. Like the guy who ends up reciting a sappy poem he wrote. Gimme a break. Those nuns are too polite to give you the tough love you need!

  Strong recommend overall. Includes vintage footage of the Mathematica exhibit. Don't miss the riveting scene where the two nuns interview another nun!

• This month let's shine the Television Spotlight on the 80s classic Macgyver. I'm talking about the original, not the reboot (which we haven't seen but the trailer doesn't look good). We've been watching a bit, focusing on the earlier seasons. It's a cheesy, cheesy show, but the character is fun and I have a hypothesis that Macgyver is the climax of 80s TV action.

  See, Macgyver the character lives a thrill-a-minute life of danger, but he hates guns and never engages in gunplay. This is a formula designed for maximum broadcast-friendly excitement. You can't show someone getting shot in the face, but you can show someone being shot at and missed. And you can show as many explosions as you want: TV explosions throw everyone clear, so no one gets hurt and it doesn't count as violence. Now you got your formula: people shoot at Macgyver, he makes a bomb out of a car battery and toothpaste; there's a huge explosion, everyone goes home happy.

  The AV Club's guide to Macgyver has been very helpful, though I think the author of that guide likes Murdoc way too much. It's not that Murdoc isn't a good villain, it's that he's someone else's villain. He's the Joker. The Joker puts a lot of effort into his capers. He needs to fight a super-square like Batman, someone with a lot of equipment and a plan for every contigency. Macgyver doesn't have a plan! He's the anti-Batman. It's like the Joker taking on Bugs Bunny. Bugs would just stretch out of the handcuffs and walk away. Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff in Macgyver as well as many cornily enjoyable takes on standard TV action plots.

• Armageddon (1998): The film so bad it got its own Film Roundup Special.
• Blood Simple (1984): Looking back this movie feels like a dry run for Fargo, but on its own terms it's really good, sort of a twisted version of "Gift of the Magi". Saw it with Sarah and we both enjoyed it a lot. Keeps the tension going to the penultimate shot! Then you get one shot of resolution and leave the theater a broken mess.
• Kung Fu Hustle (2004): Fun action film that keeps the violence cartoonish to the point of showing people with Road Runner-type rotating legs. It sure beats The Mermaid, although no one thing was as funny as the police station scene in The Mermaid.

  That said, I'm not really clear on who hustled whom or what the hustle was. Perhaps I, the audience member, have been hustled?

• The Sound of a Flower (2015): Inspiring Korean drama of a woman pansori performer who just wants to portray a Ghostbuster on stage, but the rules of nineteenth-century Korean opera require that Ghostbuster roles (plus all other roles) go to men. Will her high-pitched singing break the glass [ceiling]? It's basically a sports movie, so yes.

  This was the consensus Asian Film Festival choice between me, Sumana, and one of her friends; and as often happens with consensus picks we were all kind of let down. Pansori is a genre that's not that interesting to me, and although I'm not qualified to judge, according to the programmer of the film festival, star Suzy Bae's pansori singing isn't great.

• Antigone (2016): We made an unprecedented third excursion to a live theater event. This was a local theater production and it wasn't great. I'm interested in seeing other things in the same space, because it's relatively convenient and incredibly cheap compared to other theater options in New York.
• Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (2016): I liked this documentary a lot because I came into the movie knowing absolutely nothing about Norman Lear, and learning about him from a short documentary was a lot more entertaining than learning the same facts from Wikipedia.

  Like, just as an example, Norman Lear wasn't just a successful TV guy. At one point he was the producer of five of the top ten network shows. He plowed his millions right back into television, producing a special called "I Love Freedom" to push back against the religious right, a special which featured Robin Williams playing the American flag. He bought a copy of the Declaration of Independence and sent it on a road trip in an attempt to inoculate people against anti-American authoritarianism. And in the interviews he really opens up and talks candidly about the darkest parts of himself. Compare someone like Mel Brooks, who shows up in this movie and spends most of his scene telling one really long joke. Really interesting show.

• Bob Roberts (1992): Tim Robbins film suffers from all the problems you'd imagine from a political mockumentary made by a stereotypical Hollywood liberal who writes, directs, stars and performs the folk song parodies. Seriously, watch Tanner '88 (below) instead. Giancarlo Esposito does a good job with what he's given. Sumana and I agree there there are several minutes of footage after what really should be the last, creepy shot of the movie.
• Ghostbusters (2016): Really solid. I prefer the worldbuilding in the original, but I find 2016's escalating gags funnier than 1984's more situational humor. No reason you can't have both. In fact, have them all!

  Unlike a lot of modern action movies (see Star Trek: Beyond: below), I could follow the action scenes even when they got complicated. And looking forward, the end of this film gives me confidence the sequel will avoid the worst problem with Ghostbusters II (1989).

• Caucus (2013): This documentary about the 2012 Iowa caucuses does what Bob Roberts was too self-righteous to do: present a complex portrait of a man whose politics are awful (here, Rick Santorum). This film is full of people you will hopefully never have to care about, humiliating themselves to no purpose, but Santorum is the standout.

  He's got a couple great scenes, but the one that sticks out in my mind has a frustrated Iowan throwing a big blob of generalized resentment at Santorum, and he listens and sympathizes and probes around the conspiracy theory for some normal conservative sentiments he can agree with. It's a sign of how low the bar has been moved since 2012, but I found that really touching. Rick Santorum does the basic job of a politician.

• Chicago (2016): A fourth live theater production! We saw the all-female Takurazuka production. Sumana likes Chicago and she also likes it when women play roles that are the eternal birthright of men, so we dressed up (slightly) and headed to Lincoln Center, where we we ran into our friends Mirabai and Kate, also there to see Chicago! A pleasant surprise.

  I'd never seen Chicago before, so seeing it in Japanese was a nice stretch. Overall I would rate the musical as "okay". After the show Takurazuka did a medley of their greatest hits, with elaborate costumes and cross-dressing galore. As usual when we go out to a live theater event, I'm unhappy with the cost, but Takurazuka did give me the feeling of seeing something that I'd never be able to experience any other way, so I'm glad we went.

  Mirabai, a big Chicago fan, was not impressed by my trivia tidbit: that according to IMDB ratings Chicago was the 155th-best movie of 2002, the worst performance of any Best Picture winner. Maybe you'll be impressed! Who knows? Actually I'm a little suspicious of this number; I did some spot checks on some well-known 2002 movies and the only one I saw with a higher rating than Chicago was The Hours.

• Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004): Super enjoyable documentary of the Shirley Chisholm campaign. Unlike most long-shot presidential candidates, Chisholm had a good plan: to get some delegates and use them as leverage to affect the party platform. It's the plan Bernie Sanders started out and ended up with.

  This is a fascinating film, partly due to the inclusion of tons of candid footage from two contemporaneous films where people heard about the Chisholm campaign and thought "I must follow them around!" but never actually released a film. Caucus gives you the 'real' candidates by showing the abrasive effect on their emotional defenses of a grueling sequence of public events. These unfinished films achieve 'reality' by going right into Chisholm's Congressional office and convention hotel room. It helps that she's the same person in private as in public. The scene where Chisholm is watching the convention on TV, she picks up the phone and tells her delegates to vote how they want—it's the kind of moment that's often dramatized but that documentaries rarely have the camera running to show you for real.

  Director Shola Lynch showed up for a Q&A afterwards and mentioned some fun trivia about Shirley Chisholm's initial congressional run, plus what happened in 2004 when she took the film to Chisholm's Florida home to screen it for her. Chisholm originally hadn't wanted to watch the movie, didn't even have a VCR, but now she was sitting, watching, not saying anything, and Lynch was getting really nervous, until a friend called Chisholm's phone and she went off to answer it. Lynch overheard (paraphrase of a paraphrase): "No, I'm busy! We're going to be late! We're going to be late to the Early Bird Special! I'm watching the most incredible film!"

• Star Trek: Beyond (2016): I'm not going to say "Trek is back!" but... people who understand Trek are in charge again. There's a decent story here, and I respect the fake-out where the villain from a bad Trek movie (Ru'afo) turned out to be the villain from a good Trek movie (Colonel West).

  The Simon Pegg script does a lot to save this movie, at the cost of making Scotty's relationship with Keenser ever weirder. Lots of cool spaceship grunge—Star Trek finally stealing the best thing about Star Wars. Nice character moments between Spock and McCoy, some cleverness during the impossible-to-follow action scenes. We old-school fans have to take our enjoyment where we can, you know?

  Oh yeah, I saw this movie in 3D (not my choice) and I totally forgot about it the whole time I was writing this review, until just now. It felt like a normal 2D movie. Don't know what that says about me or the movie.

• And finally, it's time to shine the Television Spotlight on the most authentic political mockumentary, Tanner '88 (1988). What better way to introduce me to Robert Altman's work than to watch this Garry Trudeau collaboration? It occupies the place where you'll find a lot of middle-highbrow cinema, a space that used to baffle me, where the attitude is humorous but there's not a lot of jokes per se. Overall recommended, partly for entertainment value, partly for its influence, partly for sheer cleverness.

  Behind-the-scenes interview says that Altman had such a great time doing Tanner '88 that he wanted to keep it going after Tanner's inevitable loss. This is an attitude shared by many real presidential candidates, but the amazing DNC episode is the highlight of the series and it's good that HBO pulled the plug afterwards because you can already feel it start to go downhill.

• Armageddon (1998): The first hate-watch in Film Roundup history! I saw this movie when it came out, in a "friend has an extra ticket" scenario, and like the other movies I saw for free while in college (Very Bad Things, Mars Attacks!, The Phantom Menace), it's awful. But unlike those other movies, people didn't seem to notice that Armageddon was bad! It was the top-grossing film of 1998! It's in the Criterion Collection! (Albeit more as a "representative sample" pick than a "good movie" pick.) Where I saw a uniquely awful film, others saw only a cheesy summer blockbuster.

  At the time, my hatred for Armageddon focused mainly on the many, many plot holes and scientific errors in the film. But that's a pretty superficial way to look at a movie. Silent Running has huge plot holes and it's a great sci-fi movie. When I saw Armageddon was showing at the museum, I knew I had to watch it again, eighteen years later, with more mature eyes, to try and see deep into the horror.

  Well, it's still bad, and the plot holes and scientific errors are still at the core of its badness. The fundamental problem—pointed out by Ben Affleck during the filming of the movie—is that it would be easier to train astronauts to operate a drill than to train oil rig workers to operate in microgravity. This movie is two and a half hours long, and a lot of that time is devoted to making excuses for why, no, it makes more sense to bring in the oil rig workers.

  A big part of this work is establishing that there will be normal Earth gravity throughout this movie. This is because it's 1998 and they can't shoot the whole film on a wire like Gravity, and the sets are too large to pull an Apollo 13. But this technological limitation also makes the plot semi-possible, because Earth gravity negates most of the skill differential between a trained astronaut and a trained oil rig operator.

  The one good twist in this movie makes all this unsavory exposition pay off. It's about two hours in and, after seeing one space scene after another clearly shot in Earth gravity, you've forgotten that these people are supposed to be on an asteroid and not on a cheap sound stage. Then a character remembers that, despite appearances, the story has them in a low-gravity environment, and they can exploit this fact to get out of a tight spot. Eureka!

  Another big part of the necessary work is introducing four more characters to a cast that's already got way too many characters, because not even Michael Bay can convince an audience that experience on an oil rig translates to skill in piloting space shuttles. So they have to bring in some astronauts after all. It's okay, though, these are the pilots, so they're Air Force jocks, not loathsome NASA nerds.

  'Cause this movie hates nerds. Our heroes are nice people, by blockbuster standards, but they're all jocks, except for Rockhound, the creepy Steve Buscemi nerd, and Truman, who was a jock before a tragic accident left him settling for nerddom. I'm sure there's a good movie somewhere that hates nerds, but a) filmmaking is a technically sophisticated activity that demands precision, so on some level all directors are nerds, and b) it's a circle-squaring operation to celebrate a twentieth-century space program while hating on the nerds who build the hardware and keep everything running. In the far future when spacecraft are toys, like muscle cars, you can do it, but not in 1998. I mean, we tried it! NASA was on board and everything. A ton of money was poured into the concept. And we ended up with Armageddon. I see Interstellar (2015) as an attempt to fix this problem, but it swings too far in the other direction and veers into uncritical nerd worship.

  The action scenes in Armageddon are illegible. There's a lot of hardware on screen but the effects haven't aged well. The cuts are too fast and there are too many characters. (For much of the movie the characters are split into two groups that don't interact but are filmed on the same sets!) That's why most of the action scenes are accompanied by frequent cuts to a map or readout, or accompanied by shouted measurements, just so we can understand what the hell is going on. It's like hearing "rising tension... rising tension!... moment of maximum tension!... whew, everything's fine!".

  So, it's a bad movie, but the world is full of bad movies. What's special about this one? Something dark and horrifying about Armageddon's badness made me willing to watch it again—something I rarely do even to good movies—to figure out why exactly I hate it. Then I read the little flier they hand out at museum showings, and it clicked into place.

  Here's the essay the museum chose for Armageddon. It's by Jeanine Basinger, who taught film to Michael Bay at Wesleyan. Just as Armageddon spends a lot of time trying to convince you that its plan is a good idea, this essay spends a lot of time trying to convince you that Michael Bay is a smart guy. His prize-winning student film "told its story clearly, but in a highly nonverbal manner. Bay was ahead of his age group, but he was also ahead of his time. He still is."

  [Armageddon] is never confusing, never boring, and never less than a brilliant mixture of what movies are supposed to do: tell a good story, depict characters through active events, invoke an emotional response, and entertain simply and directly, without pretense.

  That was written in 1999. Now it's 2016 and according to IMDB trivia many of the participants in Armageddon have backed off or disowned it. Ben Affleck mocks the movie in his DVD commentary. Michael Bay has called Armageddon his worst film, although I don't know if he did this before or after Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Billy Bob Thornton, Armageddon's most stalwart defender, is quoted as saying "It's not THAT bad..."

  When reading that essay I was transported back, not to 1998, but to 2004. Because that essay reads like a National Review article from a Yale history professor who taught George W. Bush. That's the missing key. Armageddon is uniquely horrible because it serves as a prophetic microcosm of the forthcoming Bush administration.

  It begins with the Twin Towers being destroyed. An incoherent response is carried out in a laughably incompetent way. The poindexters who think they know better than the tough-talking action hero get their comeuppance. After a brief period of triumphant flag-waving, the whole thing turns out to have been a huge disaster, and everyone involved backs away from it or pretends it didn't happen. The result is used as an object lesson in how not to do things. The best available defenses are "It's not THAT bad..." and "simply and directly, without pretense."

  Michael Bay is absolutely a smart guy, but you don't have to be stupid to make a bad movie. I do think Armageddon belongs in the Criterion collection, but it should be experienced the way I've experienced it: initial, superficial hatred; followed by the realization that something can be an obvious disaster in the making, and happen anyway, to cheers and applause; then the sad hollow satisfaction of being proven right.

