34/2466. Big Eyes (2014)
Tim Burton's biography of the artist(s) behind the kitsch "Big Eyes" craze of the 1960s art world is big on atmosphere, which is much appreciated, especially since the drama of the story itself seems so slight. I assume that Burton's sympathies lie with the protagonist, but it's Jason Schwartzman and Terence Stamp who steal every scene they're in as, respectively, an art gallery owner and art critic who recognize bad art when they see it and aren't afraid to say so.

35/2467. Murder on a Bridle Path (1936)
The first Hildegarde Withers mystery movie in which the detective is played by someone other than Edna May Oliver. Sure, Helen Broderick tries her best, but she just doesn't have the same snark. Oh, well.

36/2468. Crime School (1938)
Humphrey Bogart tries to get The Dead End Kids to straighten up and fly right (and, frankly, I say he's by far too lenient with Leo Gorcey, who tries to have him killed). Pretty entertaining, actually.

37/2469. Invaders from Mars (1953)
Less entertaining, though mostly because this was made for kids. The "it was all just a dream, wait, no, it was a premonition!" twist ending is really a bit too much.

38/2470. The Comic (1969)
In this Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke crafted the meanest, funniest possible love letter to a bygone era of silent film comedians. The protagonist is despicable (a conglomeration of some of the worst biographical elements of Langdon, Lloyd, Chaplin, and Keaton) and would be completely intolerable if almost every scene didn't end with a punchline at his expense. Only the movie's last scene, in which the jerk, none the wiser for his many, many failures, is finally humanized, ends without a joke. Bravo. Seriously.

Pratfalls and slapsticks go better with Coca-Cola.

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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25/2457. The Search (1948)
Montgomery Clift turns in a great, naturalistic performance here in his first starring role as a young American G.I. trying to help a war orphan in the ruins of Berlin. It's a very good movie. In fact, by focusing attention on the orphans and their broken world (similar to but less humorous than 2019's Jojo Rabbit), it manages the rare feat of being anti-war without glorifying the violence.

It seems unlikely Coke gave this production any money, but If the filmmakers really wanted to hide the product, they could have used a bigger towel.

26/2458. The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)
Most of the entertainment value of this comes from watching motion picture studios entering the talkie era figuring out how to create the musical genre in real time. It fails as a whole, but it does have its moments. (Buster Keaton's crossdressing mermaid dance, sadly, is not one of them.) Jack Benny is the highlight as one of two Masters of Ceremonies.

27/2459. Flow (2024)
Yeah, Oscar got this one right. It's captivating. Definitely watch it with your pets: even Henry enjoyed watching it. (More accurately, I think he enjoyed listening to it. The soundtrack is all recordings of real animals.)

28/2460. Forbidden (1932)
This early Frank Capra is pure dreck melodrama without any of the audience-pleasing uplifting treacle that would become the director's trademark. I've often pooh-poohed Capra, but this could easily be my least favorite Capra film. (No, I did not know it was Capra when it came on, or I might have just turned the TV off.)

29/2461. Naked Acts (1996)
Watched on TCM in February before our Glorious Leader outlawed Black History, this is a mid-90s indie about an aspiring actress (imagined as the child of a Pam Grier type) who has body issues and a lot of baggage as she confronts the expectations of a male-dominated film industry. The budget is low and the talent is clearly raw, but the script is good and the finished product very watchable.

More to come.

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20/2452. Reality Bites: A Hannah Swensen Mystery (2025)
The installments written by star Julia Sweeney have solid mysteries (although it's pretty clear that a lot of plot-tightening is happening in the editing suite), but they tend to go a little heavy on melodramatic characterization, especially for the mother, whose style of comic relief grows closer to a Jerry Lewis performance in each installment.

21/2453. Hero at Large (1980)
John Ritter plays a "real life" super hero in this very gentle comedy. It's so gentle, in fact, I wondered who the target audience is. There's not enough action (and too much drama) for kids, and its story is too thin to keep the attention of adults. The premise has been done better as both parody and satire in comics, television, and movies in the decades before and since. Frankly, it's just not very deep or very funny, and that means it's just not very good.

As a general rule, I don't always include shots of incidental Coca-Cola advertising, but these are pretty prominent in the opening sequence, so here you go.

