35/2605. Odd Man Out (1947)
I read that Roman Polanski, Sam Peckinpah, and Gore Vidal considered this to be among their favorite noir movies, but I agree with some of its contemporary critics that after a fantastically engaging start, it loses its way as it staggers (and then crawls) to its unsatisfying (but necessary?) conclusion.

36/2606. Critic's Choice (1963)
Sixties sex comedies are not my bag, baby, and it doesn't help that Bob Hope and Lucille Ball don't really have any sexual chemistry. But it's a mild enough example of the genre to be an inoffensive way to pass an afternoon.

37/2607. Toy Story 4 (2019)
Purposelessness. Abandonment. Loneliness. Death. Toy Story movies go hard and are always worth the effort to watch (though my fingers).

38/2608. Two Weeks with Love (1950)
The A plot of this MGM musical with Jane Powell and Ricardo Montalban is fine, but "little sister" Debbie Reynolds steals every scene she is in, especially singing "Aba Daba Honeymoon."

39/2609. One Battle After Another (2025)
Now that I've seen this, Paul Thomas Anderson's recent Oscar feels more like a career retrospective award. I do not think this is his best work, certainly no better than Licorice Pizza or Inherent Vice. Full disclosure requires I admit that I am no particular fan of Magnolia or Boogie Nights, either, but I agree Anderson is a rare talent and I do not begrudge the industry eventually recognizing it.

For an underground militant revolutionary radio DJ, that's a pretty prominent Coca-Cola can.

More to come.

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13/2583. Kitty Foyle (1940)
Ginger Rogers is Kitty Foyle, a muddle-headed girl who falls for the wrong man and continues doubling-down on her bad decision. Ginger is very good even if her character is irritating. (The Wrong Man is played by Dennis Morgan, who I never much care for, so you'll excuse me if I was against him from the beginning.)

14/2584. The Big Combo (1955)
A film noir police procedural is right up my alley. This doesn't disappoint, especially with Lee Van Cleef playing a rat-like heavy in a homosexual-coded relationship with a fellow mobster. Good stuff.

15/2585. The Harder They Fall (2021)
I'm not sure why they unnecessarily borrowed the names of a bunch of real-life Black Wild West characters for what otherwise feels like a Van Peebles Blacksploitation Western. But whatever. It's still a lot of fun (at least until some third act shenanigans aiming for misguided pathos).

16/2586. Greased Lightning (1977)
First off, let me say that there's a briefish Coca-Cola drinking scene in the middle of this very loosely adapted biopic staring Richard Pryor and Beau Bridges, but I did not get a screenshot at the time. I'll try to correct that next time I see it's coming on TCM, which seems to run it about once a year. It sticks pretty hard to the traditional sports movie cliches, so if you like that sort of thing, you'll probably like this.

17/2587. A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
Maybe because Kirk Douglas is in this stylish tale of love and betrayal, it kept reminding me of The Bad and the Beautiful. I liked it, especially Linda Darnell (who was the love interest in Zero Hour!; if you know, you know).

More to come.

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Flower

I first heard of Phair in 1993 in the Mazda Miata with Mom during the afternoon rush hour commute between Emory University and Newnan when Phair's debut Exile in Guyville album was reviewed on NPR.

Thanks to the Internet, I can tell you that day must have been Tuesday, July 20,¹ when Ken Tucker reviewed Exile in Guyville, released in June 1993, for Terry Gross's Fresh Air. That was the summer before my freshman year at Emory, so what was I doing in the car? Was I working part-time in the Pediatric Infectious Diseases office with Mom before my work-study position started in August, or was I just killing time driving the convertible around downtown Atlanta while Mom was working? Could have been either.)

The Internet also makes it possible for me to transcribe Tucker's praise for this song in particular:

There's a thin quality to Exile in Guyville. It ends up making you think that Liz Phair is something of a dabbler, that If this rock thing doesn't work out, she'll take up painting or maybe just use her trust fund to live in Paris for a while. But there's a core of about four or five songs here that are really first rate, and one in particular, called "Flower," that I can't play on the radio but which is as fine and bold a song as I've heard about sexual obsession.

Obviously, I had to have any album with that kind of recommendation. I probably bought the cassette at the Tower Records behind Lennox Mall, and I recall playing it quite a bit during the long commutes between Atlanta and Newnan. Listening to Phair always made me feel rebellious and cool, as good rock music should. "I'll take you home and make you like it," indeed.

Thanks, Internet!

