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114/2684. The Yellow Canary (1963)
Pat Boone plays an asshole performer who mistreats everyone in his life, including his wife, and is then surprised when someone close to him kidnaps the baby he never really cared for. I'm sure this has nothing to do with Boone's real life.

115/2685. Jeopardy (1953)
This is a slow boil full of people behaving stupidly until it gets to its point: Barbara Stanwyck agreeing to sleep with a murderer to save her husband. Stanwyck is great, of course (as is Ralph Meeker as the murderer). Wish I could say the same about the script.

116/2686. Garage Sale Mysteries: Murder Takes the Stage (2026)
Mom said she hadn't watched one of these in a while, and after about fifteen minutes, she remembered why. So far as these Hallmark cozy mysteries go, it's fine, just keep expectations low.

117/2687. Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces (2000)
Though the title of this documentary on Chaney makes it seem that the focus would be on his legendary stage makeup skills (and they are covered), the takeaway is that the makeup wouldn't have meant much without his acting skills. I agree; Chaney is usually worth a watch.

More to come.

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I just rewatched Myrna Loy in The Barbarian (1933). On my first watch back in 2017, I wrote ‘"Stockholm Syndrome" wouldn't be named for another forty years, but it could have been called "Barbarian Syndrome." Myrna Loy is beautiful, but this is not her best work.’ I stand by that opinion.

This time, to see if others saw it the same way I did, I sought out online reviews of the film. Most of them are not complementary. One sample featured review at IMDB sums it up "Loy should not have been in this movie, regardless of the prevailing attitudes of the times...how things have changed." That echoes my sentiments, but it also made me curious. Have times really changed in the past hundred years?

Fortunately, IMDB has an external link to the Internet Archive where curious minds can find contemporary reviews of the movie in the May 2, 1933 issue of Variety.

In her "Going Places" column on page 11, Ceclila Ager writes

When Races Clash: Myrna Loy's metamorphosis from impulsive exotic to restrained Nordic encounters a stone wall in "The Barbarian," a set-back which, it is hoped, is only temporary. In order to make her ultimate surrender to the Egyptian respectable, she explains now and then, although nobody's asked her, that her mother was an Egyptian herself.

Now comes a battle between her Caucasian and Egyptian heredities, which makes Miss Loy proud and haughty one moment, swooning with elemental emotions the next. Her blood calls to Egypt and the particular sheik assigned her, but the Anglo-Saxon environment in which she was brought up won't let her be. She's in a pretty pickle, all the tougher for her to illustrate because it's such a phony pickle.

On page 17, male reviewer Joe Bigelow expands

It's all well and good as Novarro remains a fresh but agreeable young dragoman (Egyptian guide) who seeks to win the tourist lady from her white man fiance. That's because Novarro plays it so well, and Miss Loy helps him so much. Then the boy reveals his true station—he's a prince—and a lot of desert pash stuff, including beatings, draggings, and kidnappings, arrives. That the girl finally succumbs is a slap at the character rather than a vindication for the script. Novarro has always had a flare for light comedy. But Metro has generally succeeded in keeping it a secret.

And anonymous's "The Woman's Angle" column adds

Ramon Navarro changes, to suit the rambling, indecisive yarn, from charming rogue to routine caveman sheik. Not the type for the latter phase, so the ladies will remain quite calm.

Spread throughout the issue are theater revenue estimates from across the country indicating that in addition to critical scorn, The Barbarian also generally underperformed at the box office.

Disappointing, notices bad, and Novarro fans not liking it.

Novarro is another who is not up to previous draws....

Novarro's "The Barbarian" was coldly received and except for loyal Novarro following won't attract much attention....

Stage goes Egyptian this week in sympathy with the feature, Ramon Novarro's "The Barbarian" (Metro). Both are not so good, and from Friday night's business it looked like the populace guessed it ahead of time.

Feature picture was weak, and not exactly what the natives were looking for after the swell build-up for Novarro by the house.

Barbarian $7,800 (New Low)

All together that sounds like both critics and audiences of 1933 rejected a film in which the rape victim abruptly decides she loves her rapist. So although some things are certainly culturally different in 2026 (for example, the most recent episode of CBS Sunday Morning showcased a band called Mannequin Pussy), rather than criticize the mores of Great Depression-era Americans, we should probably be condemning the misogynistic kinks of producers at Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Bad producers. Bad!

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Henry is starting to get suspicious that I secretly film him with my phone camera.

Please don't show him this.