22/2454. Hamlet 2 (2008)
See? This is how you poke society in the eye with a sharp stick and make them laugh at the same time. It's just so absurd in all the best ways, like Mel Brooks' The Producers, that I was often blindsided by the more subtle punchlines. Would watch again.

23/2455. Hamlet (1948)
Lawrence Olivier's adaptation abridges the original to get the time down, I guess. This sort of thing is done all the time when adapting novels, but Shakespeare? It's pretty, and the climax is staged well, but I really missed Rosencratz and Guildenstern, and, frankly, it seemed to me that there just wasn't enough death in this incarnation of Denmark.

24/2456. The One and Only Dick Gregory (2021)
A documentary biography of the controversial comedian who dared to call out society for its hypocrisy. He strikes me as too often sanctimonious, but maybe he earned that by being right (and angry and bitter) about so many injustices so many of us tolerate and, unintentionally or otherwise, perpetuate.

More to come.

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15/2447. Balls Out (2014)
If you see the title to this movie about flag football and are inspired to remember Dodgeball, yeah, that's exactly what they wanted. Too bad they can't deliver. The script is meta-texturally aware of all the cliches in this type of movie, but then it completely fails to elevate any of that material. Frankly, I found the only amusing bits to come from Saturday Night Live (and AT&T commercial) alum Beck Bennett, who successfully plays his part as the cheating bully (a la Ben Stiller in Dodgeball) way over the top (a la Ben Stiller in Dodgeball).

16/2448. Good Burger (1997)
Speaking of Saturday Night Live alumni, of course this based on the recurring skit from Nickelodeon's sketch-show for teens, and while young Keenan Thompson is imminently watchable, all of the real comedy comes from Keenan's partner Kel, who is very good at playing the good-hearted moron.

If there is a movie with more Coca-Cola product placement in it, I haven't seen it.

17/2449. Young and Innocent (1937)
More of a thriller than a whodunnit, director Alfred Hitchcock makes sure that the audience knows the good natured protagonist is (probably) innocent of murder from the beginning, which is key to building his romantic relationship with the police chief's daughter. It's the prototype of a Hallmark Mystery Movie!

18/2450. Conclave (2024)
I was pulling for this to win Best Picture at the Oscars this year. I mean, I hadn't seen any of the other contenders, but this has a really, really amazing cast and is suspenseful and as illuminating about the human condition as any other great work of art. Very well done.

19/2451. The Champ (1931)
Speaking of Oscar, this won for Best Original Story, and I can only guess that's because 1931 was an off year for everyone. In a nutshell, a kid (Jackie Cooper) watches his ne'er-do-well alcoholic father (Wallace Beery) let him down in every possible way. Original! Beery also won the award for Actor, but so far as I can tell, he was only playing himself. I found it all very unpleasant. You can do better, kid.

More to come.

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10/2442. Intruder in the Dust (1949)
Before there was To Kill a Mockingbird.... Actually, it's kind of surprising how much the two stories cover the same ground. Mockingbird does it with more style and grace, but Intruder, rough as it is around the edges, doesn't pull any punches. Good movie.

11/2443. Murder! (1930)
Does anyone ever talk about the worst Hitchcock films? Ok, so it's better than Marnie (and maybe The Trouble with Harry), and, yeah, sure, it's got some clever scenes, but overall I found it terribly, terribly boring with some of the worst written and delivered dialog. (How much of that is due to it being an early talkie?) Yawn.

12/2444. 3 Women (1977)
If there's anything worse than hearing someone describe their dream, it's watching a movie of it. In this case, the dreamer was Robert Altman, and he has filled it with enough "symbols" that he hopes your over-evolved monkey brain will have a field day trying to decipher as opposed to, you know, actually having a narrative or plot or meaning. For example, one of the women obsessed with superficial commercial things has a yellow car (and yes, the importance of the color is called out in the dialogue) and late in the film takes a delivery of Coca-Cola from this truck:

Is this somehow significant? You tell me. And then tell me how you feel about your mother.

