50/2482. Fighter Squadron (1948)
The episodic adventures of a squadron of American pilots in England contains the first on screen role for Rock Hudson, but I was much more enamored by the fact that it's also the first screen role for Jack Larson, television's original Jimmy Olsen, whose boyish character is very eager and gleeful about killing Nazis (as we all should be).

51/2483. Oppenheimer (2023)
I don't share the general public's appreciation of Christopher Nolan films, which is why it has taken me this long to watch this. I should have waited longer. To its credit, the cinematography is beautiful, and the cast all deliver top notch performances. However, Nolen can't decide if he wants a biography celebrating its title character for building the device that has doomed the human race or a screed against Cold War paranoia and political egos for failing to come to terms with opening Pandora's Box, and the whole endeavor would have benefitted greatly by picking just one of those lanes and cutting out an hour or more. I did not care for Robert Downey Jr's mustache twirling plot-device of a villain or Florence Pugh's unnecessarily lingering nudity or Emily Blunt's underwritten to the point of nonexistent character. And the Academy of Motion Pictures should be allowed to take away Oscars for sound design this bad. If I wanted to read subtitles to understand what everyone was mumbling underneath the oppressive sound effects and heavy handed orchestration, I would have read the Pulitzer-winning book the movie was based on, American Prometheus. I suspect that it is much, much better than this. (And yes, Randy, I spotted the Coke bottle. But since they were careful not to show me a label, I'm not going to include a screenshot. This movie doesn't deserve that.)

52/2484. The Fuller Brush Man (1948)
I watched this Red Skelton film despite the fact that I'm not a big Red Skelton fan specifically because I had already watched the sequel, The Fuller Brush Girl, which starred Lucille Ball. This is a case where the sequel is better. The physical gags in the third act were clearly based on silent comedies, but the exaggerations and Skelton's mugging for the camera drain all the humor. At least The Fuller Brush Company gets some high quality product placement here.

53/2485. Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)
This French New Wave film follows a spoiled singer for a couple of hours in real time as she waits for test results for a cancer diagnosis, and I thought I was going to hate it, but instead I somehow found it deeply engrossing. Recommended.

54/2486. Mountainhead (2025)
Not recommended. There are really only four characters, and they are all just the worst types of human beings: Silicon Valley tech bros who literally only care about themselves and profit. (All the supporting cast are arguably worse: sycophantic enabling employees and spouses.) There's literally no one to cheer for, even as they prove their ineptitude struggling to murder one of their own. I hated it more than Oppenheimer, though maybe that's because I could understand what everyone was saying. (You win this round, Nolen!)

More to come.

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11/2322. Mystery Island (2023)
So far as Hallmark mystery movies go, this one tries harder than most to echo an Agatha Christie novel. There are several overt references to And Then There Were None which sort of gives the game away. The fun here was watching the characters, mostly crime novel fans supposedly familiar with Christie's oeuvre, fail in different ways to find the obvious answer.

12/2323. The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)
I avoided this Michelangelo biopic for years because it's long and I don't like biopics. But I finally gave in after reading that it's apparently pretty accurate, including subtle hints that Michelangelo was a homosexual. I'm no Michelangelo, but I can certainly relate to some of his artistic attitudes.

13/2324. Haunted Harmony Mysteries: Murder in G Major (2023)
More Hallmark! It's a bit more... fantastic than what the channel usually tries -- one of the amateur sleuths in this is a ghost -- but it's still the usual small cast plus love-interest detective. Hey, at least they're willing to try something different.

14/2325. It's a Big Country (1951)
This anthology film, mostly of immigrant stories, is pretty blatant pro-America Cold War propaganda, which sometimes feels a little preachy. But it's got William Powell in it delivering a lecture on the parts of America he loves, so I give it two thumbs up.

15/2326. Somewhere I'll Find You (1942)
Two brothers, both newspaper foreign correspondents covering the unrest leading to World War II, fall for the same woman... and it's just terrible. Every scene of Clark Gable being a dick to Lana Turner is too long and dull, dull, dull. For frustrated housewives only.

More to come.

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I went grocery shopping yesterday. Walking in the door, I passed a sign very clearly instructing all customers that masks were required in the building, but I was the only shopper I saw who was wearing one. I hadn't realized so few people in my town could read.

Two weeks into February, Coweta County has reported already more deaths from COVID-19 this month than December and January combined. I know that death is a lagging indicator (by approximately two weeks), but I don't know how anyone can look at those numbers and think, "Now is the time to stop wearing masks!"