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Today, while sitting in stopped traffic waiting for a school bus to unload, I thought about how younger me would have been terribly inconvenienced by such an experience. I know in the past I would have argued that school buses should make fewer stops, as they did "back in my day," rather than divest each passenger to their own driveway. But just because I had to walk a greater distance than kids today doesn't mean society should expose those kids to a greater risk of traffic fatalities by making them walk along today's much busier roads. How many dead children is my convenience worth?

That made me think about how certain activities modify your chance of dying from moment to moment. ESPN charts play-by-play win probabilities in football games based on the statistical chance of either team wining given the current score, down-and-distance, and time remaining; imagine doing the same thing for a person, charting the second-by-second probability of your death based on your current activity and location. I have a non-zero chance of dying even as I sit here typing, but my graph probably has a much steeper slope when I drive a car or hold a toaster over a full bathtub. One day, my death probability will reach 100%. Once it gets there, you can stop graphing. The line's not coming back down from that. Game over.

That made me think about what the graph would look like for people living in war zones. Everyone's current death probability baseline is non-zero, but citizens in Ukraine have to be somewhat higher. Looking at some quickly Googled numbers, approximately 8.5k people, or 0.002% of the total population, die per day in the United States in 2026. The daily mortality attrition rate in Ukraine appears to be roughly 0.015% of the population. Generically speaking, just being in Ukraine, you're 7 times more likely to die each day than in the US. If you were graphing that moment to moment, I'm sure the line would swing wildly depending on whether or not a wave of drones was overhead.

That made me think about what the graph would look like if you were one of the conscripted Russian "soldiers" sent to the front lines. I've been reading that the average life expectancy of Russia's current Latin American mercenaries is about five days. From the moment they set foot on the Eurasian continent, their death probability graph has to look a lot like the win probability graph for Georgia when they played Division II Tennessee State back on September 5. It wasn't pretty. (Georgia's lowest win probability was 85.9% after TN State completed a 6-yard pass to set up a short second down at 9:11 remaining in the first quarter. For most of the rest of the game, it was 99.9%.) I sure hope someone is getting what they want from that meat-grinder.

I'm not a fan of this current era of unjust wars and corporate-driven AI intrusion into daily life, but I might come around if the AI could start calculating my real-time death risk quantification to help me know when I was doing something really foolish. I doubt it would help much. Humans are famously stupid, and I am human. If A and B, then C, so logically, I can already predict what number I might see while staring at my smartphone as I blithely cross the street in front of an oncoming school bus. In hindsight, I guess it's a good thing we didn't have AI or smartphones back in my day.

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109/2679. Caught Stealing (2025)
I enjoyed this so much more than I thought I would. It's essentially a neo noir disguised as an action thriller. There's plenty of comedy and style. Honesty, it's worth a watch for the closing credits alone.

110/2680. Hoppers (2026)
I also really enjoyed this. The critical reviews I'd read seemed to have a problem with the second half, when, yes, the tone rather abruptly changes from sentimental environmental message movie to body horror. But its heart is always in the right place, and it's always a lot of fun.

111/2681. Stop the World: I Want to Get Off (1966)
This is a filmed British play with overt 60s counter-culture leanings. The songs are pretty good, but I struggled with the weak and generally unlikable characters slow to learn any lessons. (That's the point, yes, but I lack patience for nitwits.)

112/2682. Non-Stop New York (1937)
Mistaken identity leads to suspense on an utterly ridiculous flying boat over the Atlantic in this British production akin to the RKO B-picture murder mysteries of the era. The highlight is the attempted murder on the plane's external observation deck!

113/2683. Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause (2025)
TCM kicked off its new Friday night concept of movies themed around a film-related documentary with this, which wants you to believe that Grodin wasn't the curmudgeon he played convincingly for so many years on the set of late night talk shows. He must have been a pretty good actor.

More to come.

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UPDATE: 9:03PM. FYI: My power is out again.

This time it's my fault. After voting, Mom and I went to Culver's to celebrate democracy in action. I decided to buy four pints of custard to take home and put in the freezer for later. Mom said, "Now I know the power is going to go out again." And it did! Mothers always know.

For the record, Georgia Power's estimated time until restoration to clear this latest downed pine tree is... about three hours.

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FYI: My power is out again.

The remnants of Hurricane Isaias rolled through town four days ago, and the power never flickered. But just now, at 2:45 in the morning, after days of nothing but cloudless sunshine, still air, and record heat, the power is out again for the same 69 customers in my neighborhood as always. (Do we have the most fragile trees, or the worst line placement? You decide!) The current estimate for restoration is at least three hours from now, which means I definitely won't be finishing the Google Sheet I was working on.

