Netflix animation fest 2025!

110/2542. The Wild Robot (2024)
I spent too much of the movie wondering how the engineering of the robot was supposed to work, but once I got past that (or, more accurately, once I forced myself to recognize that the talking robot was just as unreal as the talking animals), I was charmed by the characters and appreciated how genuine the sentimentality felt compared to too many other tear-jerkers. A great piece of art and a worthy Oscar rival to Flow (which I still liked better).

111/2543. Paddington in Peru (2024)
By far the worst of the three Paddington movies but only because the first two are so truly great. This one remains quite watchable, especially thanks to Olivia Coleman's over-the-top surreality and Hugh Bonneville being Hugh Bonneville. (Although honestly, given the choice, I'd much rather re-watch either of the others for the tenth time than this one again.)

112/2544. Nimona (2023)
This might be my second favorite movie seen in 2025 after Kpop Demon Hunters, though I admit this is tailor-made for my specific interests. Nimona literally takes every medieval fantasy RPG-genre cliche and turns them inside out yet (mostly) avoids the cynicism that typically accompanies such deconstructionist approaches. Pay attention, Disney: this is the right way to turn a villain into a protagonist hero! I really, really liked it.

113/2545. Dog Man (2025)
Some children's animated movies manage to give something to the adults in the audience. Not this one. Though the art design is clever, the plot is just too thin (and the mute protagonist too bland) to hold my attention. If it had been an hour and half shorter, it could have made several amusing shorts. But as a feature? Yawn.

114/2546. Klaus (2019)
I watched this animated Christmas movie only because Netflix recommended it after I watched the series of animated movies above. I admit it's got some great animation and design (and Jason Schwartzman is perfect for his part), but Christmas... bah, humbug.

115/2547. The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)
Despite being a COVID-era movie, the "Evil Artificial Intelligence delivered through social media conquest the world" angle of this otherwise boilerplate coming-of-age adventure story could have been pulled straight from any 2025 clickbait article. None of the characters struck me as particularly unique or memorable, but maybe I've just seen the basic Hero's Journey plot too many times. I suspect this really sparkled with its target audience of tweens, as I would have loved it if it existed when I was twelve.

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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Captain D's is currently running an ad campaign that should be considered a war crime. When my television starts chanting "Fish D'Lish," I have to drive for the remote's mute button before the repetition drives me mad (or madder than I already am, anyway).

Once upon a time, I heard Stephen Colbert suggest that the best way to kill an earworm is to sing a shorter earworm that "cannot loop." His example was "by Mennen" as sung at the end of Speed Stick commercials. John Oliver suggested the "Ricola" yodel, and that's the one that usually works for me. I've been singing "Ricola" a lot lately.

On a marginally related note, I've recently been playing with the Talkback accessibility option on my phone. Theoretically, I could use it to control my phone hands free, but I've been using it to read Wikipedia articles out loud while I walk the dogs. Today I listened to the story of the Second Peloponnesian War. I found it amusing to hear my phone insist on calling the Persian king "Xerxes Eye."

That led me to wonder what Talkback's narrator would call this website, which has a made-up name I brainstormed on a napkin in my first apartment in Athens. Everyone seems to get it wrong on the first try. To my surprise, the phone handled "wriphe" perfectly. (For the record, it's pronounced like "rife," which was Merriam-Webster.com's Word of the Day on Sunday, and I'm going to have to steal their explanation to be another tagline for this site: "Rife Wriphe usually describes things that are very common and often—though not always—bad or unpleasant.")

So of course you know what I tested Talkback on next. Hint: It rhymes with "dish o'fish." What can I say? Advertising works.

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Friend James just shared an Internet article that claimed that every time I drink a Coke, my life gets 12 minutes shorter. That's a shame. Friends shouldn't share articles like that.

Let's see, if I've had just one Coke a day (ha!) since I was born, that's at least 215,760 minutes or 159 days that I could have lived and won't. If my fated expiration date is May 23, 2025, I might drop dead before I finish typing this. There's no arguing with that; it's science!

If there's one lesson to be learned from that article, it's that I really should stop procrastinating in posting these Coca-Cola product placement screenshots from recently watched movies that haven't otherwise made it into my movie reviews (either because I had already seen them or I didn't watch enough of the movie to qualify):

Some Came Running (1958)

The Cutting Edge (1992)

Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

Slap Shot (1977)

The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975)

Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)

The article didn't ay anything about drinking Coke with my eyes!

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78/2244. If I Had a Million (1931)
This is the rare anthology film, with each segment built around the idea of a dying businessman giving away a million dollars each to individuals he chooses at random out of a phone book. Interestingly, the new money makes very little difference in the lives of most of them. Pretty good on the whole.

79/2245. The Color of Money (1986)
Paul Newman revisits the character of 1961's The Hustler twenty-five years down the road. I didn't care for "Fast" Eddie Felton then, and I don't much care for him now. The strength of the movie is actually the charismatic up-and-comer played by Tom Cruise. Gee, once upon a time, that guy could really act.

