128/2137. To Hell and Back (1955)
The story of the most decorated United States soldier of World War II, Audie Murphy, as told by... Audie Murphy! Murphy's participation, though wooden, is the only reason this movie works; it's just too hard to believe that such a character could exist in the real world.

129/2138. The Whistler (1944)
If you're a fan of the Golden Age of Radio — and who isn't? — you no doubt recognize The Whistler as an anthology series of suspense stories. The movie version focuses on just one story (more or less) as a well-intentioned Richard Dix at the end of his rope is drawn into a number of life-or-death situations. I actually liked it more than I like the radio show.

131/2140. McEnroe (2022)
John McEnroe and his friends and family tell his life story in this autobiographical documentary. This was done in a similar style as the Tony Hawk documentary I watched earlier this year, and I thought this one superior, largely because McEnroe is more willing (or capable) of investigating some of the worse/private aspects of his life story in addition to the happier/famous moments.

You might say that archival footage doesn't count as product placement, but they didn't have to use this particular shot.

132/2141. This Is Joan Collins (2022)
Another autobiographical documentary, this time for the Dynasty star whose career had a lot of ups and downs (and #MeToo moments). She's quite charming.

133/2142. The Animal Kingdom (1932)
Speaking of charming women, Myrna Loy is herein supposed to be playing the proverbial gold-digging wife who tries to corrupt her artistically-minded husband, but I choose to interpret her character as a well-intentioned sophisticate working to save a wishy-washy gadfly from throwing away his fortune on drunks and whores. Casting is everything!

134/2143. Men in White (1934)
More Myrna Loy, here playing the exasperated fiance of Clark Gable's selfless driven doctor who has made the mistake of knocking up a nurse... and then operates to save her life after her illegal back-alley abortion goes awry. Welcome to the future, everybody!

More to come.

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It's been over a year (see: Mar 22, 2021) since I last posted pics of Coca-Cola product placement in movies I'd seen before I started tracking what I was watching. I've re-wartched quite a few films since then, so here's an update.

Goes great with donuts. (Beverly Hills Cop II)

Taste the future! (Blade Runner)

It's dark, we're wearing sunglasses, and we're drinking Coca-Cola! (The Blues Brothers)

Just don't spill it! (China Syndrome)

Keep your bodily fluids pure with Coke! (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)

Bring her in... for a Coke. (The Gauntlet)

No one hates Coke cans. (The Jerk)

A man's got to know great taste. (Magnum Force)

Coke looks great in glasses. (She's All That)

But it also looks good without them. (Superman)

Better. (Superman II)

Best. (Superman III)

The only good thing in life. (Tommy)

I don't know about you, but I'm getting thirsty.

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125/2134. You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939)
W.C. Fields' misanthropic humor stands up well over time, and it works especially well here, where Fields is foiled by the equally irreverent dummy Charlie McCarthy. There has long been a rumor that MGM refused to cast Fields as the titular Wizard of Oz over his outrageous salary demands, but Wikipedia's bio of Fields seems to suggest his demands were high specifically because he wanted MGM to refuse him so he would have time to write this. True or not, there's a lot to laugh at here.

130/2139. Look Who's Laughing (1941)
I'm re-arranging my viewing order to mention this here, as it is the first movie reuniting Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy with their radio cohorts, Fibber McGee & Molly and the Great Gildersleeve. The plot is silly, sure, but this radio-sitcom-adapted-for-the-screen format will take the world by storm when the television comes along. Bergen's love-interest co-star, some actress named Lucille Ball, probably took notice.

126/2135. Here We Go Again (1942)
Look Who's Laughing must have made plenty of money to earn this follow-up. I'm really digging these Charlie McCarthy movies. In this one, Charlie is often given mobility by a midget in a mask — the original uncanny valley? — but Bergen's clever creativity and wry humor carry the day.

