My movie watching has really slowed down since football season started. At this rate, I'll be lucky to make it to 120 on the year.

83/2394. Stage Struck (1936)
Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Frank McHugh in a Busby Berkely movie musical about putting on a Broadway show should be a good time, but this only manages to be a forgettable uninspired mediocrity. One too many times to the well, I guess.

84/2395. Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948)
Okay, so this whole film is about a 49-year-old man (played perfectly by William Powell) panicking about his advancing age and starting a romantic relationship with a mermaid who is much, much younger than he is. As a 49-year-old man living in 2024, I find the whole thing more than a little cringy, admittedly in part because I cannot imagine wanting to make love to a fish.

85/2396. Suicide Squad (2016)
This is the first Suicide Squad movie, the bad one. And "bad" is an understatement. I realized while watching it that the sequel was written as a response to some of the fundamental errors in plot and characterizations this movie makes. Don't watch this. It's irredeemably awful.

86/2397. Tom Sawyer (1973)
Produced by Reader's Digest, it feels true to brand as an abridged version of the Mark Twain novel I read so many years ago. (That is definitely not how I remember the Injun Joe situation playing out.) The film is fine, but it is never again as good as the opening montage of Tom running and running and running and running at the sound of a riverboat whistle.

87/2398. The Big Knife (1955)
Clearly a stage play (an angry indictment of the Hollywood studio system) before being adapted to the big screen, the claustrophobic nature of the single location is befitting for the protagonist's emotional state, but it did try my patience.

More to come.

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In 2020, Tua "If It Ain't Broke, Break It" Tagovailoa fell to the fifth overall pick in the NFL draft because scouts decided he was fragile after he broke his hip at Alabama. He missed 6 games in 2020 because of that hip and a busted thumb, 4 games in 2021 with broken ribs, and 4 games in 2022 with some pretty serious concussions. Last year was the first year he made it all the way through the too-long NFL season without missing any full games, and the Miami Dolphins, for the most part, looked pretty darn good. (At least until it got cold. Dolphins hate the cold.) If this was the new Tua, things were looking up.

Well, perhaps you've heard: in just the second game of the 2024 season, Tua had another severe concussion that left him stiffly lying on the field like... well, a player who's had a severe concussion. Nothing looks quite like the fencing response. Trust me, once you've seen it, you'll recognize it forever. And Dolphins fans have now seen it multiple times from Tua Tagovailoa.

In hindsight, "fragile" might be a polite way of putting it.

I don't mean to kick Tua while he's down. It's been proven in recent years that he gives the Dolphins their best shot at winning games. But winning really isn't everything. If it was, I wouldn't still be a Dolphins fan

I'm no doctor, and I'm certainly not getting paid $53 million a year to sacrifice my body for public spectacle, so I won't even pretend that I'm in any position to tell Tua what to do. What I will do instead is quote an infamously six-fingered man: "If you haven't got your health, then you haven't got anything." It's good advice no matter how many fingers you see.

UPDATE 09/17: Tua has been placed on Injured Reserve, which means he will miss at least 4 games because of this latest concussion. That's 8 full games (plus parts of 4 others) over the course of 2 calendar years (39 games) for concussions. That's a very, very bad trend.

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McFarlane Toys recently announced a new line of Batman cowl replicas. The "replica" in the name is important, because these cowls have never been worn by the actual Batman.

My topmost bookshelf currently showcases a Golden Age Superman statue, a battery-powered Star Trek TOS starship Enterprise, a Judge Dredd badge with my name on it, V,I,N,cent, Captain Carrot, and Booster Gold inaction figures and a life-size Batman Begins Halloween pail. The red-headed stepchild there is the Halloween pail. I'm not a big fan of the Batman Begins version of Batman, and it would be nice to replace the piercing gaze of that blue-eyed plastic pail with something less horrifying.

The new McFarlane cowls represent the 1966 television Batman, the 1989 movie Batman, and the 1993 comic book Batman. I like the idea of them, but I cannot bring myself to order one. For one thing, as I mentioned, they are stiff plastic replicas. More importantly, they are only 1:3 scale.

As everyone knows, the average American's head is about 9.5 inches high. (Batman is slightly larger than the average American, so assume his head is closer to 10 inches tall, not counting the pointy ears.) That means that a 1:3 scale cowl would only fit a 3-inch tall head! The packaging says they're about 7 inches tall with stand and pointy ears. If I put a 3-inch hood on my shelf, I'm worried it won't look so much like a Batman tribute as something I stole it from a racist Smurf.