When I was a kid during the Cold War of the 1980s, I used to wonder how long people would stay in their underground fallout shelters after World War III before emerging to see if the world was once again inhabitable. The answer, I now know, appears to be not quite 2 years. After that, hey, radiation poisoning doesn't seem so bad.

One day, when we send people to Mars, will some significant percentage of the colonists decide that they've simply had enough and walk outside of their protective environments without masks? Is that what happened to the Roanoke Colony? "I don't care that it's snowing outside; I'm not putting on another pair of pants!"

Look, I get that wearing a mask sucks. *I* think it sucks. But so long as an ongoing pandemic continues to kill thousands of Americans — and several of my immediate neighbors — every day, I think I can do at least the least I can do to help prevent further spread.

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Films can be escapist fun from the shittiness of real life. So let's escape.

71. (1930.) Mona Lisa (1986)
Bob Hoskins was a great actor. Here he plays a slow-witted but well-intentioned man, which is a necessity to get the story where it wants to take us. To his credit, I kept overestimating his character exactly as I was supposed to. (The title is not an accident; the Mona Lisa is a famous painting because you see in it what you want to see.) I didn't love the film, but I respect it.

I want to see a Coke

72. (1931.) Lisztomania (1975)
I don't respect Lisztomania, but I admit it has its moments. It's a totally bonkers musical film falling somewhere between biopic of Franz Liszt and allegory about music's power to brainwash the masses. I don't know if Liszt did drugs, but the filmmakers sure did, and they informed the script: It starts all fun and euphoric excitement, but it takes more and more effort to top the previous experience and by the end you just want it all to stop. (The Jack Kirby's Thor-influenced Frankenstein's monster Superman is about three musical bridges too far.) The turning point, as is so often the case, is the mid-film song-and-dance number in which Roger Daltry rides a giant erection straight (in)to the devil. The film wants to say a lot about too much, but the ultimate moral of the story is that what may look like a great metaphor on paper is often unwatchable garbage on screen.

73. (1932.) Mahler (1974)
An earlier film made by the same writer/director as Lisztomainia. This watches more like a conventional biopic of dour, difficult composer Gustav Malher. I found to my surprise that I missed some of the latter film's enthusasiam.

74. (1933.) Walk a Crooked Mile (1948)
This buddy cop early Cold War procedural goes out of its way to have the g-men make mistakes that result in lost lives. I cannot believe that the FBI was ever this incompentent whatever the social mores of the day were. They ignore a man dressed as a priest, discount the possiblity that a woman could be the guilty party, and accuse the naturalized citizen because he has a suspicious accent. Well, okay, maybe that last one still holds.

75. (1934.) One Sunday Afternoon (1948)
On the opposite side of the entertainment spectrum from "geo-political crime drama" is this traditional Broadway-style musical adapted into a film in which it takes all three acts to teach the irritatingly dim protagonist that his best buddy is not a good person. I enjoyed the songs, settings, actors, and the reminder that life at the turn-of-the-20th-century was just all-around rotten. (I don't think that last bit was intentional on the part of the filmmakers. I might have been reading my own biases into a world where women were either trophies or slaves, "painful" dentisty was the only option, and lynch mobs were still considered justice.) I judge the film to be a good way to pass the time on a Sunday afternoon when football is not an option.

77. (1936.) Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009)
Did I say "escapist fun"? The takeaway here could have been "if you take agency, you can make a good life for yourself," but it's not. If fictional 1980s protagonist "Precious" was a real person, she would in all likelihood have died in obscurity decades ago from a disease forced upon her by her abusers, and the film doesn't let you forget that uncomfortable fact. It's more a "life sucks so let's do what we can to make it less painful for one another" scenario. It's a useful reminder and a good film.

More to come.

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As any good head doctor will tell you, the best treatment for depression is keeping yourself distracted by doing something creative.

Walt Builds a Family Fallout Shelter, sponsored by the National Concrete Masonry Association, 1960

Bomb shelters for everyone!

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from Justice League of America #113 (1974)

Three things.

Thing 1: The Freedom Train was a real thing designed to unite America against the dawning Cold War. Ironically, the train was forced to bypass several cities because they refused to allow black and white people on the train at the same time. (In this comic, the train will be hijacked by the villainous Wizard, who only wants it to prove to his Injustice League pals that he's good at stealing trains.)