127/2136. Elvis (2022)
Baz Luhrmann's much ballyhooed biopic wants you to believe that the King of Rock and Roll was some sort of literal superhero (which would make The Colonel a Bondian supervillain). So long as you don't take it too seriously, it is entertaining enough. Austin Butler does a very good impression. Its heart is certainly in the right place, as you can tell by its dedication to replicating real-life product placement!

Drink Coke, fake Elvis!

Drink Coke, fat Elvis!

More to come.

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Some movies are so important, so incredible, so... thirsty that they deserve special attention. Which is why I'm skipping ahead in my regularly scheduled reviews to cover E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial a movie featuring a Mysterious Alien Creature:

141/2150. Mac and Me (1988)

If, like me, you're only familiar with this movie from Paul Rudd's long-running gag with Conan O'Brien, here's what you need to know about this delightful movie for children:

A family of four aliens living peacefully on a planet where Coca-Cola naturally bubbles up from the ground is accidentally captured by an automated probe and returned to Earth. Frightened by the NASA scientists, the family flees, and the smallest is thrown by the downwash of a helicopter into speeding traffic, where it splatters on a car windshield. It gets better and stows away with a mother and her two sons relocating to Los Angeles where mom has a new job at Sears.

The younger, wheelchair-bound son, Eric, discovers the alien and is attacked by drills and circular saws. After being diagnosed with schiziprehnia and drugged, Eric traps the alien in an Electrolux vaccum cleaner and earns its trust via Coca-Cola and Skittles. To protect his new "friend" from the pursuing scientists, Eric puts it inside his teddy bear and takes it to meet Ronald McDonald at a culturally-diverse football dance party.

Joined by their new next-door neighbors, the brothers take the alien to the desert in search of its family who they find in an abandoned California gold mine behind a Wickes furniture billboard. The family looks dead, but Fortunately for everyone, the kids brought two cans of Coca-Cola to revive them!

The alien family, desparate for more Coke, enter a grocery story where security guards start shooting at them, killing Eric in the crossfire.

Actual Quote: "It's like what they drink on their own planet!"

I won't spoil the ending, but it involves a United States Citizenship Oath Ceremony, a pink Cadillac, and bubble gum.

It's not overstating anything to call this is a work of genius. Obviously created with the intent of promoting the rampant consumerism of the 80s — I really don't think there's a single scene without a Coke in it — it works equally well (probably better) as an ironic take-down of American Capitalism's worst excesses. I wish I could make something like this up, and I encourage you to watch it yourself, preferably with a Coke in one hand and a Big Mac in the other.

You can thank me later.

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121/2130. Yesterday (2019)
Something about this romantic comedy, something I can't quite put my finger on, made it really hard for me to watch. And I didn't decide it was worthwhile until the scene with "John Lennon." Maybe it was because the whole thing takes place in a nightmare alternate universe without Coca-Cola. It's a horror movie!

Come together. Right now. Over me.

122/2131. Two Guys from Texas (1948)
The joke here is that these fish-out-of-water stage comedians aren't *really* from Texas, see? The broad comedy of the Dennis Morgan + Jack Carson team did get a chuckle or two out of me in this one, especially in the Bugs Bunny short.

123/2132. April Showers (1948)
In this one, Jack Carson plays a mediocre vaudevillian who doesn't know... well, much of anything. The by-the-numbers melodramatic script, essentially a frame for an assortment of vaudeville-like musical numbers, doesn't do any favors for his "wife" and "son," either. But the film does have some value as being based on the real life story of the formative years of true comedic genius Buster Keaton.

124/2133. The Deep (1977)
Before watching this underwater pirate adventure movie (the sunken treasure is drugs!), I didn't like Nick Nolte, but I did like Jacqueline Bissett. (She and her white t-shirt are the whole reason I chose to watch this.) After seeing him boss her around like a soggy caveman for the duration, I still don't like Nolte.

More to come.

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Today I returned to Sanford Stadium for the first time since November 9, 2019. This is the view from my newest tickets, 12 rows closer than the seats I had since 2002.

Wow, what a difference!