80/2246. Crime Wave (1953)
I really love snarling, toothpick chomping Sterling Hayden playing a cop who just might be dirty as he leans way too hard on an ex-con the audience knows is innocent. It's good noir with a satisfying payoff.

81/2247. Julie (1956)
The ridiculously contrived third act of this unsubtle thriller starring Doris Day would seem to have inspired much of the following-year's Zero Hour! (co-starring Serling Hayden), which as we all know, is the template for the single greatest comedy film ever made, Airplane!. So that's cool.

82/2248. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004)
The movie takes the television characters on an epic "save the world" adventure that, other than some very, very dark turns, isn't really any different than the source cartoon. But it is 100% worth watching for David Hasselhoff's brief but hilarious part. (I hope that man has had half as much fun in the entertainment industry as I have had watching him.)

83/2249. Desperate (1947)
When a robbery goes sideways, a well-intentioned teamster and his wife spend the rest of their life on the run from evil mastermind Raymond Burr instead of, you know, going to the cops. I guess if they'd done the sensible thing, it would have been a much shorter movie, and who wants that?

More to come.

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For reasons I can't explain, I wound up at a picnic for some of the greatest retired NFL quarterbacks. Dan Marino is there, naturally, but so is Elway, Cunningham, Moon, and more, all dressed like they had just stepped out of a Land's End catalog.

After a brief introduction, we walk to the stadium. We move in slow motion, as though underwater. Dodging their wrinkle-free khaki legs, I realize that these giants of football are literally giants as I gaze up at them from the viewpoint of a child. Occasionally golden rays of sunlight pierce the space between them, back-lighting their smiling faces and making them look like bronze statues of gods.

The weather changes abruptly, and the Minnesota Vikings fans wait beside stacked snowdrifts to enter their domed stadium. The fans are mostly dressed in puffy pink snowsuits, giving them the appearance of cotton-candy Michelen Men.

Inside, the stadium seems far too small to host a football game. I'm seated in the upper deck facing a solid white wall with a bank of glowing windows. The field far to our right isn't even visible from our seats. Some of the fans seated near me titter excitedly when our bank of seats begins to rotate towards the field. Gradually, the field comes into view, a flat, lifeless artificial turf. No one, neither coaches, players, or stadium personnel, is on the field.

Our seats continue rotating. Despite the hopeful noise around me, I know that we're just going to rotate 360° and face the window again. Of course I'm right, and I smile smugly to myself.

I get up from my seat and begin walking downstairs towards the lower level when I trip and stumble over the railing running vertically up the middle of the white concrete stairs. Desperate not to fall and make a fool of myself in front of a full house of fans, I lithely roll horizontally around the handrail like an Olympic gymnast and land on my feet. The nearby crowd thinks I've done this on purpose and cheers its appreciation.

Someone from the Vikings organization has seen my performance and rushes me down the stairs into a wood-paneled backroom where the team is waiting. The players are all wearing their pink Vikings uniforms, milling around nervously in the too-small space. Some are talking, some are tossing a football, some are playing cards or listening to music; they are behaving like extras in the background of a Hollywood locker-room scene. I'm at least a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter than everyone else in the room.

Someone -- the coach? the general manager? -- grabs my arm and tells me that they saw my "moves" in the stadium and they need me to replace their quarterback who has just broken his leg. On cue the quarterback, fully dressed for the game in his bright pink uniform and shoulder pads, rolls his wheelchair in from another room, his outstretched left leg encased in a white plaster cast. For someone with a broken leg, he looks indecently happy.

I try to explain that what they saw was an accident, merely an attempt to keep from making an idiot of myself. The man talking to me doesn't believe me. Chomping on his cigar, he orders the lame quarterback to throw me a pass. The football comes at me like a bullet aimed just above my head. Without time to think, reflexes born of self-preservation motivate me into a leaping backflip. In the process, my flailing arms snatch the ball from the air lest it hit and harm me. When I land, the entire team applauds, and I know I've lost the argument.

Moments later I'm running onto the field in my new pink Vikings uniform. The crowd goes wild, but I know this can't end well.

And that is why I have to stop eating pepperoni pizza and watching NFL Live just before bed.

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I've been really busy with work lately, and had less time for movies. Therefore, my movies to close out April list is relatively short. I'll make up for this next week as I sort cards in front of the television.

103. Midnight in Paris (2011)
Typically, I find I don't enjoy Woody Allen movies, but I've been recommending this film to everyone I know. This film about a writer searching for art in life qualifies itself as art. I loved it.

104. Pigskin Parade (1936)
Seeing that this was coming on Turner Classic Moves, I chose to watch it because it was about college football in 1936, not because it is the film debut of Judy Garland. In the film, Yale is the powerhouse club looking to pick on a weak southern school for an exhibition game. Their choice of weak team? Texas. Heh.

