Movies! Government shutdown edition:

81/2513. The Edge of Seventeen (2016)
Yet another coming-of-age movie about how hard life is for adolescents, especially ones who were raised by trainwreck single mothers and whose best friend is dating their insufferable brother. I can't say the script sparkles, but the lead acting of Hailee Steinfeld sure does. She's awesome in just everything.

And she drinks Coke!

82/2514. Washington Story (1952)
Not a great title (I just now had to Google it to remember what it was about), but it is a pretty accurate one: a newspaper woman out to make a name for herself as a muckraker falls romantically for an impossibly sincere Congressman. As you watch, you can actually *see* Hollywood trying to make nice with McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.

83/2515. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)
I certainly remember this being released, and I was very aware at the time of stories about the difficulties of making Apocalypse Now. So I might have seen this before, back in the day. But now I've seen enough movies and studied enough about all the personalities involved that I can only say... Coppola was insane to even have attempted it, and it's a miracle that film turned out as well as it did.

84/2516. Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015)
Other than the fact that it predicted life in 2025 too accurately for comfort, there's really nothing good to say about this sequel, the unfunny story of bad people doing awful things to everyone. (Is the whole thing improvised? Rob Corddry really needs to be kept on a short rope.)

85/2517. Staten Island Summer (2015)
So, Colin Jost wrote a movie that must be loosely based on his life, and it feels like he wants it to be Caddyshack but for community pools. Worth a watch only for the all-star cast, mostly a bunch of Jost's SNL castmates doing ambling comedy bits to fill holes in a weak central narrative.

More to come.

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Maybe I should slow down these movie reviews, as I've really found it hard to find the time/desire to watch a lot of new-to-me films in the past few months. Fortunately, I got way ahead back in July, which was when I watched these, so try to pretend along with me that these are recent watches.

76/2508. The To Do List (2013)
The always surly Aubrey Plaza stars in this raunchy coming-of-age sex comedy from the female point of view. The cast is chock full o' SNL alumni, so I'm a bit surprised I didn't know about it earlier. Everyone is funny (especially Bill Hader), and I fully endorse it.

77/2509. This Side of the Law (1950)
Right off the bat, a lawyer hires a drifter to impersonate a dead man and settle his estate, and of course it's obviously a trap. (I've seen Fletch.) The real question, and the reason to watch, is to see how everybody (anybody?) survives all the double crosses. Not bad.

79/2511. Eurotrip (2004)
When this came out (in the wake of the success of the filmed-on-the-University-of-Georgia-campus Road Trip), someone told me it wasn't very good, so I didn't watch it. Now that I have seen it, I have to say that A) while it's certainly no Road Trip, I wouldn't call it unwatchable (though I also wouldn't blame anyone for not watching it), and B) while many of the sex jokes have not aged well in the decades since release, that's par for the course for sex comedies of any past era. What we put on screen says a lot about contemporary culture, and it would be a mistake to call the mid-2000s a "more civilized age" even considering the state of modern political discourse.

Dammit, man! She's a diabetic!

80/2512. The MacKintosh Man (1973)
Paul Newman (under) plays an undercover agent who has to rout out Communist traitors in Ireland. Underwritten and dull, it is not among legendary director John Huston's best works.

More to come.

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70/2502. Professional Sweetheart (1933)
Yes, the title of this pre-Code film is suggestive of prostitution, and star Ginger Rogers plays a radio personality who is, shall we say, not exactly the darling girl she plays for the public. But the title actually refers to the gullible rube the show's sponsors hire to grease contract negotiations with their temperamental singing sensation. The best thing about this melodrama is, of course, Rogers.

71/2503. Pie to Die For: A Hannah Swensen Mystery (2025)
Once a delight, this Hallmark mystery series is experiencing some terrible diminishing returns. The guilty suspect is obvious from the start, and everything just drags on. And seriously, enough already with the mother mugging for the camera to create "comedy" moments. You're embarrassing yourself.

72/2504. Krush Groove (1985)
Hollywood's fictionalized version of the Def Jam Recording story is mostly after-school special morality play built around stellar musical performances by Run-D.M.C., The Fat Boys, Sheila E., Kurtis Blow, and LL Cool J. If nothing else, it's a great time capsule of its era (even if Russell Simmons looks nothing like Blair Underwood).

Coca-Cola: The taste of the hip-hop generation!