I was looking forward to this one, what with Auburn coming to town for something like the 126th time. To bolster my courage to go out in public again, I got Omicron boosted 2 weeks ago. I also got a flu shot. And, for good measure, a tetanus shot. Because, you know, some dawgs bite. Especially the drunk ones.

I wish I could I could tell you that I had a great time, but that wouldn't be true. The drive to Athens started me in a bad mood because I was my usually anxious pre-game self (that hasn't changed for the better in the past three years). Traffic (and my innate struggles at time management) meant that I arrived in Athens with barely enough time to sprint into the stadium before kickoff.

To make matters worse, since my last visit, Sanford Stadium has gone paperless and cashless, and it only seems to have slowed ticket taking and concession buying. Welcome to the future!

To make matters worst, after standing in a concessionaire's line for five minutes to buy a Coke, I discovered that particular concessionaire had sold out of regular Coke. "Will a Diet Coke do?" You might as well ask me if Pepsi is okay. IT. IS. NOT.

On the up side, Auburn did bring a marching band that performed at halftime, complete with a flag corps that had a real hard time holding onto their flags. I did enjoy that while I drank my Coca-Cola Dasani water.

I might have had more fun if I hadn't gone alone, if I had taken someone to bitch to. But I think the real lesson here is that I shouldn't go to games that have a 30 point spread. Frankly, Auburn is not good this year (especially since they're down to their third string quarterback), and UGA played down to their level for most of the game, striping the on-field product of any significant entertainment value. If the football game isn't any good, there really isn't any reason to spend 5 hours on the road and 4 hours in the sun watching it.

Try harder next year, Auburn.

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I know that it's still Football and Batman Month, but this movie rundown has no Batman or Football content in it. Sorry about that. I'll try harder next year.

109/2118. We Met in Virtual Reality (2022)
This documentary shines such a colorful spotlight on some of the most virtuous and positive aspects of the virtual reality metaverse that it often feels like a sales pitch. If I didn't already have decades of personal experience that the reality seldom matches the brochure, I might have been swept away. Still, it *is* nice to think that someday maybe we *can* build such a utopia. (If you ask me, no place can be a paradise without Coca-Cola.)

110/2119. Hollywood Shuffle (1987)
Robert Townsend created a very funny movie about the very serious problem the American movie industry has representing Black people on film. It's very good.

111/2120. Promising Young Woman (2020)
I like a good revenge movie, and this is a great revenge movie especially because instead of terrorists or mafia, the villains are apologists for boys-will-be-boys sexual misconduct. It also helps that the cast is chock full of talented comedic actors, an unusual casting choice that really underlines the theme of a two-faced society. Recommended.

112/2121. Danger Lights (1930)
The "danger lights" in the title are railroad markers that warn engineers of obstructions on the track. In this case, the danger is a love triangle. It's not a great film, but it does have some great shots of period railroads. Consider it an historical curiosity.

113/2122. Licorice Pizza (2021)
A very episodic story of a May/December romance based on actual events in early 1970s Los Angeles, Licorice Pizza gets by largely on the freshness of its lead actors. As you must know by now, I'm a sucker for coming-of-age stories, even when the outcome of the love story seems completely unearned.

Paradise is a 1970s analog radio booth.

More to come.

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104/2113. The Green Slime (1968)
The important thing about this movie isn't that its monsters are lame and its human characters are stupid — were the first 15 minutes of this the inspiration for Armageddon? No, it's that the script was co-written by the guy who co-created Batman, Bill Finger. Viewed through the lens of a Silver Age comic book story, it's not *all* bad.

105/2114. Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Should have been titled "Catharsis: The Movie." The whole point is that all characters are having the very worst weekend of their lives, and if you can laugh at that, maybe you can laugh at your own problems, too. Kudos to the entire cast for pulling this off so well.