  Because I'm all about celebrating the cinema, I'll close with the good things about Armageddon. The initial narration and the first scene are pretty exciting—Gravity ripped them off, so you know they're good. One joke made me laugh (Rockhound's parting shot to the loan shark). And finally, Steve Buscemi couldn't save the movie Armageddon, but when the actual 9/11 happened the former firefighter went back to his Little Italy firehouse and put in several days of volunteer work. The guy's a mensch.

• Rise of the Legend (2014): Fun, generic popcorn martial arts movie with a generic name. Best thing about this one was a small heist subplot—it's a full-fledged heist but it's just one part of a larger plan—and a character named "North Evil".
• Putney Swope (1969): Anarchic Groucho Marx-style comedy meets the 1960s counterculture in a film that's got a good number of laugh-out-loud moments and a pretty impressive Molotov cocktail effect (possibly achieved with a real cocktail, I dunno) but is ultimately a huge mess. It was an extremely offensive movie in 1969, and it's still pretty offensive, but mostly for different reasons, which is its own kind of accomplishment.

  The worst part for me was the pretty common low-budget movie conceit where someone is a terrible boss and bad at running a business, but is rewarded with huge success because... it's a satire? The director is extrapolating their experience in the film industry to the business world as a whole? I've never figured it out.

  I'm glad I saw this, but it's not great. If you want a bitingly satirical Mad Men-era film about advertising that's based on an understanding of the business, check out the 1960 short Your Name Here. If you just want more commercial parodies, watch the first few minutes of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957).

• Time Table (1956): The first scene of this movie is best-of noir material, and there's a twist at the start of act two that's handled really well, but really the first ten minutes is all you need. It's public domain, so see for yourself. The great theme of a plan that's perfect but brittle, undone by the slightest error, isn't done justice.
• Monkey Business (1952): Definitely inferior to the Marx Brothers Monkey Business, this lesser Howard Hawks feature focuses on Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers acting like teenagers. Cary Grant gets a haircut which, in retrospect, yes, is the haircut that teenage boys had in 1952 but adult men did not. It took me a while to catch on because of all those movies from the same period in which 25-year-old actors with that haircut are playing high school students.

  Not a great watch, but it was really refreshing to see a romantic comedy where the couple starts off married and in love, and stays that way for the entire movie.

• Synechdoche, New York (2008): Distressing and effective. reminds me of a Buster Keaton film in the creative ways it keeps twisting and escalating its premise rather than letting the one joke ride. Recommended.
• Heaven Can Wait (1943): This film puts on the big screen the unspoken American worldview that mixes Christianity and Epicureanism, and shows how it creates an arbitrage opportunity between heaven and hell. The story's okay, but all the characters are cartoony stereotypes. Specifically it reminded me of a Tex Avery cartoon, the way the film was scored, the orchestra constantly quoting from old-timey songs.

  Sometimes the techniques used by Code-era directors to sneak filth past the censors come off as humorous and sophisticated (Will Success Spoil Rock Hudson? again), but in this movie it just seems sleazy. Despite valiant efforts, only a couple of scenes really connected with me on an emotional level.

• Approaching the Elephant (2014): A pretty amazing documentary about a free school, with a lot to say about fundamental questions of political science. I found it really interesting because I think a free school would have been a much better environment for me when I was a kid than public school. Not really an option for me, though. Also, Lucy, the girl who's one of the focal points of the documentary, is the same age as and acts a lot like my niece Maggie. This film is really effective at showing that unstructured spaces attract a wide variety of people who don't "fit in", including bullies.

• A Beautiful Planet (2016): A 3D IMAX film shot on the International Space Station. It was edutainment aimed at the casual viewer (someone sitting in the theater hadn't known there was an International Space Station, and I hope they came out of the theater feeling better about humanity), but I didn't come to be edutained, I came to recapture the thrill I got from Gravity (2013)! And... it's fine as long as you don't compare it to a fictional experience like Gravity. It's a cinema verite documentary about life on a space station. There's a cool Blair Witch-esque scene filmed during a spacewalk, and lots of microgravity shots. The astronauts are competent and nothing goes wrong. This was in and out of theaters like a flash, and I do think it benefits greatly from the IMAX treatment, but to simulate the experience at home, check out Sunita Williams's 2014 tour of the ISS. Oh, according to the website if you're in Columbus, Ohio it's still showing until June 10.
• Rien a Declarer (2010): Seen with Sumana at her recommendation. A mismatched-cop comedy about the collapse of nationalism in the face of the European Union. It was pretty fun, had some Hot Fuzz moments, but it's no Hot Fuzz. There seemed to be jokes surrounding the fact that Benoît Poelvoorde's character is extremely racist, but I couldn't make them out; maybe the joke is that no Belgian could be that racist? But it seems quite possible! His extreme nationalism is comical, but why shouldn't it be paired with racism?
• Mad Max (1979) This isn't Mad Max, it's.... no, hold on. This is Mad Max, but it's not what I want from the series. It's a kinda generic exploitation flick with cool car stunts. According to IMDB trivia, the canonical explanation for why this movie isn't like the others, is that there was a nuclear war two weeks after the events of Mad Max. The real reason is "no money", a problem I'm sympathetic to. But if you're allowed to say "two weeks later there was a nuclear war", a whole lotta movies could be the prequel to The Road Warrior. For instance, what if The Jerk (1979) was secretly the first Mad Max movie? All you'd need to do is change the footage at the beginning of The Road Warrior to show Navin Johnson being shot at in a gas station. Much more satisfying.

  Speaking of which, Memorial Day weekend was Mad Max weekend at the museum, so I also saw...

• Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981): This is more like it. Cool worldbuilding, clever eyeball kicks, exciting chase scenes. I was not a big fan of the feckless community of refinery operators, but I did like how even though Max is central to the movie he's only a supporting character in their overall story. It creates a western-style loneliness that is used to excellent effect in Fury Road, and of course in...
• Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985): This one I'd seen before, a long time ago, and I thought it was really stupid. And... it is stupid, but it's also very fun. This is the one where the series comes into its own as an anthology that shows different approaches to post-apocalyptic worldbuilding. Probably the most realistic entry in the series, not that we're going for realism.

  Thunderdome also gets points from me for not having a "villain" per se. Auntie Entity is coded as the villain, but by Mad Max standards she's pretty chill. Max blows up her city, and she stands on the rubble and shouts "We will rebuild!" and everyone's still with her. That's the kind of popular support Immortan Joe can only dream of.

  So... I guess from most perspectives I like this one better than The Road Warrior. The action scenes are a lot better in The Road Warrior, though, and that's really the heart of the series. Fury Road remains the best entry, because it combines the super-dense worldbuilding of Thunderdome with the nonstop action of Road Warrior.

• McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971): One of the truths of genre fiction is that if you set out to deconstruct or destroy a genre, it is likely you will simply produce an example of it. Thus it is in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman's "anti-western" and the first Altman film I've seen. It's a very good western, full of loneliness and corruption and sad little schemes brought low.

  It was quite entertaining to watch Rene Auberjonois effectively play Quark. On the other hand, this has one of the cruellest scenes I've ever seen in a movie. Not that it's more violent or sadistic than other movie scenes, in fact it's a really good scene. Just... what a mean thing to do to a minor character I didn't realize I cared about until this scene started.

• Dracula (1931): Introduced by Guy Maddin! The projectionist accidentally (?) started showing us the original, and then had to start over with the version with the Phillip Glass soundtrack, and you really can tell the difference. It made a slow-paced movie seem action-packed. I haven't read the book and didn't really know anything about the plot apart from "vampire bites a buncha people", and I thought Renfield was great. I liked his abrupt turn from snob to craven Torgo-esque servant. If anything, it was a little disappointing how the best plot element in the movie happened right at the beginning.

  I also liked how Van Helsing doesn't pussyfoot around like a lot of movie scientists. He's like "these bite marks indicate it's a vampire, therefore vampires are real, deal with it." Also enjoyable whenever Mina would glare really hard at her Zeppo-esque fiance trying to work vampire magic on him.

  The ending was super disappointing! Dracula gets staked offscreen and you don't get to see what could be a great Bela Lugosi death scene.

  Since Jeanne Thornton is a big Guy Maddin fan I decided it would be cool if I could get him to autograph my Dracula ticket to her, so after the show I looked around for him, but he had disappeared... like a vampire! Or like a guy with something to do other than watch the movie he introduced.

  (If the tone of this review seems different from usual it's because I basically copy-and-pasted it from an email thread with Jeanne.)

• Buck and the Preacher (1972): Seen as part of a Sidney Poitier retrospective at the museum. Overall these films gave me an appreciation for Poitier's skill in psychologically intense action roles. The only movie I'd seen him in previously was Sneakers (1992), where he scowls a lot but doesn't do much action. In The Heat of the Night (1967) is on my list but we haven't seen it yet.

  Anyway, around 1989 I remember a movie about black cowboys came out (I don't remember the name and can't find it) and it was... not controversial, but it was remarked upon as unusual. But having discovered old movies after starting Film Roundup, I've learned that that movie would have been right at home in Hollywood fifteen years earlier. The 1970s saw tons of action movies and thrillers that have been stuffed into the "blaxploitation" box, plus a good number of westerns and comedies by and for African-Americans.

  Something happened in the 1980s, maybe due to the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster, and now we mainly remember Blazing Saddles (1974), a movie directed by a white guy that plays the "black cowboy" idea for laughs. Blazing Saddles is a really funny movie, but it came out in the context of movies like this which took the same topic seriously. So it's like we're yukking it up at Spaceballs, but all we remember is Buck Rogers and we've all forgotten about Star Wars.

  You don't need a "reason" to put black characters in a period genre piece, but this movie has a very good reason and it gives the plot, which is basically cribbed from Wagon Master, some real heft. It helps that the ending isn't a big disappointment like Wagon Master's was. A really solid movie overall.

  I could have used a little more of Harry Belafonte's con-man preacher. There's a great scene where he's sweet-talking himself into Sunday dinner and you can see the pioneer ladies thinking "He's obviously a con man, but it's not like we have a real preacher..." But probably the best scene is one where Buck and the Preacher rob a telegraph office, but they can't get at the money, and rather than let it become a Dog Day Afternoon situation they just cross the street and rob the bank as well!

• Francofonia (2015): Kinda disappointing film from the director of the gorgeous Russian Ark (2002) (one of the first films reviewed on NYCB). There's a plotline that's really good, and it's the one that you see in the promotional material for the film, making you think it's the whole film, but there are two or three other plotlines sprinkled in and none of them are very good. I did like seeing Napoleon mugging in front of the Louvre's collection of paintings of him. And that one plotline is really good. Maybe a "Phantom Edit"-type vigilante operation is called for.

  On the plus side, when we went to Paris this made me feel better about skipping the Louvre. There were specific works of art I wanted to see in Paris, but they were all in the Pompidou Centre.

• The Defiant Ones (1958): An intense, personal thriller. Poitier and Tony Curtis are great, and the supporting cast includes Theodore Bikel as the Southern sheriff, plus Lon Chaney Jr. doing the same twitchy-eyed thing he does in The Indestructible Man (1957). One of those films you can recommend just by saying who's in it and asserting that they didn't screw it up.
• Paris Blues (1961): Conveniently, we saw this movie the day we left for our Paris vacation. There's a scene with Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll on the bridge by Notre Dame, and twenty-four hours later we were walking that same bridge. Really great.

  The movie itself is pretty light fare, but it's an enjoyable rom-dram that doesn't settle for easy answers, and it's got hot jazz and great shots of nighttime Paris. I got a strong Commander Riker vibe watching Paul Newman pretend (?) to play the trombone.

• Tomorrowland (2015): I'd been wanting to see this movie for its retro-tech cheese factor, but then it was shown on the flight back from Paris at an inconvenient but not quite ignorable angle, and I got enough of it to see that it all plays out as you'd expect, but not enough to say that I've really 'seen' the movie. So let it sit eternally on this dread threshold, neither seen nor unseen, neither Rounded Up nor un-, until the end of days!
• Blow Out (1981): This started out great but rapidly went downhill, where The Parallax View (1974) starts out okay but ramps up the tension throughout. I feel like Brian de Palma is wagging a Hitchcockian finger at me for my supposed voyeuristic love of exploitation movies, whether they're trash like the fictional movie-within-a-movie in Blow Out, or Hollywood fare like Blow Out itself, or something highbrow like Blue Velvet. But I don't seek these movies out, buddy, I just watch what they show at the museum, so the joke's on you.

  Anyway, I would have liked this movie a lot more if there had been less crazy John Lithgow and more John Travolta out in the woods with a shotgun mic. My recommendation is to watch The Parallax View and The Conversation (1974) instead of seeing this. Sure, it takes more time to watch two really good movies instead of one mediocre movie, but you can't rush quality.

• Shuffle Along (2016): Our second Broadway excursion. Post-Hamilton we've decided to pay more attention when our theater-loving friends say something's great and we should get in on the ground floor. And... problems with this technique are now becoming apparent.

  Shuffle Along is a good time. It's an all-black musical about the creation and staging of another all-black musical. It deals with serious topics in a funny way, it's got great old-timey costumes and tap dancing. If I saw a musical every week I too might be thinking "yes, this is a cut above, a true classic", and recommending it to all. But since I don't, it was well within the range of "normal musical" to me. The love story was meh. The history bits suffered from major show-don't-tell issues (occasionally also a problem with Hamilton).

  We saw a preview, so maybe everything has been improved 100%, but what hasn't changed is that tickets start at eighty bucks a pop. I'm not prepared to pay that much for entertainment on a regular basis. And this strategy has worked really well for me. In all my years in New York the only live performance I've regretted missing was Bryan Cranston in All The Way, and they're turning that into a movie, so no harm done.

• Zootopia (2016): Seen on a double-date. There was a lot of fun stuff in this. The worldbuilding was great, and the design of Zootopia the city makes me feel like the movie is taking place on a space station or a ringworld or something. As with Inside Out (2015), there was also the hint of something deeper but I don't think the "deeper" thing was put together coherently enough to deserve credit. And even at the superficial level Inside Out was a lot deeper than this movie, if that makes sense.

  For me, the best cop stories are stories about systemic problems that the cops can't fix or are making worse. Zootopia is that kind of story, but this could easily have been an accident that happened in the course of building a more superficial story about the same topics. According to IMDB trivia a lot of the movie was reworked after the first test screenings in 2014, so that could have caused it, or maybe the creators of the movie didn't want to "overthink" things. (Bah!)

  The Discworld Watch novels also deal with the topic of the responsibilities of a police force in a multispecies society. In fact I think it gets a little tiresome seeing the Watch novels deal with this issue over and over again, but Terry Pratchett clearly gets it. And I don't think Zootopia does because it creates problems of systemic racism and addresses them as though they are problems of personal prejudice (which it nails with cringey gags).