73/2505. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (2024)
This feels like yet another example of a movie made by a studio who felt compelled to make a movie with their intellectual property to appease the lawyers without really having any interest in spending the money to make it right. Sure, it has the appropriate tone and gags for a shorter Looney Tunes cartoon, but it plays out much too slowly and none of what makes it on screen sparkles. This would have bored me even if I was a kid.

74/2506. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (2011)
Jenny Slate is too good a comedian for this (work it, girl), David Cross is clearly just taking a paycheck, and don't even get me started on why they hired Amy Poheler, Anna Faris, and Christina Applegate to play the Chipettes if their signature voices and personalities were going to be opaque to the audience. The target demographic is obviously pre-teens, and they can have it.

75/2507. Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print (2025)
This anthology documentary of the early years of Ms. magazine feels like a television series they couldn't sell so they crammed into one movie. That's not a complaint so much as an observation. I actually liked it quite a bit.

More to come.

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65/2497. Black Eye (1974)
This is very much a mid-70s "neo" noir. It's even easy to imagine Gene Hackman or James Garner in the title role if it hadn't been dipped in the trappings of the blaxploitation genre. It's not perfect, but it's not bad, either.

66/2498. The Cleaner (2025)
It's not Daisy Ridley's fault that this is a mediocre Die Hard knock off. She may be the best thing in it. It's just a very shallow action thriller with some very confused James Bondian antagonists. Yawn.

67/2499. Love Me (2024)
Maybe think of this as a dumber Wall-E where all of humanity is dead. I'd probably like it more if I could get over the typical Hollywood bullshit about technology being functionally immortal. But it's also a typically Hollywood bullshit romcom dressed in sci-fi trappings, raising questions it has no interest in actually answering. So that's two strikes. I do, however, enjoy Kristen Stewart, who (largely) succeeds at making her character sympathetic while working with a script that doesn't seem to understand (or care) what "self-awareness" is.

68/2500. Surviving Ohio State (2025)
This documentary is largely just the testimony of several former OSU wrestlers about events that they experienced in the 1980s and 1990s backed up with documentary evidence, and damn, it's a gut punch. I've never cared for the arrogance of "The" Ohio State University sports teams, but how could anyone support an athletic department, an institution, that would do this to its own kids? (If you watch this, know that just this week, a federal judge ordered mediation between the university, which has offered a total payout of $60 million, and the subjects of this film to be conducted by the same man who negotiated Michigan State should pay $500 million for similar circumstances. So expect more news to come in February 2026.)

69/2501. A Minecraft Movie (2025)
The similarities between this and Napoleon Dynamite were obvious even before I looked up the credits and saw that it was made by the same writer/director. I admit that a whole bunch of the specific jokes were lost on me. I've only played a couple of hours of Minecraft, and this is aimed squarely at the game's hardest-core community. Therefore, I found it just an okay movie experience, but I can understand why it was a such a big hit with the target audience.

More to come.

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34/2466. Big Eyes (2014)
Tim Burton's biography of the artist(s) behind the kitsch "Big Eyes" craze of the 1960s art world is big on atmosphere, which is much appreciated, especially since the drama of the story itself seems so slight. I assume that Burton's sympathies lie with the protagonist, but it's Jason Schwartzman and Terence Stamp who steal every scene they're in as, respectively, an art gallery owner and art critic who recognize bad art when they see it and aren't afraid to say so.

35/2467. Murder on a Bridle Path (1936)
The first Hildegarde Withers mystery movie in which the detective is played by someone other than Edna May Oliver. Sure, Helen Broderick tries her best, but she just doesn't have the same snark. Oh, well.

36/2468. Crime School (1938)
Humphrey Bogart tries to get The Dead End Kids to straighten up and fly right (and, frankly, I say he's by far too lenient with Leo Gorcey, who tries to have him killed). Pretty entertaining, actually.

37/2469. Invaders from Mars (1953)
Less entertaining, though mostly because this was made for kids. The "it was all just a dream, wait, no, it was a premonition!" twist ending is really a bit too much.

38/2470. The Comic (1969)
In this Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke crafted the meanest, funniest possible love letter to a bygone era of silent film comedians. The protagonist is despicable (a conglomeration of some of the worst biographical elements of Langdon, Lloyd, Chaplin, and Keaton) and would be completely intolerable if almost every scene didn't end with a punchline at his expense. Only the movie's last scene, in which the jerk, none the wiser for his many, many failures, is finally humanized, ends without a joke. Bravo. Seriously.

Pratfalls and slapsticks go better with Coca-Cola.

More to come.