13/2445. The Kid (1921)
Maybe I've been selling Charlie Chaplin short all these years. The Kid is actually pretty good cinema, even it if does jerk the tears a little too hard for my tastes in the third act that has a "comedy" dream sequence for no other apparent reason than the main story was just too short. (Obviously, I'm not willing to bury all my hatchets with the Little Tramp.)

14/2446. Appointment with Death (1988)
Watched with Mom. We had both read this Agatha Christie novel and remembered how the murder was committed (the movie certainly isn't shy about telegraphing it) but not the guilty party. It's not one of Christie's best, but any time spent watching Lauren Bacall is time well spent.

More to come.

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118/2429. The Losers (2010)
Sure, it's a big, dumb action movie, but it's a big, dumb action movie based on a DC comic book, and the influence shows maybe a little too much. Actually, it puts me in mind of some video games I've played in the past decade. "Pop Will Eat Itself," said the band in the 1980s, and it remains a true statement. Meh.

119/2430. From Darkness to Light (2024)
This is a so-so documentary with little insight into its subjects, but that's okay because the whole thing is really an excuse to rescue large parts of Jerry Lewis's legendary long-lost The Day The Clown Cried for curious cinephiles who seem reluctant to accept that it was just a bad film that became an unfortunate casualty of wrongheaded (and possibly malicious) decisions in the movie business. As a bit of a movie nut, I loved it.

120/2431. Dear Santa (2024)
Speaking of wrongheaded decisions in the movie business, Jack Black stars as a demon pretending to be Santa Claus. The core of the film is what you might expect from a 90s black comedy aimed at mallrat teens over Christmas break, but it is badly underbaked. Looking at the dates of release and production, it seems to me that Paramount just gave up on this without trying to make it good and dumped its barely cobbled-together carcass into the wasteland of back-catalog streaming services filler. Too bad. There's a lot of talent involved, and with the right script doctor and editor (and more money than Paramount obviously wanted to spend), maybe this could have become a cult classic.

121/2432. Uptown Saturday Night (1974)
Speaking of cult classics, Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby hunt down a lottery ticket unwittingly stolen by gangsters in a blaxploitation film which was not particularly interested in exploitation. It's not great cinema, but it's not trying to be. It just wants to be a good excuse to see something lighthearted at the movies with friends, and on that level, it works.

Truth in Advertising Disclaimer: The setting in this screencap is neither uptown, Saturday, nor night.

And that's a wrap on movies watched in 2024. If you're keeping score at home, 121 is the fewest new-to-me movies I've seen in a year since 2016. I'm not entirely sure why the number is so low, but I did have a bit of a hard time with depression this year and watched far more familiar-to-me movies than usual, so that certainly cut into my movie watching time. The complete lack of must-see cinema in theaters couldn't have helped. Better luck next year, Hollywood!

More to come.

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113/2424. Eddie the Eagle (2015)
This is the sort of feel-good sports biopic that writes itself with little regard for actual facts. Seriously, why do they even bother to base these sorts of things on true stories? The cliches are so strong, they stand alone. Which is not to say that I disliked it; it's fine. Just not very original, and I find unoriginal to be largely uninspiring.

At least their taste buds are in the right place.

114/2425. Naked Alibi (1954)
I had to double check IMDB to jog my memory on this. The title isn't particularly memorable (as it really doesn't have too much to do with the plot), but it's a fine little crime picture potboiler starring Sterling Hayden and Gene Barry. Which one of them is the real bad guy? That's the whole first act!

115/2426. Stage Fright (1950)
Another film, this one a Hitchcock, that spends an inordinate amount of time making the viewer guess who the real bad guy is. There's too much comedy of errors in this for its own good, as it really starts to grate that the protagonist keeps putting herself in such dangerous and embarrassing positions.

116/2427. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (2024)
A glowing documentary about Christopher Reeve made by his children that doesn't ignore his flaws but somehow still manages to make the man appear a saint. Not bad at all.

117/2428. MacArthur (1977)
This biopic of MacArthur's later years feels too episodic and superficial. It never quite reaches the heart of why the great general behaved as he did. (I suspect star Gregory Peck didn't quite know either). It's certainly not as glowing a character study as Christopher Reeve got, though MacArthur did seem to think he was a super hero.

More to come.

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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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78/2389. 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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