Thing 2: That's some weird perspective in the second panel. John Adams was 5 feet 7 inches tall. Thomas Jefferson was 6' 2". Adams must have been standing on his soap box.

Thing 3: It's funny to think that the self-righteous John Adams is just being a dick, but the "improvement" he's talking about is the phrase "with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence," which was added after that first comma as one of many revisions the Continental Congress made to the declaration draft that Thomas Jefferson unveiled on June 28, 1776.

The daily minutes of the first Continental Congress for June 28-July 4 do not indicate who was responsible for adding the phrase. Popular opinion points to New Jersey delegate John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration. Witherspoon was at the time the president of Princeton, and just before joining the Congress, he made a big splash with a sermon titled "The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men." The movie 1776 gives him credit, which is good enough for me.

For the record, since this seems to be that kind of year, Witherspoon owned slaves. So did both good ol' Tom Jefferson (who often took his to bed) and, believe it or not, Benjamin Franklin (who did eventually change his mind and argue for universal emancipation). Of the four Founding Fathers mentioned in this post, the only one who never owned slaves was the self-righteous dick, John Adams. Give 'em hell, Johnny!

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Contrary to what you might have read, I do watch movies that aren't Hallmark movies.

168. (1607.) The Quiller Memorandum (1966)
Another Cold War spy movie that is long on drama/suspense yet light on action. That works to its advantage, especially considering the delightfully gray ending. (How did George Segal start his career with roles like these and end his career on sitcoms? That guy has range.)

169. (1608.) The Emoji Movie (2017)
Critics railed against this movie, calling it among the worst ever made. I don't think it's *that* bad, but it is too little material spread too thinly over some poorly-thought-out scenes with a moral that makes no sense given the initial premise. In summary: Meh.

172. (1611.) Brother John (1971)
I read online someone called this the "blackest film ever." It's a fitting description. Silent, judgy Sidney Poitier is a, what, an angel? An alien? I watched this twice, and I still don't know. I really enjoyed guessing, though. I'd watch it a third time.

The movie takes place in a small Alabama town filled with racists and rapists. Almost everyone is knee-deep in petty sin. It's a weird place to put so much Coca-Cola product placement.

You can't see it here, but there's even a Coca-Cola clock on the wall behind Bradford Dillman.

173. (1612.) The Three Musketeers (1921)
Damn, d'Artagnan was a total dick in this silent adaptation by Douglas Fairbanks (in the role of... d'Artagnan). There's a lot of fun in the swordplay, so it's not a total loss.

174. (1613.) Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
I can sum this animated film up with three letters: W.T.F. In a slightly longer summary, it's about a young wife in medieval Europe who is raped by nobility on her wedding day, discovers she likes sex (a lot), and eventually makes a deal with the devil to... have more sex, I guess? Her endgame isn't exactly clear. She's burned at the stake, and the French Revolution happens. The end. Seriously bonkers. Some of the animation is quite impressive, though.

175. (1614.) Riders to the Stars (1954)
To prove that space travel is feasible, three men are launched into space to find out why metal fatigues so quickly outside of the Earth's atmosphere only to discover that the human mind is the most fragile material of all. Reading that back, I realize that sentence is far better than the movie itself. Avoid.

More to come.

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Most of the movies I've watched lately are reruns, by which I mean movies I've seen before. For example, TCM ran a month of Thursdays of James Bond movies, and I watched all of them. That's nearly two dozen movies I don't need to track here. However, I assure you that the following were indeed new to me.

160. (1599.) Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)
Not counting Zombieland 2 (opening next weekend), I'm now just 2 movies away from seeing everything that Emma Stone has done. Not that I'm stalking her. That would be creepy. No. This is the opposite of that. Not creepy.

(How was the movie? Oh, fine enough, I guess. I didn't buy Matthew McConaughey as the lead love interest, but that's par for the course. I've never been a big McConaughey fan. Oh, the things I do for you, Miss Stone. Not creepy!)

161. (1600.) Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)
I remember the trailers for this from back in the day, especially the stained-glass knight. An offspring of its era — anyone else remember Young Indiana Jones and Young James Bond? — It's a fan-service movie for Sherlock Holmes lovers to show their kids. Not great.

162. (1601.) Shakes the Clown (1991)
Also not great, though mostly because of a lack of focus befitting the settings and characters. There is some genuine funny in this parody of a crime thriller, but not enough to justify sitting through the whole thing.