So for the time being, I guess I'm sticking with plastic Christian Bale. On the bright side, his head can hold several bags of Halloween candy, and that's not nothing.

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78/2389. Rumble Fish (1983)
Francis Ford Coppola's self-defeating tendency towards artsy-fartsy bullshit is the defining attribute of this beautiful but hollow ode to teenage angst. Coppola obviously wanted this to be French New Wave, and his great cast certainly nails the style. However, his characters are barely-sketched caricatures, and their interactions are disappointingly meaningless.

If Coca-Cola is cool enough for Tom Waits, Coca-Cola is cool enough for everyone!

79/2390. Tell It to the Marines (1926)
Lon Chaney in a rare leading role where he isn't the monster. I don't know that I'd call it "good," but mostly because cinema and cultural mores have changed so much in the past century. Chaney and his rubber face are, as always, greatly entertaining.

80/2391. When We Were Shuttle (2022)
This documentary is an historical look back at the often overlooked Florida ground crew that built and maintained the space shuttles between missions. If you have any interest in the Space Age, especially the Space Transport System that defined the American space program for three decades, it's worth a watch.

81/2392. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018)
This documentary is a biography of the very influential (and very controversial) 20th-century New Yorker film critic as told mostly by her very sympathetic allies. I'm more familiar with Kael the antagonist (via the stories told by the many, many people she went out of her way to offend), so I'm reluctant to accept everything this would have me believe about her motivations and accomplishments. But it is worthwhile to hear both sides.

82/2393. The Color Purple (1985)
My rule is that I have to watch at least half of a movie before I will put it on my "watched" list. This is a rare exception. Steven Spielberg is up to all his old tricks trying to pull tears from a stone. I made it about thirty minutes through a nonstop series of incest, rape, child abuse, and murder before I had to tap out. Life is too short to spend with people this awful, even if they're fictional. (Maybe especially if they're fictional.)

More to come.

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72/2383. Captains Courageous (1937)
I've never read the original Rudyard Kipling story, so I cannot say how well this hews to that. Is there a good reason that Spencer Tracy is playing a -- *checks notes* -- Portuguese sailor? He's too good an actor to let the film down, but he really does stick out a bit. Otherwise, I liked it.

73/2384. X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963)
To its credit, this Roger Corman movie avoids the common movie tropes associated with x-ray vision and lechery, but that's in party because it avoids just about anything that might be interesting. Yawn.

Coke looks tasty in the 1960s!

74/2385. The Spirit of St. Louis (1957)
Just like the book it's based on, despite including (too many) scenes of his younger years, this isn't a biography of Charles Lindbergh as much as a lightly fictionalized recreation of his most famous flight. Given Lindbergh's many personal controversies, it's not surprising that it lost money, though I mostly blame that on it being very, very boring, just as you would expect from a 33 hour plane trip across the ocean. As much as I like Jimmy Stewart, he is clearly wrong for the part.

75/2386. Armored Car Robbery (1950)
A tight film noir heist/police procedural in which the not-as-bright-as-they-think-they-are thieves are as unlucky as the conveniently-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time detectives are lucky. Very enjoyable B-movie fare.

76/2387. Sapphire (1959)
This movie's title doesn't do it any favors. Maybe something more memorable would help draw more praise to this quirky London miscegenation crime mystery. Perhaps it's the Agatha Christie influence, but I think no one does the whodunit as well as the Brits.

77/2388. The Right Stuff (1983)
Why had I never watched The Right Stuff? Because it was too long. Well, it's still too long, and to my disappointment, it's also so invested in the mythology of the Space Race that it doesn't really care about the actual history. (Style trumps substance in almost every scene.) But what a great cast!

Coca-Cola is the right stuff in the 1980s (pretending to be the 1960s)!

More to come.

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68/2379. The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951)
Like Marty, this bittersweet romantic comedy feels more like a television episode or a black box play. Also like Marty, the lead here is a great character actor who rarely got a leading role. In fact, this is the only lead role in Thelma Ritter's career. The romantic comedy is okay, but Thelma is great.

And she drinks Coke!

69/2380. The Last Detail (1973)
This falls into that category of movies that I'm glad I didn't see when I was younger. I just wouldn't have appreciated it as much. What a great cast working with a great script (with some subtle but pointed comedy)! Life's not fair, and we've all got to find a way to get ourselves through it together.

The secret to survival is ice-cold Coca-Cola!