  Is a shrew crime boss terrorizing your city? Maybe his grip would be less secure if he didn't know 100% that there are no shrews on the police force! That sort of thing. It's hard to fault Zootopia for being "unrealistic" in this regard, since very similar things happen in real life. And I'm spending a lot of time on this because Zootopia does seem aware that something deeper is going on, and interested in addressing it, but it feels like the edges got sanded off.

  Having written all this I can't square it with the fact that my favorite cop movie is Hot Fuzz (2007), a cinematic tribute to all the cop movies I hate. Could it be that I contain... multitudes?

  Speaking of the shrew crime boss... The Godfather came out in 1972, long before I was born. When I was a kid you'd sometimes get a Saturday morning cartoon doing the Godfather bit, and it felt a little old-fashioned, like seeing Clark Gable in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Now it's 2016. This movie came out forty years ago and we're still doing extended riffs on it. Not a 'parody' per se, but a long reenactment with no twists or jokes. I love some Maurice LaMarche but it feels like this bit came out of a "Man, have you heard LaMarche do Brando? It's incredible, we gotta put him in the movie!" type discussion. They shoulda had him do the frozen peas commercial instead.

  IMDB trivia: "This is the tenth film from Walt Disney Animation Studios to feature a character who is revealed to be the villain of the movie as a surprise[.]" Not much of a surprise anymore, is it?

• That's it for movies. But there's one more thing to take care of. This month, let's focus the Television Spotlight on Columbo (1971-2003), a mystery show where there's no mystery. You know who the killer is—it's the celebrity guest star, the first act is them committing the murder—and you know what's going to happen—Peter Falk's Columbo is going to come in, get the killer to underestimate him, and then bust them.

  It's tempting to say something like "you'd think this wouldn't work," but why wouldn't it work? It works fine. You know exactly what's going to happen in a Bertie Wooster story, but it's still hilarious. What doesn't "work" is lazy mystery shows that assume they can fool us because we don't know how to watch television. As with many TV shows, Columbo's plots are a metaphor for the process of the show's production: the triumph of patient competence over flashy genius.

  I came into Columbo a few years ago because Sumana's parents were big fans. I'd heard of it, sure, but thought it was just another 70s cop show like Kojak. But you put them side by side and there's no contest. Columbo might be the earliest fully modern television show. It's the Tristam Shandy of TV.

  That said, individual episodes can flop. Each episode is basically a long face-off, so it succeeds or fails on the chemistry between Falk and the guest star. And the 70s episodes are a lot better than the 90s episodes. But overall, a hell of an achievement. As your guide to sorting out the good from the bad, I recommend the Columbo podcast Just One More Thing.

Well, see you next—ow! I banged my shin on Tomorrowland (2015), which for some reason is sitting right in the middle of this high-traffic dread threshold! Oh, right, the curse. Well, only one way to undo my hasty decision—express an opinion about the movie! It was a nice surprise to see Hugh Laurie as the scenery-chewing villain. Bye!

• Deadpool (2016): Saw this with Sarah (now my official "Sumana doesn't want to see this movie" buddy) and liked it a lot more than I thought I would. There was a ton of violence but only one scene made me squirm in my seat. Not in a good way like The King of Comedy. Just awful, that scene. Anyway, everything else was good! The R rating really gave Deadpool room to stretch out and depict a healthy attitude towards perverted sex. A big part of my distaste for superhero movies is their PG-13 treatment of material that really needs either a G or a hard R. Good job dodging that bullet (but not any other bullet), Deadpool.

  However, I'm still holding out for Zack Snyder's big-budget treatment of Ambush Bug, and the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Netflix original. Why get my hopes up only to have them pre-dashed? Take a look at this handy chart and you'll see why Ambush Bug is the best:

  	Metafictionally aware	Not metafictionally aware
  Has metafictional superpowers	Ambush Bug	Squirrel Girl
  No metafictional superpowers	Deadpool, She-Hulk	Superman or whatever

• Dragon Blade (2015): It happened again! A Chinese movie started out really fun and lighthearted, then took a horrifying turn, and then had a sappy tacked-on ending, without ever acknowledging the abrupt shifts in tone. The first part of this movie is really great, friendly and big-hearted, with Jackie Chan and John Cusak together-at-lasting to their (and your) hearts' content. But then... it's not great, let's leave it at that. I would put this movie alongside The Invention of Lying (2009) where the first half of the movie is incredibly fun and creative, and then, eh, turn it off and do something else. Or watch the first halves of both! Make it a double half-feature!

  As is only appropriate for a movie about Roman soldiers, the inaccuracies in this movie are... legion. It makes me question the history I've learned from other Asian martial-arts films. Did a CGI whale really swallow the Korean royal seal in 14xx, as The Pirates claimed? Did that guy in The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom really have to deliver those snacks? Whom can I trust?

• The Barker (1928): From Film Forum's "It Girls" series. I would not describe this film as good, but it has some fun carnival bits. You know that I don't automatically think a newer film automatically supercedes an older film on the same topic, but Nightmare Alley (1947) is just better in every way, a much better "seedy side of the carnival" film, despite having to deal with the Hays Code. I'm not even sure this film is supposed to be seedy at all. It does have the traditional flapper floozy, but there's a twist—you'll never guess which group 11 transition metal is the primary constituent of her heart! Oh, you guessed. I suppose I could have clued you in more gradually.

  The thing I found most interesting was how they did this film as a hybrid talkie. The lively carnival scenes have sound and the scenes in the carnival wagon have title cards. Did sound break upon the scene when this movie was halfway done? Were they experimenting to see how much talkie audiences could take? I don't know, and don't care enough to try to find out.

• It (1927): Now this is more like it. In fact, this is exactly like It. At first glance this movie may seem like an outdated slog. A movie based on an essay in Cosmopolitan written by a woman named Elinor Glyn? What vision does the name "Elinor Glyn" conjure up for you? Personally, I thought "Margaret Dumont as a Cardassian". When the movie started with a character picking up Cosmo and reading the essay that is the basis for the movie, and then Elinor Glyn herself showed up in the movie to talk about the essay she wrote, I was merely confirmed in this opinion. And yet, why shouldn't middle-aged 1920s society women be able to write scandalous, sexy comedies with ridiculous didactic self-inserts? Middle-aged men have been doing that for decades with much less impressive results.

  It is fun, the jokes still land, and it shows exactly what it's like to be one of those girls who's always getting entangled with Bertie Wooster. Even the essay is interesting, although I maintain that adapting an essay to a feature film is a bridge too far. The concept of "It", which is generally glossed as being identical to "sex appeal", is actually closer to the very modern notion of "cool". Overall, a pleasant surprise.

  Movies in the "It Girls" series I wish I'd seen, solely based on their titles: Safe In Hell (1931), Why Be Good? (1929), Loose Ankles (1930) and a supremely honest movie that's just called Dames (1934).

• The Straight Story (1999): David Lynch's proof of concept that he can make an effective film without employing any of his usual cheap tricks. Except! Apparently he can't make a film without making an actress cry and filming it. (Funny scene though.) Overall it was fine, and I'm probably not gonna like any Lynch movie more than I like this one, but not a very high recommendation from me.
• I saw a block of children's shorts at the museum during the Children's Film Festival, and most of them were forgettable but it was all worth it because at the end of the shorts was... a new A Town Called Panic animation! Yes! A Town Called Panic: Return To School (2016?), 22 minutes of non-stop stop-motion silliness! It's not on IMDB and I could find no English-language information about this film, but it exists, I saw it, and I laughed and laughed.

  BTW, when researching this entry I learned that the 2009 A Town Called Panic feature film is on Amazon Prime. Here's my review; basically, I give A Town Called Panic the highest recommendation I can give a movie without implying that it has anything to say about anything.

This month the Television Spotlight shines on Drunk History, a Youtube series that made the leap to basic cable and has been going strong for long enough that I'm comfortable spotlighting it here even though there's (hopefully) many more seasons to come. Sumana has written about the uses of history in Drunk History, Hamilton, and the comics of Kate Beaton, so I'll just say that all three use anachronism to deconstruct the accepted narratives of Serious History. Drunk History treats Serious History as an inhibition to be broken down with booze, and then tries to build the wall back up with 100% literal reenactments that treat the drunken ramblings of the narrator like they're Shelby Foote talking about Gettysburg. Great stuff.

I'm pretty sure Drunk History was also the inspiration for the hilarious, Mormon-friendly Kid Snippets Youtube series, which means that even as it's still on the air it's paying back in inspiration to the indie-web-film community that spawned it.

• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992): Really unpleasant, reminds me why I put off Twin Peaks for so long: I was afraid it was all gonna be like this. David Lynch gets a lot of credit for putting women actors through harrowing emotional experiences and filming it, and that's sort of the core of what I don't like about highbrow film. I don't know whether this opinion will prove popular or un- but I think the constraints of working with a 1990s television network and Mark Frost, Hill Street Blues writer, made Twin Peaks a LOT better than the corresponding David Lynch Movie (i.e. this movie) would have been.
• Hail, Caesar! (2016): Fun in a way that seems light and fluffy until you look beyond the boundaries of the silver screen and give a moment's thought to what's going to happen after the movie, at which point you know true terror. "Terror" may be a little strong. My point is this, like the movies it depicts, is a fun movie that carefully keeps all the ugliness out of the frame. There's a metafictional cleverness here that is unique even among Coen movies and subtle enough to miss. Recommended.
• Hamilton: An American Musical (2015): Live theater makes its first appearance here at Film Roundup. After months of living with all my friends and loved ones being obsessed with the Hamilton cast recording, our tickets, purchased in the mists of time, finally came due, and Sumana and I saw Broadway's hottest musical with Brendan, his friend, Rachel Chalmers, and her kids. It was good! The subject matter and the high information density of hip-hop brought me in, and the solid performances kept me interested. I've lived in New York City ten years and I think this is my first Broadway musical, so you can tell this isn't really my thing, but Hamilton is a genuine crossover hit.
• Man With a Movie Camera (1929): Another "believe the hype" selection, though after 85 years the hype on this drop has settled down to a dull roar. This docudrama about filmmaking has aged incredibly well. You get the thrill of the avant-garde with the comfort that comes from the avant-garde having been proven right and adopted by the mainstream. The cinema verite style may have seemed weird to moviegoers at the time, but it's not verite anymore--it's a glimpse of life in a long-away place. The rhetoric of editing has become standard, and for good reason--this is great stuff.

  You can watch this film online. As with most works from 1929, the copyright status is unclear, but it tends to stay up longer on Youtube than most feature films.

• Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006): A goofy comedy with no villain, just stupid people sabotaging their own lives. I think Sumana is a bigger Will Farrell fan than I am, but he's fun. Gary Cole is great as always. Some might say this is the dreaded 'sports movie', and it certainly has the sports movie plotline, but to my way of thinking, in a 'sports movie' about NASCAR racing, the characters would be the cars themselves. Ever give any thought to why Cars (also 2006) is terrible? Here's your answer!
• Executive Suite (1954): A fun, realistic story of corporate intrigue. Barbara Stanwyck doesn't get much to do, but it has a nice bit of nerd wish-fulfillment as the industrial designer fights his way to the top.
• Mermaid (2016): a.k.a. "Mei ren yu". The non-filler parts of this movie are hilarious verbal comedy, pretty decent slapstick, and horrifying violence against marine life. Why do I keep walking into this trap? I'm just gonna lay it out here, spoilers be damned: this movie has a scene where trapped mermaids are massacred with automatic weapons. Also a scene right out of the Iron Chef octopus episode that made me stop watching Iron Chef. Does the whale die? Some do, some don't! Spin the wheel! Not recommended. Just find the police station scene online and watch it, 'cause that scene's a riot.
• I went to IFC and saw the Oscar nominations for Best Animated Short. The best one was World of Tomorrow, already reviewed in Film Roundup past, but the eventual winner (Bear Story) was also good. I also enjoyed Sanjay's Super Team, and was a little disappointed in We Can't Live Without Cosmos. The non-nominees inserted into the program were not great, and mainly served to illustrate an odd trend in which French animators specialize in animating realistic fur and link to their Linkedin accounts in the credits.
• Ran (1985): Some movies I watch because I think they'll be great, or at least interesting. Some movies I watch even though I'm not super excited about them, because other people think they're great and I want to understand why. It's not as clear as you'd think that the "I'll like this" movies have a better success rate than the "other people like this" movies, but Ran is in the latter category and did little for me. It looks nice, I liked a couple scenes, but eh.

  Here's a hypothesis I'll be testing: I like Kurosawa's modern movies a lot better than his old-timey movies. Ikiru stays with me, probably will stay with me for the rest of my life, and historicals like The Hidden Fortress and Ran just feel like dudes hitting each other. Not as much depth, you know?

In lieu of Television Roundup this month I'd like to put in a good word for a company I don't like very much: Amazon. Specifically, Amazon Instant Video. If you spend $8 a month on Netflix you can stream the output of their recommendation engine all day long, but if you want to watch something in particular, you're likely to be disappointed, because Netflix's selection is terrible. That's why they put so much work into the recommendation engine! From one who knows.

By contrast, Amazon Instant Video has an excellent selection of classic, arthouse, and just plain old films. I generally want to watch specific titles, and about 90% of the things I put on my wish list are available on Amazon for the price of a video rental. Remember that? Back when there were video rental stores, you could borrow some Criterion DVDs and the works of big-name arthouse directors, but could you get an obscure noir, a 1950s office comedy, or an undistinguished war movie that you only want to watch because there's a character with your name in the movie? The answer was no. Same with the public library (still a good place to borrow seasons of television though).

So we frequently purchase the time-limited right to stream a movie from Amazon. It ends up a bit more expensive than Netflix, and if we watched a movie every single night it would get pricey real fast, but it's a lot more satisfying for casual use.

We do sometimes have Netflix-style nights where we just want to watch something that's free on Amazon Prime, and unfortunately we recently encountered the worst documentary I've ever seen, a thirty-minute piece on Queen that's part of a series of terrible music documentaries. They're all rush jobs cobbled together from still photos cadged from Geocities fan pages, old television footage, and interviews from other peoples' unfinished documentaries.

There's no Queen music in the Queen documentary. The interview subjects tell rambling stories laced with vague, inaccurate recollections. It's like Drunk History, except nobody's drunk, just frequently wrong. I know people get things wrong in interviews, but it's the filmmaker's job to fact-check and find some way of conveying the correct information, and that didn't happen here. We peeked at a couple other docs in the series and although they're all awful, only the Queen documentary was hilariously awful.

• Office (2015): a.k.a. "Hua li shang ban zu". A gorgeous musical with a lot of great songs and a really dull, standard issue plot. So, effectively an American musical from the 1950s. I was hoping it would turn into the Chinese version of The Apartment, but it didn't get much past The Pajama Game. However, unlike other movies with dull plots, this movie is always fun to look at, and most of the songs are really fun. So, semi-recommended.
• McFarland, USA (2015): You know my feelings about sports movies, and this was sports movie all the way, but I was really interested in this one. I'd been wanting to watch it for a while, and finally saw it with my sister Rachel when she was in town. Why? Because this movie actually happened to us.