If you're keeping score at home, this is the fifth significant outage (three hours or more) in the past four months.

They say you shouldn't go to bed angry, but it seems I don't have much choice. Better that than stewing in the dark until dawn.

UPDATE: Dawn has come and gone, so I can now stew into the afternoon. Apparently some of my neighbors have been posting on Nextdoor.com that no one even came to look into it until after a school bus got stuck and the fire department had to be called to clear the road. (I assume all the linemen are still out on loan to clean up Florida /Alabama?) So these "estimated time of restoration" alerts from Georgia Power are starting to seem pretty suspect. It's now 9:30 and the current estimated time of restoration? Still at least three hours from now.

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Mom sent me a link to the front page of The Atlanta Constitution on October 13, 1940, because it celebrated the debut of female cheer leaders at University of Georgia football games. But what caught my attention was this article:

Tom Mix Dies With His Boots On
By the United Press.

FLORENCE, Ariz, Oct. 12.—Tom Mix, the rootin'est, tootin'est, shootin'est cowboy there ever was, died today as spectacularly as he lived, in an auto wreck, when his green speedster turned over on an Arizona desert Highway at 80 miles an hour.

He was dead when passersby hauled him from the wreckage near here. His neck was broken.

Mix, who never was as good behind the wheel as he was at the bridle of his horse, Tony, tangled with a bridge construction job. There was a detour sign, but the 60-year-old cowboy—the originator of Hollywood's multi-million-dollar horse opera industry—failed to see it.

He died with his high-heeled boots on and his 10-gallon white sombrero still jammed on his brow.

(Other details on Page 10-A)

It sure sounds like Tom Mix hurt someone's feelings in Atlanta. Here's how the New York Times front page ran the story:

Tom Mix Dies With His Boots On
By the United Press.

FLORENCE, Ariz, Oct. 12.—Tom Mix, 60, cowboy-actor and hero of Western thrillers of the films, was killed eighteen miles south of here today as he was pinned under his overturned automobile on a highway detour.

Mr. Mix, whose colorful career as a circus performer, soldier, law enforcement officer and motion picture star make him the idol of millions the world over, was traveling alone from Tucson, Ariz., to Florence and Phoenix.

Serving as advance agent for a circus scheduled to show soon in Phoenix, he was carrying $6,000 in cash, $1,500 in travelers' checks and several valuable jewels.

Two highway employes [sic] discovered the upset car and called State patrolmen, who extricated the body. Coroner E.O. Devine said that Mr. Mix apparently died instantly after losing control of his car. There will be no inquest. The body was brought here.

The Times story continues for about another thousand words but none of them confirm Constitution's gorier details. So of course I had to go looking for more. The United Press-credited story on the front page of The Arizona Daily Star follows pretty much the same template as the Associated Press story in The Constitution and The Times but adds some additional facts.

Tom Mix Dies in Auto Crash Near Florence

FLORENCE, Ariz, Oct. 12.—(AP)—Tom Mix, 60, cowboy-actor and hero of scores of western thrillers of the silent film era, was killed 18 miles south of here today when he was pinned under his overturned automobile on a highway detour.

Mix, whose colorful career as a circus Performer, soldier, law enforcement officer and motion picture star made him the idol of millions the world over, was traveling alone from Tucson to Florence and Phoenix.

Coroner E. O. Devine said Mix apparently died instantly after losing control of his car. The body was brought here.

Body Is Found

Two highway employes [sic], John Adams of Oracle, Ariz., and E. A. Armenta of Casa Grande, discovered the overturned vehicle.

Martin Younkers, Beloit, Wis., and Anthony Monts, Rockford, Ill., who said Mix had passed them on the highway north of Tucson, helped pull the actor's body from under his racing model car.

Younkers and Monts said a heavy suit case had fallen against Mix's head, burying his face in the soft ground. A physician reported later the blow broke his neck.

Local investigators said Mix, who left Tucson at 1 p.m., was serving as advance agent for a circus scheduled to show in Phoenix shortly. The cowboy star was carrying $6,000 in cash, $1,500 in travelers' checks and several valuable jewels.

One of the things I was taught in high school journalism was to get people's names in the paper to encourage local interest. I wonder how Mr. Younkers and Mr. Monts felt about that tactic.

For the record, the Constitution was wrong about the color. The car was not green. It was a bright yellow 1937 Cord 812 Supercharged Phaeton (with California license plate 6C 90 61). It's since been restored. The same cannot be said for Mr. Mix.

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