163. (1602.) A Scanner Darkly (2006)
I always say that there's no point to making an animated movie if you're not going to push the boundaries of "reality," and this film certainly does that. Too long, too much talking, too ambiguous in plot and point. I'm not disappointed that I finally saw it, but I wouldn't watch it again.

164. (1603.) The Happiest Millionaire (1967)
Walt Disney's last movie. The old man must have been slipping near the end, because this is terrible. It's like a remake of Mary Poppins with all the magic sucked out and replaced with the drudgery of wedding planning. Blech.

165. (1604.) Night People (1954)
A Cold War spy drama starring Gregory Peck. I found it engaging, but it's no James Bond. "Dry" might be the most generous description.

166. (1605.) Highly Dangerous (1950)
The unusual twist in this spy pulp fiction is that the newly recruited spy is *gasp* a woman. That's about all it has going for it. I'd say avoid if possible.

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It feels like forever since I've posted about movies. Let's correct that now with the first four movies I watched in June.

55. (993.) A Blueprint for Murder (1953)
I kept expecting this movie to have a twist. I mean, in a Law and Order episode, they give you a suspect, throw you a curve, then come back to suspect number one. This movie... well, I won't give it all away. It's a pretty good film, in fact, with plenty of suspense. Just fewer curves than I was expecting.

56. (994.) The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013)
Every once in a while you watch a film and say to yourself, "why did they make this?" Wonderstone is part family comedy like Liar, Liar, part satirical dark comedy like The Cable Guy, part dumb buddy comedy like Dumb and Dumber. The parts don't mix well. That said, Jim Carrey is a highlight.

57. (995.) The Double Man (1967)
This is a fantastic Cold War spy film staring Yul Brenner. I was confused by some POV choices early in the film, but they paid off later. Well done.

58. (996.) Now You See Me (2013)
This film had enough twists to make up for Blueprint for Murder, but most of them exist just to fake out the audience. Excuse me, director, but the viewer isn't actually a character. If you want to fake us out, it's a better option to just not show some things instead of showing us stuff that makes no sense in light of future revelations. In a mystery/caper film like this, that's the worst kind of cheating. (And don't even get me started on character motivations. Guh. The more I think about it, the less I liked this film.)

More to come.

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I Was hoping to make it to 12 movies in February, but I managed only 11. Drats. Anyway, here's the second (and final) batch of films watched in February.

18. (956.) The Wind and the Lion (1975)
I don't know that I've ever had the patience for this kind of film, a long-winded desert adventure story that plays fast and loose with history. I don't mean to suggest that it's bad. It just wasn't my thing.

19. (957.) Possession (1981)
One of the big jokes in Tropic Thunder is that an actor should never go "full retard," which is a shorthand way of saying that the emotions and behavior we expect from actors onscreen should represent real life only in a stylized way without putting real, messy human behavior on the screen. (Take that, method actors!) Although it feels weird to say this about Possession, a horror movie in which an unfaithful wife gives birth to a tentacle creature in the days before the Cold War apocalypse, lead actress Isabelle Adjani really does go "full retard." Her emotional anguish on camera is frightening in its honesty and intensity. That sort of emotional rawness made me far more uncomfortable than the monster did.

20. (958.) Thor: The Dark World (2013)
This movie's story is thin enough to wipe your nose with, but I don't think I've ever seen a better job of a comic book hero brought to the live screen. Thor is every bit the muscled pea-brain he was when I read his comics in the 1980s, and Tom Hiddleston's Loki is everything I want in a movie villain. Bravo.

21. (959.) Deadpool (2016)
The hype got me. I went to see the film for Colossus, my favorite of all the X-Men, and I wasn't disappointed. I describe it to friends as the Marx Brothers meet Beverly Hills Cop: if you don't like this dick joke, don't worry; there will be another in a second. More, please.

22. (960.) The Verdict (1982)
I'm on record as not liking Paul Newman movies. I think I need to amend that to say that I don't like young Paul Newman movies. The Verdict is a great courtroom drama, and Newman is great in it. I suspect I'm going to have to start dividing Newman's career into pre- and post-Butch Cassidy and only watch the latter.

23. (961.) Zoolander 2 (2016)
This movie became instantly famous as the only movie Leonard Maltin has ever walked out of. That's a shame. He missed one of the best boner sight gags ever. It's not that I blame Leonard. Comedy is the most subjective genre, and even the funniest people have days they just don't want to laugh. But I thought this sequel was a well worthy successor to the original, which I still laugh at 15 years later.

More to come.

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