Category Archives: Movies

GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO (2019) is a wildly entertaining film that takes elements of the original novel and the Disney movie and throws in Italian fascism. It’s the brink of WW II and Gepetto is grieving his son’s death in an earlier bombing raid. When he carves a puppet boy out of a tree his son once planted, the Blue Fairy (Tilda Swinton) brings Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) to life which leads to inevitable trouble as he tries to make sense of life, dies and returns, gets drafted into the army (Ron Perlman plays the local fascist leader) and struggles to find his dad with the help of a somewhat self-centered Crickett (Ewan MacGregor). Odd, grotesque — but it works well. With Christopher Waltz as a conniving showman and Cate Blanchett as his monkey sidekick. “Sometimes fathers feel despair like anyone else.”

With WW II cutting Hollywood off from the European market, 20th Century Fox hoped DOWN ARGENTINE WAY (1940) would sell well enough in Latin America to compensate. This stars Don Ameche as the son of an Argentine horse-breeder who strikes up a romance with American horse-loving socialite Betty Grable; alas, it seems Ameche’s father has a bitter feud with Grable’s and declares his is a love that cannot be. This successfully launched Grable as a musical star though I’m damned if I can see why — she’s way too bland an actor for my taste (though tough enough offstage to stare down the studio head when he demanded to sleep with her).

However my primary reason was that the Nicholas Brothers, the amazing black tap dancers, appear here doing a solo number, which was typical for their film careers (easier to cut for Southern markets). I’m a fan of theirs and they are spectacular here, more than worth watching. The supporting cast includes Carmen Miranda as herself and J. Carroll Naish as a gigolo — oh, my mistake, he’s a Tour Guide, got that? “If he ever looks into my eyes again, I’ll show him a storm rising over the pampas.”

I was never a fan of the original He-Man series but I had some free time and Amazon was streaming MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE (2026) free and Camestros Felapton thought it was worth seeing, so …

A sneak attack by Jared Leto’s Skeletor forces Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) to flee to our world where he loses the Power Sword. As an adult he’s stuck living as an HR worker, searching for the sword and convincing everyone around him he’s a borderline nutjob. Worse, when he finds the sword, the movie’s threat level ratchets upwards ..

This feels like it’s shooting for a Guardians of the Galaxy-type balance between comedy and adventure and it does reasonably well. The cast includes Idris Elba as a drunken, washed-up Man At Arms, Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn, James Purefoy as Adam’s dad, Kirsten Wiig as the voice of Roboto, Morina Baccarin as the Sorceress and Camilla Mendes as Teela. “No match for the Netflix She-Ra (though “Force Commander Adora” does appear in an endbit), but fun enough. “There is no good left in me for you to find.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Mundus vult decipit was the motto of Manuel of Poictesme in James Branch Cabell’s Figures of Earth. It reflects that Cabell’s heroes are frequently liars and con artists, and Cabell’s general cynicism about everything. But it’s also got an element of truth to it.

In its ugliest form, we have people embracing patriarchy and racism. As I’ve written before, patriarchy makes people stupid. It’s a lie that tells men they’re entitled to have a woman provide them with sex and clean up after them. The same appealing (to some people) lie ripples through society in other ways. Shitbag misogynists such as preacher John Piper insist women’s submission is justified because her man will protect her; even if she can protect herself, he should do it. And if the moment he need to protect her never comes? Well, he was willing to do it, so her life of submission and housekeeping, day in and day out, is completely justified. And if the husband, instead of protecting her, is abusive, Piper is very concerned … that she not defy her husband by calling the cops unless the church gives her permission.

Then there’s Joel Webbon, hatemongering misogynist racist preacher who claimed once that MLK and the major anti-slavery abolitionists are burning in hell. He offers no evidence for this — there is none — but for people who want to believe in white supremacy, that might be comforting. More generally we have the idea there is a divinely ordained hierarchy and God has assigned us our place in it . Regardless of whether you earn a place on merit, “He made them high and lowly” tells you you still deserve it. That’s very comforting to people with privilege or unearned advantages: questioning them is questioning God!

Then there’s the ongoing anti-vax movement. I’ve seen occasional interviews where the parent of an autistic kid says they support the Toddler and RKF Jr. because the medical establishment refused to accept the kid’s mental state was caused by vaccines. Well, that’s because it wasn’t. There’s no link, no connection. But the parent wants to believe there’s a simple explanation and so they swallow the first one offered. And as I noted a week ago, so has the Toddler.

Or consider the endless claims that forcing women into tradwife homes isn’t sexist: It’s what women secretly crave. Which is the tip of a whole iceberg of lies: “We’re supposed to buy that the woman who makes chewing gum from scratch while her husband cosplays as James Dean wasn’t trying to capitalize on the tradwife trend? That Miller throwing hot water on his wife was just “horseplay”? That a desperate mother who called ER after ER and saw doctor after doctor was planning on killing her children? Really?

For decades, American mothers have been expected to eat lies with a smile—swallowing any anger and disappointment, and surviving on platitudes about our job being the most important in the world. (So important that we don’t need pesky paid parental leave, affordable child care, or the equitable division of domestic labor.) Still, for a minute there, it seemed like conservatives might just get the cultural shift they wanted: between the backlash to “girlboss feminism,” the rise of MAHA moms, and the Covid-era exodus of women from the workforce—the tradwife movement was being carefully positioned as something American moms might just want.”