70/2381. The Crowd (1928)
The Crowd is a silent film that follows a spoiled jerk who thinks the American Dream is his birthright. He marries the wrong woman, they have a couple of kids they mostly ignore... and things go from bad to worse. If there's an opposite to "entertainment," it's this. Although, there are a couple of great camera shots that borrow heavily from German Expressionism, so, it's not entirely worthless. They could still show this to teenagers to promote abstinence.

71/2382. Arsène Lupin Returns (1938)
The master thief is back, but the original cast is not. I mean, it's fine, but without the Barrymores, this MGM production feels a lot like an RKO B-movie mystery.

More to come.

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62/2373. Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951)
A woman loves her man so much, she lets him believe that he murdered the policeman she shot. It's every film noir cliche in one movie! The ending is... well, even if you saw it you wouldn't believe it. True story: it put me to sleep.

63/2374. Family Practice Mysteries: Coming Home (2024)
The hardest part to believe about this Hallmark Mystery Movie (in which the murderer's motive is -- surprise! -- greed) is that the protagonist doctor (a former military doctor who seems to be the only person in town who has ever heard of poisoning someone to death) has so much spare time (and office space) on her hands that she can be up in everyone else's business.

64/2375. Tipline Mysteries: Dial 1 for Murder (2024)
This Hallmark Mystery Movie leans hard into being a Hallmark Mystery Movie, and I think that's the correct impulse. We don't watch these puzzle movies for realism. In fact, although there were several moments where the police procedure was questionable, the enthusiastic protagonists were always enjoyable to accompany as they stumbled their way to the solution.

65/2376. The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
I saw the Pierce Brosnan in theater on release, but this was my first time watching the Steve McQueen original. The first half is a heist film; the second is a romance. I enjoyed the heist (and the ending, which made me Google which was the first movie in which the criminal gets away with his crime), but the pacing is way too slow and McQueen's character and fickle love interest Faye Dunaway are way too unlikable to really enjoy spending time with them.

66/2377. The Babe Ruth Story (1948)
If you look this up online, you'll see many critics in its day called it the worst movie ever made. It's not that bad, but they've made a lot of movies since 1948. Personally, I thought it was a good time. It's a clearly sanitized version of The Babes life story intended for kids, and that's fine.

67/2378. Arsène Lupin (1932)
If you do Google which was the first movie in which a criminal gets away with a crime, the original British 1916 version of this movie will come up. (The Italian film Filibus beats it by a year, and the French Fantomas by three. I'm still not sure what the first American film to feature successful criminal was, though if I stretch the definition to short films, the answer is probably D.W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley in 1912.) The reason to watch this version is to see the two Barrymore brothers acting opposite one another, as cop vs. robber, in the same film. Boy, that family had some acting talent.

More to come.

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57/2368. American Graffiti (1973)
I avoided this movie for years in part because I expected it to be the worst kind of nostalgia trip. It is indeed what I thought it was, but it also has a truly great cast, and the soundtrack is even better than advertised. I've got to give it to George Lucas, he really knows how to give audiences what they want when he wants to. (Which makes those later Star Wars movies even more baffling.)

Coke note: For a movie built on pure, distilled 1950s Americana, Coca-Cola is conspicuously hard to find. It only appears in a mini-golf snack shop intentionally obscured from the camera because it was obviously part of the actual snack shop and not paid product placement. (The "Frozen Coca-Cola" logo dates to 1969, an anachronism in a movie that takes place in 1962. Obviously.) What, did Coke want a cut of the box office?

58/2369. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Clearly the wrong lessons were learned from Ragnarok. The key theme of both the the A and B plots in this film are squarely focused on death, or more specifically, how to come to terms with surviving the death of loved ones. I think this is what makes the incessant, juvenile antics of Thor and company land so badly. There's just too much happening that's too heavy for the audience to enjoy casually tossed-off punchlines (mostly about destruction) and a badly underrealized visit to God City (which should be a movie in itself).

59/2370. The Hateful Eight (2015)
When I reviewed Django Unchained, I mentioned that it felt plodding. This movie moves half as fast, but since it is set up like a horror film (wearing the skin a Western), the slow pace is actually its strongest asset. (Perhaps because of Kurt Russell's presence, it becomes clear pretty quickly that John Carpenter's The Thing is the style template here.) The overriding theme in Tarantino's best work is the fluid state between trust and betrayal (the guy must have issues), and all roads lead here. Very good, I'd say; among Tarantino's best.

60/2371. MoviePass, MovieCrash (2024)
This is a documentary about how a company germinated by a good idea was killed by greed. It is a very American story, but it's clear even the filmmakers don't think anyone will learn any lessons from it.