  In 1989, our dad abruptly moved us to the San Joaquin Valley where he became a cross-country coach at the local high school. (For all I know he got the idea watching the 1988 Griffith Park race that's recreated at the climax of McFarland USA.) Dad saw talent in kids that didn't have a lot of options, and helped them develop that talent. I remember him talking about the McFarland team and I probably got dragged to McFarland for meets. So this wasn't just a movie for us. As soon as the immortal line "We can't afford to live in Bakersfield!" dropped, Rachel and I knew that what we were seeing was raw and real.

  How can a by-the-numbers sports movie also be raw and real? It's simple: selection bias. My dad's story was very similar to Jim White's, but there's no movie about Dad, because his abrupt move to Arvin wasn't an exile in which he would forge a sporting dynasty. It was the rash decision of a dying man. For me, hanging over every scene of McFarland USA is the awareness that a feel-good sports movie can abruptly turn into a depressing indie film about a shattered family.

  Some nitpicks: In the early meets, the McFarland team is running against schools like Palo Alto (240 miles away from McFarland), not schools like Wasco (12 miles away). I guess kids from Bakersfield and Fresno don't make good sports-movie snobs. We were also certain there would be a plot point about running in tennis shoes without breaking them in, and got kind of annoyed when it didn't happen.

• Sabrina (1954): Billy Wilder is nearly able to make a romance between 55-year-old Humphrey Bogart and 25-year-old Audrey Hepburn not seem creepy. It's a really fun movie, with great performances, assured female sexuality, Wilder's trademark respect for office work, and humor that ranges from sophisticated observation to jokes about butts. Good stuff.

And now, the Television Spotlight, focusing on a show that we started in January and finished in February:

• Twin Peaks (1990-1991): Seen many years after Beth gave us the Season 1 DVDs, but not quite late enough that we can immediately switch over to the new season premièring in 2017. This was really solid, really fresh compared to other shows of the time. Over the years I'd picked up the impression that the characters in Twin Peaks were completely illegible, like aliens, and I wanted to see how they pulled that off, but the truth is they didn't try. The inhabitants of Twin Peaks are... quirky. Slightly weirder than most sitcom characters. Disappointing in theory, but I didn't mind because for the most part the characters are very well-realized and likeable. And there are a couple characters who are more on the "alien" side, though I don't think it advances past the level of a Star Trek episode.

  The second season was still fun but not as strong. I got the sense that the showrunners were winging it and maybe fighting a bit. Characters came close to explicitly saying "Terrible David Lynch things keep happening to me, so I'm going to go find another TV show to be in." or "Remember me? I'm the interesting villain! This other villain is a dime-store piker compared to me!"

  We also rewatched the Psych parody/homage episode "Dual Spires", which was baffling when we first watched it in 2010 but is now revealed as a solid mass of references. Well, I guess that was pretty clear the first time we watched it, but now we get all the references. Not a great Psych episode, but worth it just as a game of "spot the in-jokes".

Books

I've been giving books short shrift by only mentioning a single Crummy.com Book of the Year, and in 2015 I started reading books on my commute (partly because I'm developing a tool that helps people read books on their commute), so I can afford to mention more than one. I have records of reading 25 books this year, and probably a couple more slipped through the cracks, but I've got a solid best-of slate.

The 2015 Crummy.com Book of the Year is Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir by Bryan Burrough. So much good stuff in that book. If you want to write fictional dingy spacecraft, you can't do better than looking at the dingy spacecraft we've actually built.

Runners-up:

1. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (who needs her own NYCB post)
2. Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones
3. You Can't Win by Jack Black (not that Jack Black)
4. The Space Opera Renaissance, ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (book needs its own NYCB post)
5. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, by Anya von Bremzen
6. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers

Honorable mention to Mallworld by Somtow Sucharitkul, a book that I didn't love, but I was blown away by its inventiveness. In 1982, Sucharitkul crammed Mallworld with all the jokes that would later be used in Futurama.

Film

Saw ninety-one features this year. As always, only films I saw for the first time are eligible for consideration, though that only eliminates three. Here are my must-see movies:

1. The Americanization Of Emily (1964)
2. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
3. The Brink's Job (1978)
4. Inside Out (2015)
5. Sullivan's Travels (1941)
6. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
7. The Breaking Point (1950)
8. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
9. Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
10. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
11. The Parallax View (1974)
12. Nightmare Alley (1947)

And this year's bumper crop of "recommended" films:

1. The Best of Everything (1959)
2. Clueless (1995)
3. Wagon Master (1950)
4. The Crimson Kimono (1959)
5. The Godfather, Part II (1974)
6. Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
7. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
8. Inside Man (2006)
9. The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
10. Kundo: Age of the Rampant (2014)
11. Ed Wood (1994)
12. How To Marry A Millionaire (1953)
13. Brainstorm (1983)
14. Invention For Destruction (1958)

Honorable mentions to the burglary in Rififi (1955) and the hotel tour in The Shining (1980). I don't want to sit through the whole movie again but those scenes were awesome.

Bots

Looking at the list of my follows I feel like I need to broaden my bot horizons because I love all of Allison's bots (except that damn Unicode Ebooks, which still has three more followers than Smooth Unicode) and I love bots that post images from image collections, and that doesn't seem like a very diverse set. Anyway, here are my faves of 2015:

• Deep Question Bot and The Ephemerides by Allison Parrish
• wikishoutouts by Jeff Sisson
• Gutenberg's Delight by Hugo
• The now-defunct men only by thricedotted

Games

Didn't play a lot of new video games this year because of the persistent problem with my computer shutting off if I dare to start up a game. I did replace the computer near the end of the year, so there will probably be more games in 2016. In the meantime, the Crummy.com Game of the Year is the super-atmospheric This War of Mine; its only flaw, which it shares with nearly all games, is that it's not roguelike enough.

A couple runners-up and honorable mentions:

1. 80 Days
2. Mini Metro
3. Alphabear

I played board games pretty regularly but the only new game I remember is the much-loved "Code Names", which I also think is great.

I'd wanted to do an escape room this year, but put the idea on hold when Sumana wasn't interested. Near the end of the year, though, Pat Rafferty (who now works at an escape room in Portland) invited me to join his room-escaping team, and I leapt stood up at the opportunity. As part of a crew of six, I helped to repair a drifting spacecraft. It was really immersive, finally allowing me to live the experience of crawling through a Jeffries tube.

My only complaint is the puzzles were free-to-play iOS game-level stuff. I understand why you have to do it that way, since none of us would be able to repair a spacecraft in real life, but it meant that a very immersive exploration experience was constantly interrupted by having to decode some Morse Code or solve cheesy riddles. Same reason I didn't like Myst. I did like the puzzles that made you combine objects.

Going Out

Stereotypically this section would be called "Going Outside", but all the things I want to talk about happened indoors. In fact, two of them happened in the same building: the Town Hall Theater near Times Square. In fact, all of them, since I moved the escape room to the previous section,

Sumana and I both grew up listening to NPR, and we're both fans of the schticky comedy and down-home existentialism of A Prairie Home Companion (though less ardent fans than we were as teenagers). 2015 was the year I told Sumana (paraphrase) "You know, PHC does shows in New York, and as a project focused around a single individual who has been doing it since before we were born, it might not be around for much longer. We should see it live while we have the opportunity." Sumana was convinced by my airtight logic, and we caught the April 25th show. We had lousy seats but it was fun!

Then, near the end of the year, the PDQ Bach Golden Anniversary Concert Kickstarter was announced. As per previous paragraph, Sumana and I are also fans of Peter Schickele's ur-podcast Schickele Mix, so we went through a similar process, although I ended up going to the concert alone. This time I had a great seat! Beautiful music, lots of laughs, I'm really glad I went.

Food

As you can see from the associated pictures, I lost a lot of weight in 2015. I still have a little more planned, but I'm very close to the impossible-seeming target weight I set in July. I found the Atkins diet to be very effective. I don't think I have a lot of self-control, but I am very, very stubborn, and Atkins lets you substitute stubbornness for self-control.

Because of this I didn't exactly spend a lot of time in 2015 exploring New York's burgeoned restaurant scene, and the Food section will be correspondingly short. However, I want to give a special shout-out to the King of Falafel halal food truck in Astoria. See, most places, if you order a meal without the carby thing, they'll simply omit the carby thing, yielding about 60% of a meal. However, if you order a plate at King of Falafel and ask for no rice, they will fill up the empty space with more meat and salad, and you still get a full meal. Thanks, King of Falafel. Saved my sanity.

Also this sugar-free flourless chocolate cake recipe is good for managing your chocolate cravings. Honorable mention: xylitol.

My Accomplishments

People say that being on Atkins normalizes your energy level, getting rid of the highs and crashes, and I've found this to be true but very inconvenient, since the highs are where I do all my creative work, and the crashes happen at night, a.k.a. "getting sleepy", or they happen at 2 PM, when I drink some tea, problem solved. Right now I feel like it's 1:30 PM all day. Anyway, if you don't count the amazing work I did going from Before to After, 2015 wasn't my most productive year, since I spent half the year in power-saving mode.

But I did finish Situation Normal, and handed it off to an agent, so the book is officially Not My Problem. I've started work on a new novel, Mine, my take on the classic Big Dumb Object In Space story.

I wrote four short stories: "We, the Unwilling" (a bonus story for Situation Normal); "The Katie Event" (the third in the Awesome Dinosaurs trilogy, which you haven't seen because the second in the trilogy needs a revision); "Worm Hunt" (exploratory work for a novel I probably won't write); and "Only G51 Kids Will Remember These Five Moments", which I think I can sell if I ever get around to sending it out.

I gave three talks of note:

• "The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book" (RESTFest), which goes over my hypermedia work at NYPL.
• What Have I Done? (RESTFest), a five-minute talk about the "Richardson Maturity Model"
• "Painting Bots, Carving Bots" (unofficial Bot Summit), a praxis-oriented taxonomy of bots.

I crafted a fabulous NaNoGenMo entry with a one-line shell script: Alphabetical Order.

Four bots came from my fingers in 2015:

• The highly overengineered Ghostbusters Past.
• The old-school phrasebot AMA Bot.
• The self-descriptive A Dull Bot.
• My fave of the year, Roller Derby Names! Endless fun and easy to write.

I also breathed new life into Smooth Unicode by implementing beautiful emoji mosaics.

Well-wishing

Finally I want to wish all of you readers the best in 2016, and to ask you to tell me what you liked in 2015. or what you're proud of accomplishing. I like other peoples' posts like this (Here's Allison's, here's Darius's), and I think taking a moment at the beginning of the new year to look back is satisfying in a way that can't be matched by the corporate "best of the year" lists that dominate the end of the old year.

• The Last Blitzkrieg (1959): A weird little war movie that I watched for only one reason: it's the only movie I've ever heard of that features a character named Leonard Richardson. Except that's not really his name! "Leonard Richardson" is an alias the main character steals from a red-blooded American POW to carry out a nefarious scheme.

  This movie was nearly interesting--there were some moments when it could have taken a really cool turn, got some dramatic irony or moral ambiguity going, a la The Americanization of Emily. But nope! It's a normal WWII movie that was made fourteen years after the war ended. Bizarre.

• Sunset Boulevard (1950): This is a great movie. Exactly as you'd expect me to say. Classic dark-roast Wilder. 'Nuff said.
• The Breaking Point (1950): The sort of surprise that keeps me coming back to the museum. Sometimes I know a film will be great ahead of time, sometimes for educational purposes I watch a "classic" I don't think I'll like, and once in a while I'm blown away by a film I had no particular expectations for. Such was The Breaking Point. This film rises above popcorn noir by focusing not on the gritty glamor of the underworld but on the corruption of a decent family man. Great, great stuff.
• Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton (2015): Guy Maddin somehow gets a job doing the behind-the-scenes documentary on a Canadian war movie. He does his best to bite the hand that feeds. Some good lines ("A war movie is a funeral with no body.") and great gags. The weird video effects are inspired by 80s VHS movies and video games, and thus I find them less annoying than the usual silent-movie schtick. I think Maddin should stick this film on Vimeo.
• Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015): Pretty educational. It was fun to hear Truffaut be a huge fanboy. If I'd known about the book this film is about, my "French New Wave films are secretly genre films" theory would have gotten off the ground a lot sooner. The things you miss out on by not going to film school.
• The Golden Cane Warrior (2014): Starts out really cool, but the best character (the martial-arts mom) dies in the first act, her kids take over, and the middle of the film is kind of a slog. It comes back together for the big fight at the end. Sumana liked it more than I did.

  A character in this movie does the most heroic thing you can do in this sort of movie: she stops a village from being burned down, preventing the traditional "burnt village" scene. The villagers get slaughtered anyway, but a valiant effort.

• Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015): This was going to be my Christmas movie to see with Susanna, but she had to take care of her new baby, so I saw it with John and the niblings who were old enough for it. This movie provides a good illustration of the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars: J. J. Abrams ruined Star Trek, but he did an excellent job with Star Wars.

  It's totally Abrams-friendly! Star Wars is based on action set-pieces and eyeball kicks, not thought experiments. The Star Trek characters are all military officers who serve together, but the Star Wars characters are distinctive archetypes, so it doesn't bog the film down to give everyone their scene. We expect a Star Wars movie to have a megalomanical villain, so it's not a disappointment when it happens every single time. The morality is cut and dried: light side, dark side. You can make the hero fight a giant spider in the second act and it makes perfect sense.

  I think Star Trek is an important contribution to human culture, whereas I think Star Wars is a fun couple of movies that got out of hand, but I gotta face facts: the Star Wars movies that actually get made are now better than the Star Trek movies that actually get made. I don't like it, but that's what how Hollywood works.

  Anyway, a really fun movie. I'm especially tickled that they made the hypothetical "plumbing contractor who works on the Death Star" from Clerks into a compelling, canonical Star Wars character.

• The Last Picture Show (1971): I guess this is the month where I watched movies that claimed to feature "The Last" of something. Appropriate, as this is The Last time I will watch this film. I'm not going to say this is a 'bad' film, there's a lot of good in it, but it hits too close for comfort (I basically grew up in that town) and I also encountered two of my common bugbears:

  One, as I've mentioned before, ninety minutes is kind of my cutoff point. I'll watch almost any kind of film if you can keep it to ninety minutes. If you go beyond that point, I need something compelling, like a plot, or fight sequences, or I get antsy. This film is over two hours long, and...

  I'm averse to films that could end at any time. The Last Picture Show is such a film. It has a through-line, sure, but since the point of the film is that life is a stochastic process that just creeps at its petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time, I'm sitting here at minute 90+k unsure if this movie's ever going to be over or what. Whereas Celine and Julie Go Boating has a rough first hour, but by ninety minutes a plot is apparent, and by the two-hour mark you can see what has to happen for the film to come to a conclusion.