106/2115. Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982)
Another movie that I'd seen in bits and pieces over the years. Well, now I've seen it all in one sitting, and it is very much just as depressing as the album (which is probably why I haven't listened to that all the way through in decades). Sadly, its key themes of the loneliness of mental illness and the seduction of fascism as a panacea to difficult problems is probably just as relevant in modern America as it was in early 80s Britain, and I'm pretty sure we don't have any better solutions now.

Coke is for crazies!

107/2116. In Harm's Way (1965)
John Wayne and Kirk Douglas lead an all-star cast through an epic that equal parts soap opera and war film, and in typical fashion for director Otto Preminger, it's pretty darn ambivalent about both. I've generally liked the Preminger films I've seen, this included. Maybe I should make an effort to see more.

Coke is also for rapists!

108/2117. Car Wash (1976)
"A Day in the Life of a Full Service Car Wash" is a great idea for a film and I loved it. 'Nuff said.

More to come.

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99/2108. The In Crowd (1988)
Start with Hairspray, subtract the cynicism and commentary on racism, add a sexual predator father, and you get this! It's not without charm, especially scene-chewing VJ Joe Pantoliano and the "biker versus nerd" dance-off.

100/2109. Repo Man (1984)
When I was in high school, there were several boxes for movies on the "Cult Classics" row at Blockbuster that I looked at and looked at but could never bring myself to rent. Repo Man falls into that category and demonstrates how bad my decision-making process was in 1991. This is a punk-rock film that delights in subverting expectations.

Cars, beers, and Coca-Cola are the few brands in this movie pointedly populated with generic products.

101/2110. The Fearmakers (1958)
Dana Andrews comes back from Korea to discover that gangsters have taken over his PR firm to advance a Communist plot: lobbying Congress! The film wisely focuses on the tighter picture of Andrews trying to avenge his former co-worker and plays as a pretty entertaining noirish crime story.

102/2111. The Watermelon Woman (1996)
I enjoyed the half of this film that is a fictionalized biography representing how poorly Hollywood treated colored people in its early days (as if anything has changed), but the other half, a companion plot about the young, gay, black would-be documentarian's messy personal life felt like something I had to sit through to get to the good stuff. I suspect most viewers have the opposite opinion, and I do not deny that both halves contribute to a superior whole.

More to come (sooner than later).

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93/2102. The Buddy Holly Story (1978)
Must all Hollywood biopics be commercially compelled to warp facts to fit their desired narrative? We're led to believe that Holly was a diva and The (racist, sexist) Crickets' careers died with him, neither of which is true. Good music, though.

Hit the road with Coca-Cola!

94/2103. The Westerner (1940)
Gary Cooper's usual "gee, shucks" cowpoke is alternately persecuted, befriended, and persecuted again by a caricature of infamous lawman Judge Roy Bean. Given that there is never any doubt that Cooper will win in the end, I found the experience punishingly boring.

95/2104. Mystery Train (1989)
Anthology movies can be real hit or miss, but everything really works here in a setup that presages (in style and function) what Tarantino will bring to prominence a few years later with Pulp Fiction. If you like indie cinema (or Elvis mythology), this is totally worth a watch.

96/2105. The Bronze (2015)
This movie answers the unasked question, "What if Kerri Strug grew up to be a total bitch?" Forced to train her successor, not-Strug's story is a gymnastics version of Kingpin told by less competent filmmakers. There are a couple of genuinely funny moments, but they are far too few and far between.

97/2106. Hollywoodland (2006)
This movie avoids answering the much asked question, "Did Superman kill himself?" That's the question the fictional protagonist detective is investigating, but the whodunnit is only superficial. The real subject is the more metaphysical question of what gives a man's life meaning. It doesn't answer that question, either, but it does rule out some commonly held possibilities. Not bad.

Up, up, and down the hatch!

98/2107. Alice's Restaurant (1969)
What's most surprising about this anti-war comedy movie (based on an anti-war comedy song) is how cynical it is about counterculture. Society is so rotten, even those who would try to escape it are already corrupted, and all we can do is keep a sense of humor about it. Obviously, I liked this.

More to come.

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