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30/2462. Alma's Rainbow (1994)
Another '90s black indie coming-of-age movie that aired on TCM, and also quite enjoyable, assuming you like '90s indies and/or coming-of-age movies, as I do. The pacing felt a little uneven, but that's adolescence, isn't it? I found it charming.

31/2463. Scarecrow (1973)
I've said it before, but it bears repeating after his recent, tragic death: When I was a kid, I didn't like watching Gene Hackman in a movie, but as I've aged, he's become a favorite. And it was in his memory that I watched this, which had been languishing on my DVR largely because I expected bad things from his co-star, Al Pacino (who I disliked as a kid and still dislike). In many ways, it's a dark, dark buddy road "comedy" movie based on Of Mice and Men with extra homosexual rape and mental breakdowns! The version I watched seemed to be edited in such a way as to only suggest the rape, but I read online several reviews that agree that the scene was more explicit in its first-run release. I don't know if that's true or another example of the Mandela Effect.

Coke by the barrel? Yes, please!

32/2464. The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)
A post-apocalyptic movie in which the only survivors are hung up on the fact that white and black people shouldn't kiss. Maybe this was as progressive as Red Scare 1959 Hollywood could get, but golly, I spent the movie very irritated that race was even as issue in the empty ruins of New York City. Maybe that was the point, but it's a frustrating viewing experience.

33/2465. The Domino Principle (1977)
More Gene Hackman! This time he's a imprisoned murderer recruited by The Government to carry out a clandestine execution. His wife (who he killed for) is played by Candice Bergman, dressed down in a bad wig to look just awful even by mid-70s style standards, and his best friend, Mickey Rooney, is given a plot twist that makes less than no sense. I didn't hate it, but really, only because of Hackman's skill at portraying a grumpy everyman scrambling to get out of proverbial quicksand.

More to come.

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25/2457. The Search (1948)
Montgomery Clift turns in a great, naturalistic performance here in his first starring role as a young American G.I. trying to help a war orphan in the ruins of Berlin. It's a very good movie. In fact, by focusing attention on the orphans and their broken world (similar to but less humorous than 2019's Jojo Rabbit), it manages the rare feat of being anti-war without glorifying the violence.

It seems unlikely Coke gave this production any money, but If the filmmakers really wanted to hide the product, they could have used a bigger towel.

26/2458. The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)
Most of the entertainment value of this comes from watching motion picture studios entering the talkie era figuring out how to create the musical genre in real time. It fails as a whole, but it does have its moments. (Buster Keaton's crossdressing mermaid dance, sadly, is not one of them.) Jack Benny is the highlight as one of two Masters of Ceremonies.

27/2459. Flow (2024)
Yeah, Oscar got this one right. It's captivating. Definitely watch it with your pets: even Henry enjoyed watching it. (More accurately, I think he enjoyed listening to it. The soundtrack is all recordings of real animals.)

28/2460. Forbidden (1932)
This early Frank Capra is pure dreck melodrama without any of the audience-pleasing uplifting treacle that would become the director's trademark. I've often pooh-poohed Capra, but this could easily be my least favorite Capra film. (No, I did not know it was Capra when it came on, or I might have just turned the TV off.)

29/2461. Naked Acts (1996)
Watched on TCM in February before our Glorious Leader outlawed Black History, this is a mid-90s indie about an aspiring actress (imagined as the child of a Pam Grier type) who has body issues and a lot of baggage as she confronts the expectations of a male-dominated film industry. The budget is low and the talent is clearly raw, but the script is good and the finished product very watchable.

More to come.

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20/2452. Reality Bites: A Hannah Swensen Mystery (2025)
The installments written by star Julia Sweeney have solid mysteries (although it's pretty clear that a lot of plot-tightening is happening in the editing suite), but they tend to go a little heavy on melodramatic characterization, especially for the mother, whose style of comic relief grows closer to a Jerry Lewis performance in each installment.

21/2453. Hero at Large (1980)
John Ritter plays a "real life" super hero in this very gentle comedy. It's so gentle, in fact, I wondered who the target audience is. There's not enough action (and too much drama) for kids, and its story is too thin to keep the attention of adults. The premise has been done better as both parody and satire in comics, television, and movies in the decades before and since. Frankly, it's just not very deep or very funny, and that means it's just not very good.

As a general rule, I don't always include shots of incidental Coca-Cola advertising, but these are pretty prominent in the opening sequence, so here you go.

22/2454. Hamlet 2 (2008)
See? This is how you poke society in the eye with a sharp stick and make them laugh at the same time. It's just so absurd in all the best ways, like Mel Brooks' The Producers, that I was often blindsided by the more subtle punchlines. Would watch again.