  Just to end on a positive note, it was nice to see young Jeff Bridges. And if you want a cynical 1970s black-and-white Bogdanavich film about the horrible past that's funny and full of life, check out Paper Moon (1973). That movie's more my speed.

• The Cheap Detective (1978): Rewatch with Beth over New Year's Eve. A classic pre-Airplane! spoof with incredible casting (Peter Falk! Louise Fletcher! Stockard Channing!) that gets a lot of laughs out of its absurd dialogue but isn't the perfect classic I remember, because I mentally edited out the bad/boring/offensive parts.

  Hilarious and worth a watch, but not tight enough to be a work of genius. Trying to do The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and Casablanca all at once makes it less a tightly focused experience like Airplane! and more like the omnibus spoof movies that dominated stupid comedy in the 2000s. I do think this movie is funnier overall than Airplane!, but I prefer verbal comedy to sight gags, and there's no wasted space in Airplane!. Unless I mentally edited that movie as well.

And now, the Television Spotlight focuses on a show that we watched in its entirety in December:

• John Adams (2008): Hamilton-mania continues to run rampant in our household, and I had the idea to apply HBO's recent miniseries to Sumana's forehead as a sort of poultice. We had a good time and enjoyed the subtle shout-outs to last month's poultice, 1776. The John/Abigail relationship is always a winner.

  If you look at the reviews for this movie, you'll see that a lot of the low-rated reviews are based on complaints about historical inaccuracies, but they're generally pretty minor inaccuracies, well within the range of... Creative License. In fact, in the final episode, Adams, talking to John Trumbull, makes the 'historical inaccuracy' critique more effectively than most John Adams reviewers, who admittedly may not have made it to the final episode. Just a little bit of fourth-wall breaking to send you on your way.

  I haven't read the book but I think this series does a good job of portraying Adams the way he might have seen himself: as an unappreciated figure, always working away in someone else's shadow, a man whose greatest accomplishment as president was having the guts to do nothing when the public was demanding he make a horrible mistake.

• Aparajito (1956): I believe this movie was bankrolled by Indian moms looking for effective ways to guilt-trip their children. I saw this while Sumana was out of town. Sumana really wants to watch the Apu trilogy, and I'm happy to watch these movies with her, but it's the kind of episodic character study stereotypically associated with foreign film and it's not a great way for me to spend my alone time. PS: Call your mother!
• My Name Is Nobody (1973): An attempt to deconstruct the spaghetti western a la Sergio Leone, the way John Ford deconstructed his own work The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I don't think it works very well. Ford's films are full of humor and in Liberty Valance he uses that humor to fuel the dramatic irony. I find spaghetti westerns effective insofar as they're bleak and kinda humorless, and this film pours on the humor to create a satire of the genre. Admittedly this was (barely) pre-Blazing Saddles, so I understand why this movie was made, but between Blazing Saddles on the lowbrow end and Liberty Valance on the highbrow, the western is pretty well deconstructed by 1974.

  This movie contains an awesome sight gag involving more pool balls on a pool table than I've ever seen before. I'll always remember that sight gag and I've already forgotten most of the rest of this movie. On IMDB for this film Sergio Leone is credited with "idea", and I hope his idea was "you should do a gag with a bunch of pool balls on a pool table" and not "what if you made a film that exposed the shallow conception of heroism in the western?" Because John Ford already had that idea.

• 1776 (1972): Among movies whose titles are years, the one with the largest delta from the year the movie was made is probably One Million Years B.C. (1966), and the smallest is Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). In between we have... this fine movie. You may know that Sumana is obsessed with Hamilton, but I don't want to listen to the soundtrack until I've seen the play, so we saw 1776 together as a compromise move because our Hamilton tickets aren't until next year.

  Sumana found it a learning experience since 1776 was a big influence on Hamilton. We agree that it's incredibly ahistorical and that the songs are overall not great (Sumana: "Do we really need a song about how Jefferson plays the violin?"). The villains (i.e. the Southern reactionaries) have the best songs, like the one that exposes New England's complicity in the slave trade. Howard da Silva does a great job playing Benjamin Franklin as I've always pictured him: as America's wacky Falstaffian uncle. According to IMDB da Silva also portrayed Franklin "in a National Park Service film presented in the 70s and 80s at Ben Franklin's home at Franklin Court, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," making this also the federal government's official portrayal of Franklin.

• Johnny Guitar (1954): Didn't find it that enjoyable, and in retrospect I mainly wanted to see this because everyone in the screenshots looks like Jeff Goldblum in Buckaroo Banzai. Not a good reason to see a movie. I did like Joan Crawford being real brassy. Just a hunch, but I think this movie is a lot better if you're a forty-year-old gay man. I feel that's the approximate shape of the thing I don't understand here.
• Out of the Past (1947): Stereotypical film noir with a character named Leonard! Boosts my hypothesis that Leonard is a perfect film noir name. For heroes, villains, thugs, cops, society gents or skid row bums... "Leonard" always works. Consider naming your next noir character Leonard!

  Oh yeah, everything else about the movie. The first few scenes defied convention with their setting and mood, but it settled in to the familiar pathways pretty quickly. Overall... popcorn noir, recommended, but not highly.

• Nightmare Alley (1947): Now this is some noir. It starts at a carnival, the place where all happiness is false and misery is paraded as entertainment. And it all goes downhill from there, and you're along for the ride. Great stuff. In particular the portrayal of a ruthless woman psychiatrist who sleeps in a Ruth Bader Ginsberg outfit seems unusually progressive for 1947.
• Clueless (1995): One of Sumana's all-time favorites, and an entry on our "women directors" watchlist. I saw it for the first time this month and I gotta say this is a great movie. The characters change over the course of the film, they avoid being John Hughes teen stereotypes, and the only real villain is dispatched pretty early on, allowing for plenty of conflict that's not predicated on someone being the antagonist. Lots of laugh-out-loud moments for me.

  One weird thing: the cell phone jokes don't land anymore. You can see them happening, you know they are jokes, but everyone has cell phones now so the jokes don't do anything. They're like the ghosts of jokes.

• The Crimson Kimono (1959): Wow, what an unusual movie. It's resembles noir, but it's too procedural, too earnest, and it has a happy ending. None of the cops are crooked; they just have personal problems that get in the way of their work. It goes overboard showing that Japanese-Americans are good, patriotic Americans. In general, it has too much faith in humanity to be film noir. But it was more daring in its time than more cynical movies, and it's the rare movie that makes me want to seek out more of this director's vision. Really glad I saw this one.
• It's the Old Army Game (1926): At this point I gotta say that W.C. Fields, like Jerry Lewis, is one of those comic legends I just don't find funny. A misanthropic loser can be a hilarious character, but I only laughed at some of the physical comedy (like the Stooges but more highbrow). The best thing about this movie was that the Zeppoish love interest resembles Derek Waters from Drunk History, allowing me to pretend that the whole thing was a Drunk History vignette gone wrong.

  This silent film includes a title card containing must be the ultimate W.C. Fields line: "I'll hit him in the face with this kid!"

• In honor of Clueless, this month the Television Spotlight focuses on Square Pegs (1982), a really smart television show about high school girls, created by SNL writer Anne Beatts. It's clever and funny in the same way as Clueless, but it's even better because it focuses on the misfits rather than the popular kids. Watch it today! Includes Devo.

• Inside Man (2006): A Sumana recommendation. I never would have seen this movie based on the poster. It looks like "Denzel Washington Has A Gun: Part XI". If I were in charge of the poster it would just say "SPIKE LEE MADE A HEIST MOVIE". However, the point is moot, the poster was designed, let's just live with it.

  This movie's really fun. It's got good twists, all the characters are genre-savvy ("This isn't Dog Day Afternoon"), and the tension to violence ratio is very very high. It's also full of classic New York set pieces like the cops suddenly falling into a big argument about MTA trains versus Metro North. Good stuff.

  Fictional video game watch: the kid in this movie is playing a PSP game that's a parody of 50 Cent: Bulletproof.

• Sneakers (1992): Another Sumana recommendation. I know that this is Brendan's favorite movie, but it's... not my favorite movie. It is okay. I like its portrayal of pre-Internet tech companies and the common varieties of nerd. The action is corny, and even though they've both done thrillers before I feel like Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier are kind of acting below their pay grades. I... don't regret seeing it? But not a revelation or anything.
• The Martian (2015): Matt Damon, regretting his performance in Interstellar (2015) as the least competent astronaut imaginable, called a Hollywood do-over and portrayed the most competent astronaut imaginable. Seen with Sarah, who disliked it, not as much as Interstellar, but she felt it was like watching a documentary. I like documentaries, so although I wasn't crazy about this movie I had a good time. I loved the 'aha!' moments of puzzle-solving that did duty for plot twists.

  My least favorite thing about The Martian: Jeff Daniels's incompetent NASA administrator. I don't object to portraying NASA brass as incompetent, but when something like this happens, and your reaction is sustained incompetence, you can't keep your job. Yet there he is in the epilogue, still running NASA, happy as a clam. I hate clams. Always so damn happy. Who do they think they are?

  This film takes an Alphaville strategy where, logically, the film must be set in the future, but the Earth scenes are effectively set in 2015. All the gee-whiz technology is in the space or Mars scenes. It's a good choice, and something you don't notice watching the movie in 2015, but I don't think it will hold up well. But maybe it's better than having some token future changes. Also they did a lot of smaller-scale time skipping, where events on Mars are interspersed with what happens on Earth twelve minutes later, when Earthlings become aware of what happened in the previous shot. I think that decision will probably age well.

  Fictional video game watch: this movie mentions real video games. No credit.

• In Bruges (2008): They say the neon lights are bright... in Bruges. This was a fun movie that had some laughs, some really good plot twists, and then disappeared up its own ass trying to set up an ending with maximum dramatic irony. Great dialogue though. I was inspired to see this movie by this random NYCB comment from 2012, so beware! You never know when you might inspire me?
• Bombay Velvet (2015): I witnessed an interesting phenomenon during this movie. It's full of things Sumana hates in movies—mainly graphic violence against women—but unlike other movies the presence of these elements didn't make her hate the movie as a whole. She really liked this movie, because pretty much everyone in the movie is Indian. Getting to see a nearly all-Indian cast in a gritty retro-noir movie is a rare occurrence.

  This is an Indian movie for people who love American movies, which may explain why its IMDB rating is a measly 5.8 compared to Baahubali's bestounding 8.8. The Scorsese influence (via Scorsese's editor Thelma Schoonmaker) is really strong. In addition to the violence and the lavish spectacle you get riffs on other Scorsese films: Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy; maybe Shutter Island, I dunno, didn't see that one. The political corruption was top-notch.

  Overall it's kind of a borderline recommendation for me, but I thought it was a better take on the "rags to blood-soaked riches" story than Scarface, so if you love that kind of movie, I think you'd really like Bombay Velvet.

  Also, Bombay Velvet probably has the best soundtrack of any movie I've seen since the invention of Film Roundup. Hot nightclub jazz + all-out Bollywood singing. It's great.

• The Forbidden Room (2015): I feel like Guy Maddin is the Thomas Pynchon of avant-garde film. He surveys the landscape and says "Damn, this is a landscape of pretentious crap. I'm going to show you how it should be done, but at the same time I'm going to be really goofy so you know I don't take it seriously." And that's The Forbidden Room. It's a pretty fun movie but it's really painful to look at. Everything looks like it's been sitting in a film canister in someone's garage for sixty years, and the fact that it's intentional doesn't help.

  The only visuals I enjoyed were the animated appearance of the nightclub singer Blob-U-Lo(?), a sort of incomprehensible phenomenon that can only be perceived as a hole in space. Super creative. He/it sings a song about being obsessed with butts, in case you were doubting the Pynchon comparison. Here's the music video.

• World of Tomorrow (2015): A fun sci-fi short, full of cool ideas and abstract eyeball kicks. Recommended.
• Cosmodrama (2015): I pitched this to Sarah as "the antidote to The Martian", and that much is correct. In The Martian an astronaut is abandoned by his companions and must rely on Science™. In Cosmodrama a group of astronauts are abandoned by Science™ itself, and must recreate their knowledge of the universe from scratch. It's a French film, so you know it's all a metaphor for the human condition.

  For the first time ever, I was annoyed that a science fiction film included too much science. You could take the title literally: it's a dramatization of Cosmos (1980). Unfortunately this makes it unclear which of the movie's ideas you're supposed to take seriously once you leave the theater.

  If you're already up on dark energy you don't need to see people explaining it; if you're not, this film makes it feel like a plot device instead of a real-world scientific mystery. I really liked the use of Lee Smolin's hypothesis about universes being created inside black holes (this is the official multiverse cosmology in Constellation Games, BTW), but it's just a hypothesis at this point. In the movie it's presented as a discovery and it's likely to read as technobabble. Especially since it's accompanied by real technobabble that has no factual basis.

  In a Lem-esque twist, the astronauts are never named and are identified in the credits only by their specialties. One of them is "the semiotician" (Lem would have written "the cyberneticist"). In another Lem-esque twist, this movie wants to be Solaris but isn't nearly as deep. It looks great though. A classic 1970s spaceship in glorious digital high definition.

• The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom (2014). A.k.a. "The White Haired Beauty", a.k.a. too many other titles to count. A mediocre Chinese historical action movie. Little bits of it were cool, but overall not worth the running time. Probably the best thing about this movie is that its historical hook is an incident called "The Case of the Red Pills". The pills sound really gross. Oh, also there's a plot point where someone gives the order: "You must deliver these snacks." The snacks look delicious.
• How To Marry A Millionaire (1953): Pretty fun, so long as you don't expect a step-by-step guide. Apparently marrying a millionaire is a matter best left entirely to chance. Some surprising plot twists as William Powell, initially set up as a creepy old guy, turns out to be a mensch. Also a baffling sequence before the titles, where the orchestra plays the overture for, like, four minutes, and you're just watching the orchestra do its thing. I didn't come here for no Leopold Stokowski, I wanna see some dames pass the Bechdel test! We speculated this was to make the experience feel like watching a Broadway musical, but How To Marry A Millionaire isn't a musical. My current hypothesis is, that bit was just supposed to play as people were walking into the theater.

  There's a fashion show in this movie, and although the outfits everyone wears for the rest of the movie still look cool and glamorous, nearly everything in the fashion show is tacky and ugly. And I gotta ask: did that stuff ever look good or is it a joke?

And now, the continuation of Television Roundup. We actually finished a show this month!

• The Legend of Korra (2012-2014): Really really fun. Creative action scenes, good humor, realistic family dynamics, cute animals, enough twists on the "Chosen One" narrative that it wasn't annoying, a big ensemble of characters who wax and wane in importance over the seasons. We had to pay attention at close to an adult level since it's assumed we watched a previous show we didn't actually watch. We had a lot of fun speculating about the worldbuilding. Highly recommended.