¹ The Internet tells me July 20, 1993², was the same day that the press box caught on fire at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, which 90s Atlanta Braves fans will recall as the day that Fred "Crime Dog" McGriff made his debut for the team, in his third at-bat hitting a home run to drive in Ron Gant to tie the game at 5-5 in the 6th inning. The fire didn't start until 6, so I think we found out about the fire after we got home. The fire delayed the game start until after 9; I might have watched it, but I don't have any memory of that.

² You know what else happened on July 20, 1993? Some guy named Vince Foster committed suicide. And no one ever uttered his name again.

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Today is my fiftieth birthday. That's a nice, round, easy-to-add number, which is probably why I remember figuring in elementary school that I would turn 50 in the distant, future year 2025. That seemed a very long way off back then. A 50-year-old me still feels a long way off, and I guess that's just going to have to be good enough.

UPDATE: Look at this sweet stack of books that my aunt gave me! Famous Last Words: An Anthology, A Brief History of Death, Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Imperialism, The Fires of Lust: Sex on the Middle Ages, But Can I Start a Sentence with "But"?: Advice from the Chicago Style Q&A, Who's a Good Dog?: And How to Be a Better Human, Canine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do, and Show People: A History of the Film Star. (Don't blame her. I picked all of those titles out from a University of Chicago Press catalog. What can I say? I like to read about death, comic books, sex, grammar, dogs, and movies, maybe even in that order.)

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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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My mouse has started to report random double clicks, and my keyboard has begun occasionally ignoring me when I press the letter "e". Traitors!

So while I work on finding replacement parts, I'll keep today's post short and just give you something I was saving for a later post: the gift of pornography. Ear pornography.

Centerfold

Na-na na-na-na-na, na-na-na na-na-na-na.

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45/2477. I Love Melvin (1953)
MGM tried to recreate the magic of Singin' in the Rain by re-teaming Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor to diminishing returns. Yes, there are some entertaining song and dance numbers, but the plot is a stretched terribly thin and the chemistry between the leads just doesn't work as well without Gene Kelly.

46/2478. Three the Hard Way (1974)
The title explicitly refers to the plot in which three action heroes (Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly) must race to three different American inner cities to stop mass poisonings. At least, I think that's the plot. The actual scenes aren't staged, filmed, or edited particularly well. (There's a scene near the climax where Brown literally trips over a folding table and has to stumble out of the way of an incoming breaking glass stunt. I guess they had to use that take because they only had one pane of glass?) But no one is watching this movie for the narrative. We watch to see Jim Kelly go kung fu on a bunch of cops and Jim Brown climb a dam with his bare hands and Fred Williamson kill a bunch of Nazis with explosions (plus a trio of topless motorcycle prostitutes who interrogate a man to death... with sex!). And we do get all that and more.

47/2479. The Big Trail (1930)
On the other hand, the amount of pre-planning and care that had to go into the massive wagon train scenes in John Wayne's first starring role is downright impressive, even if Wayne is not so much. They really don't make 'em like this anymore.

48/2480. Kaboom (2010)
Awful, just awful. The film juggles a lot of pop culture elements that also turn up in other fringe indies (coming of age struggles, philosophy, sex, homosexuality, religious cults, prophecies, conspiracies, psychic powers, witches, etc.) but the third act just kills all momentum with a long sequence of talking heads trying to explain everything that to that point hadn't made much sense. And then the movie just ends. I can only assume that the filmmaker Gregg Araki ran out of money and gave up. Avoid this turkey at all costs.

49/2481. The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
Now this is eccentric filmmaking done right. This, writer/director Jacques Demy's musical follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is definitely not perfect (the unrhyming song lyrics distracted me throughout), but it is very, very colorful and charming and life affirming. It also happens to have Gene Kelly in it. Coincidence? I think not.

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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By chance, while waiting for an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver to start, I stumbled into the end of an episode of a series I'd never seen before: The White Lotus.

In particular, my first glimpse of any The White Lotus was a scene in which 53-year-old Walton Goggins put his tongue on the nipples of much younger Aimee Lou Wood. And it creeped me out.

I could go on at length about what I think creeped me out about that scene (in fact, I've spent the past hour typing and deleting as I grasp at straws), but all I can say for sure is that it makes me very uncomfortable thinking about how they rehearsed and shot that scene in real life.

If the actors both had input and were genuinely okay with their participation (as a Googled article at Elle.com suggests), well, they are both adults and professionals, after all. So long as they had agency to consent and/or refuse, more power to them, I guess.