105. The Illusionist (2010)
A beautifully animated, largely silent movie about the end of a stage magician's career with a distinctly bittersweet final act. I was initially disturbed by its lack of resolution. As the days have passed, I find I appreciate its honesty more and more.

106. Fearless Fagan (1952)
Plot in a nutshell: a circus clown is drafted into the army and takes his pet lion into the service with him. It's hard to believe that when the U.S. Army finds a lion roaming one of their bases, they don't immediately shoot it, but I guess that would have been a much shorter movie.

107. My Dear Secretary (1948)
Another variation on the A Star is Born format, this time played for laughs. Kirk Douglas plays a washed-up author who is an absolute cad that the up-and-coming writer inexplicably falls for anyway. If not for Keenan Wynn ending practically every scene with a Bruce Vilanch-style punchline, this movie would be nearly unwatchable.

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Michelin has been running animated tire commercials in a heavy rotation during this football season. I assume that they are hoping it will gain their product some traction with the NFL's truck-buying audience. Typically, the commercials roll along at a fun clip, however, the commercial for their Primacy MXM4 comes up a little flat. Read the following transcript of actor John Doman's voice-over narration and see if you can't figure out where I think the commercial runs off the road:

Max and his son made their way homeward bound
when mischievous rain dropped down, down, down.
Safety was threatened by every roguish drip.
They slipped and slid. They couldn't get a grip
Then along came the Michelin Man reminding them the right tire changes everything.
So with Michelin tires rainy days werent so tricky.
Stop up to 29 feet shorter than the leading competitor with the Michelin tire.
Michelin: a better way forward.

Bound is to down as drip is to grip. Then along came the Michelin Man to ruin a good rhyme. If that's what the Michelin Man does to smoothly running cadence, I'm pretty sure I don't want him anywhere near my car.

You can see the whole commercial at advertolog.com. Your mileage may vary.

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After my curiosity-driven research into the tombstone of Jeannie Hardaway McBride and my follow-up on the destruction of her home, I've had a request for more information about the descendants of Jeannie Hardaway McBride. I should point out that she's my 3rd cousin three-times removed, so I'm no expert. However, I'm glad to share what I know (because I'm a know-it-all busybody).

Research indicates that Jeannie McBride had as many as 8 children ^[1][2][3], six of whom appear to have survived infancy. What little I know about that family is detailed as as follows. Keep in mind that all of the detective work that follows was done at my computer. A little real digging through actual books -- does anyone do that anymore? -- would no doubt clear up any inconsistencies or misinformation.

Robert McBride was born January 16, 1895, and died May 9, 1896. He is buried in Newnan's Oak Hill Cemetery.^[4]

Isora Burch McBride was born December 25, 1896, and died September 6, 1898. Isora was named for her grandmother, and is buried in Newnan's Oak Hill Cemetery.^[5]

William H. McBride was born March 21, 1899. The Social Security Death Index shows two William McBrides born on March 21, 1899; one died in May 1962 in Virginia, the other died in December 1986 in Houston, Texas^[14]. Since there is a William C. McBride, Jr. buried in Marietta National Cemetery in Marietta, GA, with a death date of May 23, 1962^[15], I'm guessing it's that one.

George McBride was born June 22, 1901, and died August 27, 1932. He is also buried in Newnan's Oak Hill Cemetery.^[16]

Alice M. McBride born October 22, 1903, and died on November 9, 1977. In between she married James Thompson Goodrum who appears as a 29-year-old male in the 1920 U.S. Census.^[6] The couple had at least 2 children, both boys. She is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Coweta County as Alice McBride Goodrum.^[7]

Henry Strickland McBride was born January 8, 1906, and died May 6, 1976. Henry married Mary Cowham on March 2, 1941¹³. After years of adventures in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Henry retired to Newnan and is buried in Newnan's Oak Hill Cemetery.^[8]

Virginia McBride, birth date unknown, was in the Shorter College graduating class of 1929.^[9] I have no idea what happened to Virginia after that.

Ruth McBride was born in December 1910. Like her older sister, Ruth attended Shorter College and appears as a Sophomore in the 1928 Argo yearbook^[10] and the 1930 Argo yearbook!^[11] Mysteriously, she does not appear in the 1931 yearbook at all.^[12] While I had initially been led to believe that her name was "Ruth Reid McBride," and that she had been born on December 10^[2], I can find no records for that name. Because Ruth Reid Hardaway was the name of Jeannie's sister, this could have been an honest mistake by an earnest genealogist. A little digging reveals one Ruth Hardaway McBride born on December 7, 1910, married William Haskell DuBose, Jr. on May 4, 1935, and died on September 8, 1999.^[17] Mr. DuBose is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park like Ruth's sister, so it seems likely that his wife is our girl Ruth.

And that's all I know about that.

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