  Random character notes that I enjoyed: Every season Korra figures out she's being manipulated a little earlier, until in the final season she's too smart for that plot twist to work at all and they have to give that job to Bolin. Bolin, whose job throughout the series is to be Phillip J. Fry. Seriously, he never makes a decision or says a line that Fry wouldn't make or say in the same situation. It could get tiresome, but Bolin gets less time after season two. And Varrick has a cool arc that reminds me of Londo from Babylon 5. Londo starts off as a buffoon, then becomes a monster and ends up a tragic figure. Varrick starts out as a buffoon, then becomes a villain and ends up a hero—but he never stops being a buffoon! Also, he's Dr. NakaMats. Great stuff.

• Rififi (1955) a.k.a. "Du rififi chez les hommes", a.k.a. "Rough Stuff" (my translation). Where's the dividing line between French New Wave films inspired by American noir, and just plain French noir? I don't know. This is definitely on the 'just plain French noir' side, but everything in this movie—the misogyny, the stylishness, the despair—is just a more extreme version of what you get from Truffaut. Not recommended overall but the half-hour silent heist scene is black-and-white gold, everything that was promised.
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009): The first Wes Anderson film I've enjoyed rather than admired. Everything is so cute and twee but with a little edge, so the style is a perfect match. If I've read the book it was in grade school, so I don't know who gets the credit for this idea, but I love how, despite being totally anthropomorphized, the stop-motion animals are animals. Really cool seeing Mr. Fox get into a hissing match with his lawyer, casually killing chickens, etc. Also love how 'cuss' is used as an all-purpose swear word.
• Kumaré (2001): Saw with Sumana and mother-in-law. Not really happy with the way this ended. It's common for the creator of a documentary about pulling a con job to start to feel remorse for their marks about halfway through the documentary. And this does happen to Vikram Gandhi in Kumaré, but when it's time to come clean he doesn't show the remorse. He retcons his con job as "Yes, I misled you and lied to you, but it was all in the service of a larger spiritual goal!"

  Gandhi has a degree in religious studies so he should know this is Religious Huckster Trick #2. And of course it works. He pulls it off! But he's still operating the con.

• Desperately Seeking Susan (1985): This was on the list of great films by female directors (see previous post), and it was showing at the museum, so we caught the next train posthaste! (Actually we walked.) It's a fun movie that's very much a time capsule, not just because of the New York and the fashions and the yuppie coffee tables and the Madonna but because not one single element of this plot can coexist with cell phones or the Internet.

  Well, one element can—hyperspecific amnesia caused by otherwise harmless head trauma—but that's just ridiculous, so I'm not counting it. No, you know what, even that can't survive cell phones. "I forgot who I am... good thing I'm still logged into Facebook."

  You just know I'll like this movie because there's a very strong Celine and Julie go Boating vibe, not just in the magic show but in the way Roberta just picks up Susan's identity and tries it on for a while. Really fun.

And now the TV section. Obviously my technique of waiting until I can evaluate the show as a whole, creates a selection bias towards good television shows. I'll sit through a bad movie and then pan it in Film Roundup, but a bad TV show is outa here, especially since I watch movies on my own but I only watch TV with Sumana. But what's the problem with talking about good TV? Try this on for size:

• The Dick Van Dyke Show (1951-1966) - Or as I just typed into IMDB, "The Dick Van." I remember reading an essay that explained that Leave it to Beaver was a groundbreaking show because it showed post-WWII parents trying to figure out how to raise children without the corporal-punishment-centric style their parents used on them. But phooey on that, because Leave it to Beaver is not funny. The Dick Van Dyke Show shows a postwar couple trying to figure out how to be good parents and partners, and it's really really funny. It's got workplace comedy, metahumor, tastefully wacky neighbors, everything good you'd want from a sitcom. Rob and Laura will have a disagreement that turns into an argument and then a reconciliation, it will be realistic and funny, and they'll shoot it all in one long take. It's so good. Sometimes they tire of the normal fare and do a sitcom version of The Twilight Zone instead.

  Best moment: Buddy, one of Rob's co-workers, is always making these awful jokes about his shrewish wife Pickles. And then in one episode all the co-workers have a night out on the town. Buddy brings Pickles along, and she's great! She's a Broadway chorus girl, she's the life of the party, she and Buddy are perfect for each other, totally in love, and you realize, of course! Why would Buddy marry someone who'd make him miserable? He's just an asshole who adopts this Borscht Belt persona at work. The show doesn't go out of its way to point out any of this; it just quietly develops the characters in ways that reward paying attention.

(Before you ask, Religious Huckster Trick #1 is "God told me to tell you to give me money.")

The above-linked list is very quirky, and although the idiosyncracies generally work in the reader's favor (gotta figure out a way to see Jodie Mack's Dusty Stacks of Mom (2013)), it left rhetorical space for men to come into the comments section and say HOW could you OVERLOOK this GROUNDBREAKING film, [potentially useful recommendation], for you see, I know a LOT about FILM. Which I must admit would have happened anyway.

I don't know a lot about film, but I do know how to run SQL queries against IMDB data, so I thought I would make an intersubjective list of the top 100 films directed by women, judged by their IMDB ratings. In general I copied the implicit rules of the hand-picked list. Only feature-length films are here. No documentaries, no concert footage. (There is one comedy special in here, but whatever.)

As usual, films with fewer than 150 votes on IMDB were not considered. Also as usual, there are no links because the IMDB dataset is far too ancient for such things. I did some spot checks and kicked a couple movies off the list for obvious astroturfing. I don't believe one of the movies on this list is real, but I left it on the list because it's so weird.

Here's the list:

Title	Director	IMDB	Genres
1. The Matrix (1999)	Wachowski, Lana	8.7	Action, Sci-Fi
2. Cidade de Deus (2002)	Lund, Kátia	8.7	Drama, Crime
3. Voskhozhdenie (1977)	Shepitko, Larisa	8.3	Drama, War
4. Drushyam (2014)	Sripriya	8.3	Drama, Thriller, Family
5. Moe no suzaku (1997)	Kawase, Naomi	8.2	Drama
6. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011)	Akhtar, Zoya	8.1	Drama, Romance, Comedy, Adventure, Family
7. Salaam Bombay! (1988)	Nair, Mira	8.1	Drama, Crime
8. Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002)	Sen, Aparna	8.0	Drama
9. Le roman de Renard (1930)	Starewicz, Irene	8.0	Comedy, Fantasy, Animation, Family
10. Slumdog Millionaire (2008)	Tandan, Loveleen	8.0	Drama, Romance
11. Persepolis (2007)	Satrapi, Marjane	8.0	Drama, Animation, War, Biography
12. Chelovek s bulvara Kaputsinov (1987)	Surikova, Alla	8.0	Romance, Comedy, Musical, Western
13. Zero Motivation (2014)	Lavie, Talya	7.9	Drama, Comedy
14. Chou tin dik tong wah (1987)	Cheung, Mabel	7.9	Drama, Romance
15. Out 1, noli me tangere (1971)	Schiffman, Suzanne	7.9	Drama
16. Tau ban no hoi (1982)	Hui, Ann	7.9	Drama
17. Gett (2014)	Elkabetz, Ronit	7.9	Drama
18. Sharasôju (2003)	Kawase, Naomi	7.9	Drama
19. Gangoobai (2013)	Krishnaswamy, Priya	7.9	Drama, Family
20. Patrice O'Neal: Elephant in the Room (2011)	McCarthy-Miller, Beth	7.9	Comedy
21. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)	Akerman, Chantal	7.9	Drama
22. Little Miss Sunshine (2006)	Faris, Valerie	7.9	Drama, Comedy, Adventure
23. English Vinglish (2012)	Shinde, Gauri	7.9	Drama, Comedy, Family
24. Shrek (2001)	Jenson, Vicky	7.9	Comedy, Fantasy, Animation, Adventure, Family
25. La distancia más larga (2013)	Pinto, Claudia	7.9	Drama
26. Pasqualino Settebellezze (1975)	Wertmüller, Lina	7.9	Drama, Comedy, War
27. Dönüs (1972)	Soray, Türkan	7.8	Drama, Romance
28. Strangers in Good Company (1990)	Scott, Cynthia	7.8	Drama
29. Awakenings (1990)	Marshall, Penny	7.8	Drama, Biography
30. Dolgie provody (1971)	Muratova, Kira	7.8	Drama
31. Ne dao Bog veceg zla (2002)	Tribuson, Snjezana	7.8	Romance
32. Tong nien wang shi (1985)	Yang, Li-Yin	7.8	Drama, Biography
33. Dedictví aneb Kurvahosigutntag (1993)	Chytilová, Vera	7.8	Comedy
34. Cheshmane John Malkovich 1: Viggo Mortensen (2004)	Solati, Sara	7.8	Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery
35. Earth (1998)	Mehta, Deepa	7.8	Drama, Romance, War
36. Nu ren si shi (1995)	Hui, Ann	7.8	Drama, Comedy
37. Lost in Translation (2003)	Coppola, Sofia	7.8	Drama
38. Efter brylluppet (2006)	Bier, Susanne	7.8	Drama
39. Water (2005)	Mehta, Deepa	7.8	Drama, Romance
40. Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926)	Reiniger, Lotte	7.8	Romance, Fantasy, Animation, Adventure
41. Rocks in My Pockets (2014)	Baumane, Signe	7.7	Comedy, Drama, Animation
42. Kirschblüten - Hanami (2008)	Dörrie, Doris	7.7	Drama, Romance
43. Selma (2014)	DuVernay, Ava	7.7	Drama, Biography, History
44. Nirgendwo in Afrika (2001)	Link, Caroline	7.7	Drama, Biography
45. Hævnen (2010)	Bier, Susanne	7.7	Drama
46. S tebou me baví svet (1983)	Polednáková, Marie	7.7	Comedy, Family
47. Nastroyshchik (2004)	Muratova, Kira	7.7	Drama, Comedy, Crime
48. Die Höhle des gelben Hundes (2005)	Davaa, Byambasuren	7.7	Drama
49. Sita Sings the Blues (2008)	Paley, Nina	7.7	Comedy, Fantasy, Romance, Animation, Musical
50. Sans toit ni loi (1985)	Varda, Agnès	7.7	Drama
51. Olivier, Olivier (1992)	Holland, Agnieszka	7.7	Drama
52. Little Fugitive (1953)	Orkin, Ruth	7.7	Drama, Family
53. Film d'amore e d'anarchia, ovvero 'stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza...' (1973)	Wertmüller, Lina	7.7	Drama, Romance, Comedy
54. Le bonheur (1965)	Varda, Agnès	7.7	Drama
55. Krylya (1966)	Shepitko, Larisa	7.7	Drama
56. Jibeuro Ganeun Gil (2013)	Pang, Eun-jin	7.7	Drama
57. Whale Rider (2002)	Caro, Niki	7.7	Drama, Family
58. Frozen (2013)	Lee, Jennifer	7.7	Family, Fantasy, Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Musical
59. Europa Europa (1990)	Holland, Agnieszka	7.7	Drama, War, History
60. Elsker dig for evigt (2002)	Bier, Susanne	7.7	Drama, Romance
61. Die Fremde (2010)	Aladag, Feo	7.6	Drama
62. Away from Her (2006)	Polley, Sarah	7.6	Drama
63. Saving Face (2004)	Wu, Alice	7.6	Drama, Romance, Comedy
64. Tou ze (2011)	Hui, Ann	7.6	Drama
65. En chance til (2014)	Bier, Susanne	7.6	Drama, Thriller
66. Wadjda (2012)	Al-Mansour, Haifaa	7.6	Drama, Comedy
67. My Life Without Me (2003)	Coixet, Isabel	7.6	Drama, Romance
68. Neposlusni (2014)	Djukic, Mina	7.6	Drama
69. 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981)	Sen, Aparna	7.6	Drama, Romance
70. Depuis qu'Otar est parti... (2003)	Bertuccelli, Julie	7.6	Drama
71. The Hurt Locker (2008)	Bigelow, Kathryn	7.6	Drama, War, Thriller
72. American Psycho (2000)	Harron, Mary	7.6	Drama, Crime
73. The Secret Life of Words (2005)	Coixet, Isabel	7.6	Drama, Romance
74. Brødre (2004)	Bier, Susanne	7.6	Drama, War
75. Yeo-haeng-ja (2009)	Lecomte, Ounie	7.6	Drama
76. Ting shuo (2009)	Cheng, Fen-fen	7.6	Drama, Romance
77. I Am Sam (2001)	Nelson, Jessie	7.6	Drama
78. The Namesake (2006)	Nair, Mira	7.6	Drama
79. Boys Don't Cry (1999)	Peirce, Kimberly	7.6	Drama, Biography
80. Büyük adam küçük ask (2001)	Ipekçi, Handan	7.6	Drama
81. Hanezu no tsuki (2011)	Kawase, Naomi	7.6	Drama
82. Pora umierac (2007)	Kedzierzawska, Dorota	7.6	Drama
83. La faute à Fidel! (2006)	Gavras, Julie	7.6	Drama, History
84. Kazoku no kuni (2012)	Yang, Yong-hi	7.5	Drama
85. Zir-e poost-e shahr (2001)	Bani-Etemad, Rakhshan	7.5	Drama
86. Proof (1991)	Moorhouse, Jocelyn	7.5	Drama
87. Ramchand Pakistani (2008)	Jabbar, Mehreen	7.5	Drama
88. Te doy mis ojos (2003)	Bollaín, Icíar	7.5	Drama, Romance
89. Nanayomachi (2008)	Kawase, Naomi	7.5	Drama
90. La misma luna (2007)	Riggen, Patricia	7.5	Drama
91. Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (1974)	Wertmüller, Lina	7.5	Drama, Comedy, Adventure
92. Samt el qusur (1994)	Tlatli, Moufida	7.5	Drama
93. Et maintenant on va où? (2011)	Labaki, Nadine	7.5	Drama, Comedy
94. The Japanese Wife (2010)	Sen, Aparna	7.5	Drama, Romance
95. An Angel at My Table (1990)	Campion, Jane	7.5	Drama, Biography
96. Antonia (1995)	Gorris, Marleen	7.5	Drama, Comedy
97. Hooligans (2005)	Alexander, Lexi	7.5	Drama, Sport, Crime
98. Trolösa (2000)	Ullmann, Liv	7.5	Drama, Romance
99. A New Leaf (1971)	May, Elaine	7.5	Romance, Comedy
100. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)	Ramsay, Lynne	7.5	Drama, Thriller
101. Ke tu qiu hen (1990)	Hui, Ann	7.5	Drama
102. Mita Tova (2014)	Granit, Tal	7.5	Drama
103. Ratcatcher (1999)	Ramsay, Lynne	7.5	Drama
104. ...ing (2003)	Lee, Eon-hie	7.5	Romance
105. Tin shui wai dik yat yu ye (2008)	Hui, Ann	7.5	Drama
106. American Splendor (2003)	Berman, Shari Springer	7.5	Drama, Comedy, Biography
107. Tian yu (1998)	Chen, Joan	7.5	Drama
108. Cloud Atlas (2012)	Wachowski, Lana	7.5	Drama, Sci-Fi
109. Jestem (2005)	Kedzierzawska, Dorota	7.5	Drama
110. Korotkie vstrechi (1968)	Muratova, Kira	7.5	Drama, Romance
111. Dogfight (1991)	Savoca, Nancy	7.5	Drama, Romance, War
112. Across the Universe (2007)	Taymor, Julie	7.5	Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Musical
113. Sedmikrásky (1966)	Chytilová, Vera	7.5	Drama, Comedy

There are 113 movies in this list because IMDB ratings only have 0.1 star precision. If you're a woman and you direct a movie that gets a 7.5, congrats, you're tied for 84th place.