But that doesn't mean that I'm going to be watching any more White Lotus episodes. They creep me out.

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'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other word would smell as sweet.

Shakespeare wrote those lines in 1597,^[1] by which time Greenland had been called "Greenland" for 611 years,^[2] which I mention only to give perspective to the following bill introduced this week into the United States Congress,^[3] itself founded 173 years after Shakespeare died.

---

119th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 1161

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
February 10, 2025

Mr. [Earl L. "Buddy"] Carter of Georgia introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and in addition to the Committee on Natural Resources, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

A BILL

To authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. Short title.

This Act may be cited as the “Red, White, and Blueland Act of 2025”.

SEC. 2. Purchase or other acquisition of Greenland.

The President is authorized to enter into negotiations with the Government of Denmark to purchase or otherwise acquire Greenland.

SEC. 3. Renaming of Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”.

(a) Renaming.—Greenland shall be known as “Red, White, and Blueland”.

(b) References.—Any reference in a law, map, regulation, document, paper, or other record of the United States to Greenland shall be deemed to be a reference to “Red, White, and Blueland”.

(c) Implementation.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—The Secretary of the Interior, acting through the Chairman of the Board on Geographic Names, shall oversee the implementation of the renaming described in subsection (a) with respect to each Federal document and map.

(2) REQUIREMENT.—Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this section, the head of each Federal agency shall update each document and map of the Federal agency in accordance with the renaming described in subsection (a).

---

I wish I could say that this bill is the dumbest thing we will see in 2025, but we all know better.^[4]

We are now living in a theater of the absurd. It's only a matter of time before someone actually makes their horse a senator.

Here's drink. I drink to thee.

^[1] Source: Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 38-44. (You know, the balcony scene.)

^[2] "Grœnland" is the name given by tenth century Norse colonizers, but there is no record of what the previous inhabitants called it, and the current "natives" are actually newer settlers than the Vikings. At what point does the colonizer become the native? As an American who can trace my ancestry back to the American Revolution, I can only say that I don't know.

^[3] Source: www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1161/text

^[4] I mean, for one thing, a man convicted of 34 state felonies, found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation, and charged with fomenting rebellion against the federal government and stealing classified documents from the federal government has been sworn-in as president, and in just the past six weeks we've witnessed, in no particular order, the United States under his direction withdrawing from the World Health Organization; sanctioning the International Criminal Court; starting trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and Columbia; threatening Panama, Greenland, and Denmark; buying-out the contracts of an estimated 75,000 government employees without the funding to do so; ending the corruption prosecution of the mayor of New York City accused of taking bribes from Turkey; ordering the Army Corp of Engineers to fight future fires in Los Angeles by releasing water from California dams into streams that do not reach Los Angeles; blaming an airliner crash in Washington DC on handicapped people; re-renaming Mount McKinley and Fort Bragg; firing 17 Inspectors General in the Executive branch; pledging to permanently displace all Palestinians so that Gaza can be turned into "the Riviera of the Middle East"; banning Constitutionally-granted birthright citizenship; eradicating "anti-Christian bias in government" before demanding an apology from a bishop for suggesting the president show mercy to marginalized communities; ending the "weaponization of the federal government" by appointing a man with an enemies list of "conspirators" to be FBI Director, blocking all transgendered people from the military; ordering colleges to give medals to non-transgendered athletes; refusing to enforce the anti-bribery Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because its bad for business; selling meme coins; restarting Ronald Regan's Star Wars missile defense project; removing any reference to climate change from the Department of Agriculture; freezing Congress-allotted funding agencies including FEMA, USAID, EPA, CDC, NIH, CFPB, NOAA and others; axing any mention of "Diversity," "Equity," and "Inclusion" from government websites and databases (with sometimes hilarious results); ignoring election pledges to take action on inflated grocery prices; assuring Russia that Ukraine will never join NATO; replacing the board of the Kennedy Center with loyalists so that the president could be elected chair in order to stop "wokey" productions; appointing an accused statutory rapist to Attorney General, an anti-vaxxer to lead Health and Human Services, a conspiracy-theorist to lead National Intelligence, an avowed dog-killer to lead Homeland Security, an accused alcoholic to lead Defense, and the world's richest man to lead deregulation efforts in the name of "Government Efficiency"; and, of course, pardoning everyone involved in the January 6 riot. Note that I did not mention getting rid of the penny; it is well past time for the penny to go (although the president doesn't actually have the power to do that). At least he hasn't gassed any protesters again... yet. It's going to be a very long four years.

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