61/2372. Scott Joplin (1977)
Billy Dee Williams plays the King of Ragtime in a period piece biography heavy on the syphilis. The movie is not great -- the director is unable to rise above its made-for-television feel -- but Billy Dee is.

More to come.

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56/2367. Denial (2016)
This is a courtroom drama about the libel lawsuit brought in the mid-90s against a Emory University professor by a British Nazi-sympathizing Holocaust denier. That's interesting, sure, but the reason I watched it was because I was a student at both Emory University and DeKalb College (renamed Georgia Perimeter College while I was there but is now a satellite campus of Georgia State University) in the mid-90s when the principle action takes place.

The 2016 film begins with an attempt at verisimilitude with establishing shots on Emory's quad in Decatur, GA (purporting to be 1994 and not doing too bad a job at pulling it off)...

...then follows our antagonist as he travels west away from Emory towards downtown Atlanta on Freedom Parkway (a road originally planned as the very controversial Presidential Parkway which was still under construction in the mid-90s)...

...then south along the Downtown Connector ("connecting" US Interstates 75 and 85) through the Grady Curve, so-called because Grady Memorial Hospital is just off camera to the right. (There's a giant neon Coca-Cola sign just off camera to the left.)

Side note: Turner Field, seen on the sign above, is also an anachronism. It didn't exist in 1994. It was originally opened to the public as Centennial Olympic Stadium for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games. After the Atlanta Braves abandoned it and moved north to Cobb County in 2016, it was sold to Georgia State University to become their football stadium and renamed again to Center Parc Stadium.

Side note 2: That billboard in the bottom right of the frame is advertising then-new (in 2015) news team of Sharon Reed and Ben Swann for WGCL CBS46 News. In 1994, WGCL was calling itself WGNX and after many years as an independent UHF station had just become the local CBS affiliate (after Atlanta's original CBS affiliate, WAGA, became a Fox station). Since 2022, WGCL has become WANF (for "Atlanta News First") but both Reed and Swann are long gone (in 2018 and 2019 respectively).

The antagonist must have been headed south down the Connector to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (called just the William B. Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport in 1994 as former mayor Maynard Jackson wouldn't die and get his name added until 2003) because we next see him pull up to -- I had to Google Image Search this -- the Elmsbridge Civic Centre in Esher, England.

Google Maps tells me that Esher is a suburb of London, where most of the movie is set and filmed, so it's easy to see why the filmmakers would use it here. For the record, according to Wikipedia, the Civic Centre was constructed in 1991, so it is at least period appropriate!

However, in the very next scene, by means of movie magic, we're transported back to the States inside an unidentified lecture hall disguised as DeKalb College (by means of a banner on a podium)!

I have no idea where this last bit was filmed, though I suspect it is also in London. It doesn't match any hall I sat in off Emory's quad in 1993-95, and if there were any lecture halls like this on Perimeter's Clarkston ("Central") or Decatur ("South") campuses in 1997-99, I was never inside them. They never used wood paneling when concrete blocks would do.

That's just the first 5 minutes. The rest of the movie takes place in Europe. I never went to any schools in London or Poland, so for all I know, all those locations are perfect.

More to come.

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Not a great bunch of entertainment value here.

51/2362. The First Auto (1927)
This is a pretty simple story about a horse-lovin' man slowly coming to terms with the march of progress. The appeal is all the shots of early cars and how they did (and sometimes didn't) work.

52/2363. The Cheat (1915)
TCM played this as part of a tribute to Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, but there's not really a lot to celebrate. Apparently, it was a bit of a sensation back in its day. Sure, Hayakawa's character is the sort of tall, dark and handsome slime that infatuated early movie audiences, but he's only taking advantage of the series of very poor choices that the white "lady" made herself in the first half of the film. Ick.

53/2364. Flirtation Walk (1934)
As much as I enjoy Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler in other, better musicals, this forgettable, fervently pro-Army melodrama is just too darn light on the music. I can say that it taught me that Flirtation Walk is the name of an actual landmark at West Point, so it certainly wasn't a total waste of time.

54/2365. Laugh and Get Rich (1931)
I recommend against this "comedy." Despite having the delightfully odd Edna May Oliver in a lead role, it's very much a couple of dull sitcom elements slow rolled into an 80-minute runtime. Snore.

55/2366. Sweet Charity (1969)
I don't understand most of the choices that director Bob Fosse makes with this movie adaptation of the stage show, but I disagree with most all of them, especially the obvious lip-synching. Everything that's worth watching here happens in the first hour.

More to come.

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