Susanne Bier and Ann Hui each have five films on the list. Naomi Kawase has four. Some of the directors share the credit with a man, notably Lana Wachowski and Suzanne Schiffman. Barring any titles I don't recognize because they're not in English, the only films on this list I've seen are Sita Sings the Blues, Whale Rider, Frozen and A New Leaf. My personal favorites, among movies I know were directed by women, are A New Leaf and Wayne's World.

Finally, here's the base query I used to get the info I needed out of the database. I used the same database I built for Ghostbusters Past.

select distinct(title.id), title.title, title.production_year, rating.info, votes.info, movie_info.info, kind_id, name.name, name.gender from title join cast_info on title.id=cast_info.movie_id join name on cast_info.person_id=name.id join movie_info_idx as rating on rating.movie_id=title.id join movie_info_idx as votes on votes.movie_id=title.id join movie_info on movie_info.movie_id=title.id where cast_info.role_id=8 and kind_id=1 and movie_info.info_type_id=3 and rating.info_type_id=101 and votes.info_type_id=100 and name.gender='f';

Update: The pedantry continues with Darius Kazemi telling me that Loveleen Tandan was the casting director on Slumdog Millionare, not the director who yelled "cut!" and "action!" and "it's a wrap!". If IMDB says role_id=8, that's good enough for me, but YMMV.

Update #2: danima asked about English-language films. I don't think IMDB tracks the primary language of a film, just whether a language is used in the film. So I can filter on "English", but I'll still pick up films that are primarily in French or Hindi, so long as there is some English dialogue. Our story begins right after Across the Universe, where the previous list leaves off. Basically if your film is in English you only need to get a 7.4 or 7.3 (still several standard deviations above the median) to get in the top 100. I have not vetted this list for astroturf:

57. Pismo do Amerika (2001)	Triffonova, Iglika	7.4	Drama
58. Bastard Out of Carolina (1996)	Huston, Anjelica	7.4	Drama
59. Frida (2002)	Taymor, Julie	7.4	Drama, Romance, Biography
60. Chance (2002)	Benson, Amber	7.4	Drama, Comedy
61. Kaméleon (2008)	Goda, Krisztina	7.4	Drama, Comedy, Thriller
62. Paris, je t'aime (2006)	Chadha, Gurinder	7.4	Drama, Romance, Comedy
63. Le fils de l'autre (2012)	Lévy, Lorraine	7.4	Drama
64. Lifted (2010)	Alexander, Lexi	7.4	Drama
65. Belle (2013)	Asante, Amma	7.4	Drama
66. Desert Flower (2009)	Hormann, Sherry	7.4	Drama, Biography
67. Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)	July, Miranda	7.4	Drama, Comedy
68. On Dangerous Ground (1951)	Lupino, Ida	7.4	Drama, Romance, Thriller, Film-Noir, Crime
69. Paris, je t'aime (2006)	Coixet, Isabel	7.4	Drama, Romance, Comedy
70. Bound (1996)	Wachowski, Lana	7.4	Drama, Thriller, Crime
71. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)	Bigelow, Kathryn	7.4	Drama, Thriller, History
72. También la lluvia (2010)	Bollaín, Icíar	7.4	Drama, History
73. Monsoon Wedding (2001)	Nair, Mira	7.4	Drama, Romance, Comedy
74. Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore (1972)	Wertmüller, Lina	7.4	Comedy
75. Hollow Reed (1996)	Pope, Angela	7.4	Drama
76. The Trouble with Angels (1966)	Lupino, Ida	7.4	Comedy
77. The Selfish Giant (2013)	Barnard, Clio	7.4	Drama
78. Mikey and Nicky (1976)	May, Elaine	7.4	Drama
79. José Rizal (1998)	Diaz-Abaya, Marilou	7.3	Drama, War, Biography, History
80. Titus (1999)	Taymor, Julie	7.3	Drama, Thriller, History
81. Sepet (2004)	Ahmad, Yasmin	7.3	Drama, Romance, Comedy
82. Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)	Yuh, Jennifer	7.3	Family, Drama, Animation, Adventure, Action, Comedy
83. Put oko sveta (1964)	Jovanovic, Soja	7.3	Comedy, Adventure, Western
84. Fish Tank (2009)	Arnold, Andrea	7.3	Drama
85. Infinitely Polar Bear (2014)	Forbes, Maya	7.3	Drama, Comedy
86. An Education (2009)	Scherfig, Lone	7.3	Drama
87. The Black Balloon (2008)	Down, Elissa	7.3	Drama, Romance
88. North Country (2005)	Caro, Niki	7.3	Drama
89. Thousand Pieces of Gold (1991)	Kelly, Nancy	7.3	Romance, Western
90. Funny Valentines (1999)	Dash, Julie	7.3	Drama
91. The Secret Life of Bees (2008)	Prince-Bythewood, Gina	7.3	Drama
92. Stander (2003)	Hughes, Bronwen	7.3	Action, Drama, Biography, Crime
93. Shao nu xiao yu (1995)	Chang, Sylvia	7.3	Drama
94. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005)	Anderson, Jane	7.3	Drama, Biography
95. Craig's Wife (1936)	Arzner, Dorothy	7.3	Drama
96. Firaaq (2008)	Das, Nandita	7.3	Drama, History
97. Blood and Sand (1922)	Arzner, Dorothy	7.3	Drama, Romance, Sport
98. My Brilliant Career (1979)	Armstrong, Gillian	7.3	Drama, Romance, Biography
99. Eve's Bayou (1997)	Lemmons, Kasi	7.3	Drama
100. The Name Is Rogells (Rugg-ells) (2011)	Warner, Rachel	7.3	Romance, Adventure
101. The Voices (2014)	Satrapi, Marjane	7.3	Comedy, Thriller, Crime
102. The Woodsman (2004)	Kassell, Nicole	7.3	Drama
103. Talaash (2012)	Kagti, Reema	7.3	Drama, Mystery, Thriller, Crime
104. My First Mister (2001)	Lahti, Christine	7.3	Drama, Romance, Comedy
105. Big (1988)	Marshall, Penny	7.3	Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Comedy
106. Monster (2003)	Jenkins, Patty	7.3	Drama, Biography, Crime
107. The Secret Garden (1993)	Holland, Agnieszka	7.3	Drama, Fantasy, Family
108. Little Women (1994)	Armstrong, Gillian	7.3	Drama, Romance
109. Fire (1996)	Mehta, Deepa	7.3	Drama, Romance
110. The Connection (1962)	Clarke, Shirley	7.3	Drama

• Stagecoach (1939): I always come into these hyper-classics expecting to be disappointed, but Stagecoach totally delivered. It's a movie full of memorable character actors and easy-to-get jokes. Its plot structure is very unusual for a western. I found it a cut above much "deeper" westerns like Red River. Recommended.
• The Sun Shines Bright (1953): John Ford's second attempt at Judge Priest, the film I walked out of in July. I saw this one with Camille, so I was committed. Still has Stepin Fetchit doing his bit but generally achieves 1950s-liberal levels of anti-racism. I upgrade this version to "watchable." There's a scene where a lynch mob pours into town, and you see reaction shots from all the black characters, and it's filmed like the scene in a western where the bad guy walks down main street and the shopkeepers hurriedly close up shop. Also a very effective moment of cringe comedy at the beginning, like the striptease in Cotton Comes to Harlem. Plenty of good stuff interspersed between the never-explained scandals and the tepid romance between [Female Lead] and [We Can't Give An Old Guy Top Billing! Get Me a Zeppo Marx type!]

  Between this and Stagecoach I wasn't expecting how pro-sex-worker John Ford is. ("So was Jesus."—Camille) This is the one that really hammers the point home, though. So cheesy and heartfelt and effective. Not believable, but effective. People marching with a banner saying "He Saved Us From Ourselves"—the ultimate liberal fantasy!

• Brainstorm (1983): I was really impressed by Brainstorm's portrayal of a Research Triangle tech company and the weirdos who work there. It doesn't hurt that Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher play the weirdos. Some really clever twists, by which I mean ideas you might see in print SF in 1983, instead of film being twenty years behind like usual. It becomes kind of goofy at the end, but it's a Douglas Trumbull movie, you're gonna get some goofiness. A pleasant surprise.
• Victor/Victoria (1982): I cut this movie a lot of slack while I was watching it because I seriously thought it was made in, like, 1965. It's a mashup of a bunch of mid-1960s movie plots, and I'm still at a loss to explain how young Julie Andrews looks in this movie. Maybe a mosquito bit her just as The Sound of Music wrapped, the mosquito was preserved in amber, and a clone of the beloved actress was created from the blood in the mosquito's stomach. I assure you, it's quite possible. German scientists brought to the United States by Operation Paperclip had been researching... but you're not here for the science lesson.

  I don't know about the politics of this movie, I guess it's pretty good for 1982. Overall it's kind of a mess in my mind. It's worth watching just to see Robert Preston (who has aged a normal amount) be a huge ham. There were a lot of funny moments but also a lot of duds, like the... bumbling private detective? What, did Blake Edwards direct this? Oh, he did? Well, he should know better.

  PS: In an act of sheer cowardice, a "nobody's perfect"-style line was cut from the romantic lead's part, leaving him nearly as Zeppo-ish as the dude in The Sun Shines Bright.

• It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963): I'd never seen the prequels (It's a World (1956), It's a Mad World (1958), It's a Mad Mad World (1959), etc.) but it's pretty easy to follow. Also easy to see why this is where the franchise ran out of steam. Not recommended, especially since The Great Race (1965) fixes every problem with this movie:
  • Shorter
  • Less sexist
  • Better characters
  • Better jokes
  • Better slapstick
  • More Peter Falk

  So watch The Great Race instead. It's one of my favorite movies and maybe the best thing about It's a (Mad )* World is that it ensured The Great Race would be greenlit.

• Baahubali: The Beginning (2015): Saw it again with the in-laws. My verdict is the same as before. One funny thing I forgot: there's a guy who's got all his lackeys together to carry out a coup, and as he explains why pulling a coup is the right thing to do, ethically speaking, all his lackeys intone in unison: "The right decision." It's funny the same way "The greater good." is funny in Hot Fuzz. I asked my brother-in-law if that was a translation error and he said no, that's pretty much what they say in the Telugu original.

  In our collection of Amar Chitra Katha we found a comic called "Bahubali", and although it shares some similarities to the movie it's not the same story. The comic is notable for having a conflict between two brothers which could lead to war, but is instead resolved by contests of brotherly roughhousing: backyard wrestling, splashing water at each other, and so on.

• The Master (2012): I guess it was inevitable that some big-shot Hollywood auteur would take it into his head to make a prequel to Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), answering all the questions no one cared to ask, like: why is Torgo's posture so poor? How did he and the Master meet? And why does the Master keep all his wives under hypnosis? Creating such an elaborate backstory to something so silly is, well, silly, but it's also something I would do, so I'll give it a pass.

  The performances in this are great, but it's ultimately another in Paul Thomas Anderson's explorations of horrible men being horrible, so... I'd stick with There Will Be Blood. At least there's blood in that one.

• Young Mr. Lincoln (1939): Very hagiographic about Lincoln personally but unsparing about everything surrounding Lincoln, especially antebellum American society and politics. One of the lesser John Ford films I saw finished this month, if only because the competition's so stiff. In particular, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance does all the political stuff much better. Not bad though.
• The Grapes of Wrath (1940): Really good and super liberal. None of the "this is all in the past, you can relax now" we saw with Border Incident. Even the unbelievable ending, tacked on by the producer to forestall a socialist revolution, is downright pinko by today's degraded standards. I'd like to give special attention to John Carradine, who turns in a really good performance as a man of God who's lost his connection.
• Judge Priest (1934): I walked out of this movie after ten minutes because of the super-racist comedy. If this was a Serious Film I would deal with the racism, but this was supposed to be my lighthearted Grapes of Wrath chaser, so screw this movie. Also, is this guy a judge or a priest? Make up your mind! Negative one-and-a-half stars.
• Inside Out (2015): I love movies that posit weird theories of consciousness, and this one kinda mashes up Multiple Drafts with traditional theater-of-the-mind. Great stuff. It's a kids movie that's more mature than most movies for adults: not only is there no villain, the protagonists are also the antagonists. You could sit around and analyze the world of this movie for hours (I've done it; it's fun), but then there's this bit of IMDB trivia, which undermines most of the speculation you might do:

  When asked about the genders of the emotions, Pete Docter said, "It was intuitive. It felt to me like Anger's very masculine, I don't know why... with Mom and Dad, we skewed them all male and all female for a quick read, because you have to understand where we are, which is a little phony but hopefully people don't mind!"

  I try hard not to mind, I know this stuff is difficult, but if you're making decisions you consider phony for the sake of a quick read, I don't think you're creating something that can accommodate a nerd's analysis.

• Magic Mike XXL (2015): The bros started out a little bro-y for my tastes but over time their characters got more defined and it turned into a decent road trip/small business movie. I wouldn't watch it on the big screen unless you've got a taste for beefcake.

  I don't really have more to say about the movie but I would like to critique some of the striptease routines. Near the beginning of the movie they're planning all these cheesy soldier/fireman routines, and thankfully they move in a different direction but that makes me think the first Magic Mike must be unbearable, with Matthew McConaughey MCing these guys in Village People outfits. I liked the routines that had an improv element, like Donald Glover's rap or the Kevin Nash painting routine.

  Oh, also, Kevin Nash looks so much like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (2008) that for the whole movie I thought it was Mickey Rourke, that he'd beefed up for The Wrestler and really liked being that buff and that's his look now. But I guess it's just a common look. I'm not great at this movie-watching stuff.

• Invention For Destruction (1958): a.k.a. "The Fabulous World of Jules Verne", a.k.a. "Vynález zkázy". An utterly Gilliam-tastic film, both in the animation style (a direct inspiration for Gilliam's Monty Python stuff) and in the single overarching aesthetic which requires that every piece of every elaborate set be custom built. Here's Pauline Kael from 1991:

  Zeman employs almost every conceivable trick, combining live action, animation, puppets, and painted sets that are a triumph of sophisticated primitivism. The variety of tricks and superimpositions seems infinite; as soon as you have one effect figured out another image comes on to baffle you.