23/2455. Hamlet (1948)
Lawrence Olivier's adaptation abridges the original to get the time down, I guess. This sort of thing is done all the time when adapting novels, but Shakespeare? It's pretty, and the climax is staged well, but I really missed Rosencratz and Guildenstern, and, frankly, it seemed to me that there just wasn't enough death in this incarnation of Denmark.

24/2456. The One and Only Dick Gregory (2021)
A documentary biography of the controversial comedian who dared to call out society for its hypocrisy. He strikes me as too often sanctimonious, but maybe he earned that by being right (and angry and bitter) about so many injustices so many of us tolerate and, unintentionally or otherwise, perpetuate.

More to come.

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15/2447. Balls Out (2014)
If you see the title to this movie about flag football and are inspired to remember Dodgeball, yeah, that's exactly what they wanted. Too bad they can't deliver. The script is meta-texturally aware of all the cliches in this type of movie, but then it completely fails to elevate any of that material. Frankly, I found the only amusing bits to come from Saturday Night Live (and AT&T commercial) alum Beck Bennett, who successfully plays his part as the cheating bully (a la Ben Stiller in Dodgeball) way over the top (a la Ben Stiller in Dodgeball).

16/2448. Good Burger (1997)
Speaking of Saturday Night Live alumni, of course this based on the recurring skit from Nickelodeon's sketch-show for teens, and while young Keenan Thompson is imminently watchable, all of the real comedy comes from Keenan's partner Kel, who is very good at playing the good-hearted moron.

If there is a movie with more Coca-Cola product placement in it, I haven't seen it.

17/2449. Young and Innocent (1937)
More of a thriller than a whodunnit, director Alfred Hitchcock makes sure that the audience knows the good natured protagonist is (probably) innocent of murder from the beginning, which is key to building his romantic relationship with the police chief's daughter. It's the prototype of a Hallmark Mystery Movie!

18/2450. Conclave (2024)
I was pulling for this to win Best Picture at the Oscars this year. I mean, I hadn't seen any of the other contenders, but this has a really, really amazing cast and is suspenseful and as illuminating about the human condition as any other great work of art. Very well done.

19/2451. The Champ (1931)
Speaking of Oscar, this won for Best Original Story, and I can only guess that's because 1931 was an off year for everyone. In a nutshell, a kid (Jackie Cooper) watches his ne'er-do-well alcoholic father (Wallace Beery) let him down in every possible way. Original! Beery also won the award for Actor, but so far as I can tell, he was only playing himself. I found it all very unpleasant. You can do better, kid.

More to come.

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10/2442. Intruder in the Dust (1949)
Before there was To Kill a Mockingbird.... Actually, it's kind of surprising how much the two stories cover the same ground. Mockingbird does it with more style and grace, but Intruder, rough as it is around the edges, doesn't pull any punches. Good movie.

11/2443. Murder! (1930)
Does anyone ever talk about the worst Hitchcock films? Ok, so it's better than Marnie (and maybe The Trouble with Harry), and, yeah, sure, it's got some clever scenes, but overall I found it terribly, terribly boring with some of the worst written and delivered dialog. (How much of that is due to it being an early talkie?) Yawn.

12/2444. 3 Women (1977)
If there's anything worse than hearing someone describe their dream, it's watching a movie of it. In this case, the dreamer was Robert Altman, and he has filled it with enough "symbols" that he hopes your over-evolved monkey brain will have a field day trying to decipher as opposed to, you know, actually having a narrative or plot or meaning. For example, one of the women obsessed with superficial commercial things has a yellow car (and yes, the importance of the color is called out in the dialogue) and late in the film takes a delivery of Coca-Cola from this truck:

Is this somehow significant? You tell me. And then tell me how you feel about your mother.

13/2445. The Kid (1921)
Maybe I've been selling Charlie Chaplin short all these years. The Kid is actually pretty good cinema, even it if does jerk the tears a little too hard for my tastes in the third act that has a "comedy" dream sequence for no other apparent reason than the main story was just too short. (Obviously, I'm not willing to bury all my hatchets with the Little Tramp.)

14/2446. Appointment with Death (1988)
Watched with Mom. We had both read this Agatha Christie novel and remembered how the murder was committed (the movie certainly isn't shy about telegraphing it) but not the guilty party. It's not one of Christie's best, but any time spent watching Lauren Bacall is time well spent.

More to come.

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