  It's so fun to watch. The plot is terrible, but I don't care. It was a decent plot when Jules Verne came up with it in 1898. Recommended. I feel like this incredible movie is gonna get lost in this huge list because I don't have much to say about this except "it looks really cool", but it looks really cool.

• Wagon Master (1950): It's rare to see cinematic depictions of Mormons, and although the Mormons in Wagon Master are mostly played like generic movie puritans, there are two big exceptions. First, Ward Bond, who is extraordinarily likable as the tough, self-deprecating Elder Wiggs. Second, the dances. Generic movie puritans would frown at dancing (and everything else), but these Saints have serious happy feet. Still not a lot of Mormon-specific content, but a fun comedic western.

  I have one major complaint: as the tension ratchets up in the third act, our two Gentile protagonists plot together to form a genius plan, but the "plan" is the same as in every other western: get the drop on the bad guys and shoot 'em. Doing a full planning scene for that just got my hopes up.

• The Third Man (1949): I believe viewer enjoyment of this movie is highly dominated by not knowing its twist. Unfortunately, even if you don't know the twist going in it's pretty easy to figure it out, and even telling you why this is the case is enough to trigger figuring-it-out, so it's a tricky situation but rather than bemoan "the culture of spoilers" I posit that The Third Man is a fragile movie. Any other movie on this month's list you could have told me how it ends and I'd have enjoyed it just as much (or as little). But you live by the twist, you die by the twist.

  It's not ruined if you know the twist. This is a classic that people watch over and over, and I had a good time even though I went in knowing the twist. The movie looks great. But despite my general pro-spoiler stance I'm not comfortable talking about my major problem with this movie, or even minor stuff like the pacing, because I'm held hostage by this damn twist. I guess that it's own kind of accomplishment.

• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): Not really fair to call this a 'deconstruction' of the western, but it's definitely John Ford being tired of making these movies and reevaluating exactly what message he's been sending for the past twenty years. In doing so he creates a much more complex story than usual and goes to some uncomfortable places. Great stuff.

  Just when you think you can finally get through an old movie without seeing John Carradine, guess who shows up? No, guess again. John Carradine, you fool! He was the Christopher Lee of his day, or maybe the Nicolas Cage.

  Amazing trivia! Woody Strode, the Dr. Phlox-esque coroner on Psych, is named after the actor who played Pompey in this movie. He was in some other Ford films as well as Spartacus. It's just about the weirdest character naming tribute possible, but there it is.

• The Fifth Element (1997): I was really down on this movie after seeing it because the sci-fi aspects, although beautiful, are entirely superficial. It's cool to see everyday life in the equivalent of the Federation, something that Star Trek never shows you, but it turns out it's very similar to everyday life in 1997 New York. A couple search-and-replace operations on the screenplay, and this whole movie takes place in 1997.

  But then Sumana (who saw The Fifth Element a long time ago), pointed out that Luc Bresson directs action movies, not science fiction. If you're going to direct a by-the-numbers action movie, why not throw in an ancient prophecy and some really cool eyeball kicks and make it sci-fi? Otherwise no one will remember your generic action movie fifteen years later. Your only other hope is to write Laim Neeson's "special set of skills" monologue from Taken (2008)—Bresson also did that movie, so he's playing all the angles.

• Court (2014): The most realistic Indian movie I've ever seen. There are musical numbers, but they're all where you would expect to find musical numbers in real life. I didn't mind the slow pace, but it's not as funny as I'd been led to believe. I don't think it's funny at all unless you're unfamiliar with Indian culture and you turn the culture shock into nervous laughter.

  Sumana did not see the movie, and I don't think she'd like it, but I narrated it to her afterwards and she made two really good points. First, this is a movie like To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) or Gentleman's Agreement (1935) whose goal is to get the audience to sympathize with an oppressed group, but the protagonist is not from that group. He's an outsider, a lawyer or journalist, played by Gregory Peck.

  Second, Sumana explained the ending, which I found totally mysterious. The judge goes on his summer vacation and you see that even outside the courtroom he's passing judgement on people based on ridiculous, outdated precedents. That's who he is. Makes sense.

• Upstream (1927): Upstream Color? More like Upstream Black And White, amirite? This recently rediscovered John Ford film is full of light silliness. It's also got Sammy Cohen, a vaudeville-style actor who would have a lot of stereotypical "Jewish buddy" roles, including Ike Ginsberg, one of the cougar-hunting frat boys in The Cradle Snatchers (1928, previously on Film Roundup). In this film he's in his element as half of vaudeville duo Callahan and Callahan. That's the kind of movie we're talking about.

  But the title's off. Upstream sounds kind of ominous. Like, well, Upstream Color. Our talented accompanists did what they could, composing a theme song for the movie that tries to make it make sense:

  Broadway life is feast or famine
  But if you're like the little salmon
  You'll keep on swimmin' up-streeeeeam!

  But here's the scoop, from the National Film Preservation Society:

  The reason for the film being titled Upstream is no clearer after viewing it... According to Charles G. Clarke the film was known during production as The Public Idol: "The change in title was the result of a curious system that then prevailed. In those days, a film company sold a program of features to the theater owners for a year ahead…. In this case, a film called Upstream was scheduled to be made starring Dolores Del Rio, but for some reason it was not put into production. To make up for the deficiency, the Fox Film Company simply changed the name of The Public Idol to Upstream."

  May curious systems always prevail.

• Ant-Man (2015): There was a lot of Edgar Wright in this, but not nearly enough. The thorax of this movie was a generic superhero movie, and it ain't no accident that this is the first superhero movie to show up in Film Roundup. I don't like 'em and I don't watch 'em. I do like the stories of ordinary losers on the periphery of a superpowered universe (the head of this movie), and I like ridiculous parodies of superhero movies (the abdomen). That's why I saw Ant-Man, and it delivered, just not all the way through.

  I should make it clear that there are a ton of CGI ants in this movie, it's not just a metaphor for a guy being really small, so if ants squick you out, give it a pass. I didn't mind. It did make me wonder if doing mo-cap on ants counts as "animal action" for purposes of ASCPA monitoring.

  No idea what was going on in the after-credits scene. Also not really clear on the difference between SHIELD and HYDRA. I was totally on board with Hank Pym's refusal to give shrinking technology to the military-industrial complex. Right on, fight the power, Tony Stark is a fascist. No need to explain anything more. But all the MCU movies have to share a common ideology, so Ant-Man then took pains to explain that the villain was working with HYDRA (bad), not SHIELD (good). It's well established that I won't do the homework to sort this stuff out, so it doesn't matter.

  Bonus: Here are the three superhero movies I would love to see:

  1. Ambush Bug
  2. She-Hulk (probably better as a Netflix series)
  3. Squirrel Girl

  You'd think I'd be excited for the forthcoming Deadpool movie, but Deadpool is too gory for me. I might see it anyway though.

• Baahubali: The Beginning (2015): The best thing about Times Square is that the big movie theaters on 42nd are always showing an Indian movie and a Chinese movie. It's a good way to see foreign blockbusters. Baahubali is very much in the spirit of the East Asian martial arts movies we've been seeing, but it's Indian, so a) everything has to be bigger and b) the martial art in question is "enormous set-piece infantry battles".

  It's got everything I've come to expect from a martial arts movie, good and bad: non-stop action, semi-historical setting, political corruption, bandits, badass women, men creeping on those women, the CGI deaths of adorable megafauna. All that's missing is the burnt village (there was one implicitly, but at least we don't have to see it), and the priest who kicks ass for Lord Shiva. The priests in this movie are kind of craven. It's also got all the good and bad you'd expect from a Lord of the Rings type movie: magic, monarchy, quests, sword duels, horse stunts, a conlang, and a climactic battle against the dark-skinned Other. Plus the costume-change-heavy musical numbers you'd expect (blah) from an Indian movie other than Court.

  It's a huge movie, three hours long. You watch a ninety-minute action movie, then you watch its prequel in a flashback (with some actors playing different roles and some playing 25-years-younger versions of the same roles--very confusing), and then it turns out it's the first part of a two-parter. Stuff that would be CGI in an American movie, they did it for real and filmed it. (A good decision--the CGI isn't great.)

  I don't know if this movie is "good" in any highbrow sense—the plot is a pastiche of myth that gave me the overall impression of watching a big-budget Book of Mormon adaptation—but it's really fun to watch. American studios make this kind of movie all the time and they've got it down to a science. It's safe. I stayed interested in Baahubali because it didn't feel safe. There were a lot of plot twists, all from the same general mythic space, but they kept sticking 'em in and I didn't know which one they would choose next, not like with Ant-Man. Everything was so much bigger than other Indian movies I've seen, I felt at any time the director might lose control, but they pulled it off.

  PS: Instead of the boring MPAA "This trailer has been approved for all audiences" green-screen, sometimes a trailer for an Indian movie will show you a picture of the trailer's censorship certificate. Classy!

• The Brink's Job (1978): Just after finishing the first run of Columbo, Peter Falk answers the question that was on everyone's mind: what if instead of a cop who entraps rich murderers, Columbo was a con who robs rich private security companies? I had to rearrange my whole day to catch this movie at Film Forum, but it was worth it. (It's on DVD, but the DVD costs $20. What is this, 2003?) It's a tense heist film full of slapstick that showcases Falk's ability to do comedy and drama at the same time. And his character is totally Columbo, whether he's baiting his adversaries into underestimating him, wearing shabby clothes he doesn't need to wear, or just doting on his wife. Features a solid supporting cast consisting entirely of "that guy", including Dick Van Dyke Show producer Sheldon Leonard as J. Edgar Hoover. Also features a brief Kevin Smith-esque comic book conversation.

In honor of seeing The Third Man and The Fifth Element in the same month I'd like to announce the Criterion Collection Film Festival. I call it that because I've collected movies that meet a certain criterion. I don't anticipate any trouble. Anyway, here's the lineup!

1. The First Time (2012)
2. The Second Face (1950)
3. The Third Man (1949)
4. The Forth Kind (2009)
5. The Fifth Element (1997)
6. The Sixth Sense (1999) <- Bruce Willis double feature!
7. The Seventh Seal (1957)
8. The Eighth Day (1996)
9. The Ninth Configuration (1980)

Hope to see you there!

• Cowboys (2013): a.k.a. "Kauboji". Combines the highbrow downer of Eastern European film (the theater director) with the lowbrow energy of screwball comedy (every other character). Genre fiction—in this case the western—brings them together. I had a good time. There were a lot of really clever jokes, including one I think was added just for the foreign audience. During her audition the female lead starts doing her piece, and there are no subtitles. It sounds like Croatian but the subtitle says:

  [talking gibberish]

  The camera cuts to the other auditioners, all looking confused.

  [It's okay, they don't understand either.]

  Good stuff, recommended.

• Flying Deuces (1939): I thought this film would save me a lot of time by simultaneously satisfying my idle curiosity about Laurel and Hardy, and the French Foreign Legion. For the French Foreign Legion I should have gone to Beau Geste, or Wikipedia. As for Laurel and Hardy, meh. I don't like when the straight man is the funny man's punching bag, and I only found them funny when they were doing really dark material like Hardy's protracted suicide attempt.

  This film either assumes its audience is quite ignorant or demands more suspension of disbelief than a normal 1930s comedy. For instance, there's a stuffed marlin trying to pass for a man-eating shark. If I was bursting with laughter the whole time, I wouldn't care—I don't care when The Muppet Show does something cheesy like that—but despite the name of the movie L&H don't even touch an airplane until the final sequence, and that final sequence isn't too great.

• The Shining (1980): Starring Jack Nicholson as The Patriarchy! He really hams it up. Like Alien, a movie where I came in having read the book and well aware of the "spoofed in" scenes. As with Alien I loved the slow burn at the beginning, the long tour of the hotel with its glorious 1970s design. Probably not so fun on television, but that's why I wait to SEE [these films] BIG. It was intense, creepy and fun. It kind of dragged in the middle, possibly because of Hamlet cliches, but I think because none of the characters are that interesting. In the book the hotel slowly drives Jack insane, but in the movie it just gives him an excuse to let his preexisting problems run wild, meaning there's no character progression. And Shelly Duvall is still stuck in her Method acting as Olive Oyl.

  The first thing I did after seeing this movie was create a bot. I call it A Dull Bot. It's not the first movie that inspired me to create a bot, but it is the first one where I got the idea while watching the movie. My dadaist heart was touched by how much Jack's manuscript resembles a real typewritten manuscript. It's not preternaturally neat, the way a possessed person would type. It's full of typos, like when your fingers can't keep up with your ideas. Jack really thinks this is great stuff. The manuscript thing is not in the novel, but if you've read On Writing I think you'll agree it's a very Steven King sort of scare.

  My original plan was to create a full statistical model of typewriter typos, but once I abandoned this quixotic project I got the bot done in Darius time. I did copy the layout of the Adler typewriter used in the movie, so sometimes you'll see ½ in a typo.

• House Party (1990): Turns out Warrington Hudlin, film curator at the museum, also produced House Party. This was a 25th anniversary screening with a Q&A afterwards (including Play, via video chat), and the theater was packed with House Party superfans. There were a lot of good laughs, but after hearing people come up to the mic and saying they'd seen House Party over one hundred times, I wonder if it was the sort of laughter you'll hear from me watching The Big Lebowski.

  Anyway, good teen party movie, and because it takes place over a single night the action is a lot tighter and the pacing more intense than other teen movies. Minor characters show up again in different contexts, major characters move around the game board and meet each other in different combinations, creating opportunities for different types of comedy.

  Standout performances from Martin Lawrence as the un-smooth DJ, and Robin Harris as the working-class values dad, who's idealized in approximately the same way as the socialist mom in Good Bye Lenin! (2003).

• The Hudsucker Proxy (1994): Continuing my new resolution to watch only 90s movies with the initials "H.P.". I really dug this as a parody of classic 50s office movies like The Best of Everything. The main character was more complex than I expected, and it's pretty rare for the Coen brothers to do flat-out parody. And then the ending...? How, why? I don't understand it. It went from a funny parody of good 50s movies to stealing ideas from not-so-good 50s movies. What's going on? Maybe I don't get it, but I think I'm pretty good at figuring out the Coens' film-nerd tricks, and making me think something really clever is awful... not a useful trick. Still a "buy" on balance.

Tragically, this marks the end of Film Roundup, as the resolution I foolishly made late in the month means that the only movies I can see from this point on are the likes of Hocus Pocus (1993), Heaven's Prisoners (1996), Hurt Penguins (1992), and the Tagalog comedy classic Haba-baba-doo! Puti-puti-poo! (1997). We'll miss the magic, the mystery, but most of all... the movies.

Wait, I can just disregard resolutions? They're not legally binding? Amazing! See you next month! I gotta go cancel my Columbia Record Club membership.