Then you have Katie Souza, ex-con and former meth distributor, who’s reinvented herself as a preacher exposing the covert alien conspiracy to harvest women’s eggs and make alien hybrids. Plus “she said that she had to break a family curse connected to Adolf Hitler’s attempt to harness the power of a Satanic altar.” As Fred Clark says at the link there’s not an atom of evidence for any of this but plenty of people are apparently willing to believe her — after all, it’s such a cool story. The same, I think is true of fake Satanist Mike Warnke. It’s not just that much of his life story was obvious bullshit (the Freedom Riders were a Kennedy administration thing so he couldn’t have been one when at college in the late 1960s) but if, as he claimed, he’d participated in Satanic human sacrifices, he’s an accessory to murder. I’m pretty sure if his conservative Christian audiences believed him they’d have called the cops — but they told themselves they did.

Which shows why this stuff isn’t merely laughable: during the 1980s Satanic panic, prosecutors cited Warnke’s stories as proof that Satanic cults could indeed be sacrificing children. They weren’t. A number of people went to jail based on the lie, though. The Qanon nonsense follows the same path. Only it’s not just about the cool story, it’s about the fantasy that if Democrats are pedophiles, Republicans are heroes for fighting them.

There are multiple reasons people fall for nonsense. There are multiple reasons people spread them: fame, political advantage, money (and in the current political environment add one more: to keep President Crybaby happy). Underpinning much of this is one fundamental defense against reality: “We just have different facts” or the like. We do not, however, have different facts. While there are many cases where we might debate over the facts or how to interpret them, the examples I’m listing here are not among them. There is no vast network of Satanic ritual abuse, there are no aliens creating hybrids, vaccines work, and nothing justifies a hierarchy that ranks members of one race or gender or ethnicity above others.

In the words of George Orwell, “”The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” And for some people, not even that will work.

Michael Cera is a Big Apple journalist in PERSON TO PERSON (2017) though it’s the kind of quirky indie where his plotline — working with a cute colleague on a story in hopes he can get her into bed — is only one strand of the story, alongside a record collector hunting a rare Charlie Parker disc and a teenage girl trying to figure out her sexuality (“I’m a lesbian … mostly … I think.”). This is nominally tied together by taking place on a single day in New York but more connection between the plot threads would really have helped. Or maybe having one upbeat protagonist instead of everyone being glum or nervous. The end result is competent but listless. “It’s not a good-looking penis because a good-looking penis does not exist.”

BOYS NIGHT OUT (1962) has married Howard Duff and Tony Randall nag divorced buddy James Garner into a plan to rent a swinging bachelor pad (it’s interesting to see how Hollywood imagined a swanky apartment back then) and then install a mistress they can each visit one night a week. By sheer luck, Kim Novak stumbles into this set-up and decides to let them think she’s a sex worker as it will provide invaluable research for her thesis on “Adolescent Sex Fantasies of the Suburban Male” (“This isn’t what they want, it’s what they’ve been told they’re supposed to want.”). Garner is horrified by all this, yet at the same time, Novak’s character is so cute … can he save her from this life of sin?

This worked better when I didn’t know all the twists and Novak’s too stiff to be funny; nevertheless, I enjoyed rewatching this one. It’s fluff, but it’s entertaining fluff. The cast includes Jessie Royce Landis as Garner’s disapproving mom, Oscar Homolka as Novak’s thesis adviser, William Bendix as a barkeep and Fred Allen as a gumshoe. “When it comes to sex, men can’t keep from lying. Women can’t keep from telling the truth.”

I’ve never liked Marvel’s decision to retcon out the Peter/MJ marriage in the One More Day/Brand New Day story arcs and had similar feelings about the MCU’s Peter Parker (Tom Holland) having to erase his relationship to MJ (Zendaya) in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Nevertheless SPIDER-MAN: Brand New Day (2026) makes excellent entertainment.

It’s been five years since the previous movie and the same amount of time has elapsed in the MCU. Spidey has become a Big Apple legend, taking down Scorpion, Tombstone and the Hand and forming alliances with the Punisher (Frank Bernthal) and Inspector Jean DeWolff (Liza Colon Zayas). As Peter Parker he’s alone, unable to rebuild his life after losing MJ and Aunt May. DeWolff warns him he needs to get a life instead of fighting crime 24/7 but what else does he have to do? Then a mysterious body-jumping adversary begins using random people to coordinate an attack on Damage Control, here something equivalent to DC Comics’ DEO. How does he stop someone who can be anyone, or distract him by making their victims jump off a ledge? And what about his own powers, which are spiraling out of control as he stresses out (I half-wondered if he’d briefly become the eight-limbed figure seen on Gil Kane’s cover here, but no)? Can Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) give Peter the advice he needs on controlling a dangerous alter ego?

The movie isn’t perfect. There’s one twist that’s not even slightly shocking and the mind-controller gets too big a pass on some of her actions. Peter has an apartment, food and a state of the art computer system but we never learn where he gets the money. Overall, though, an impressive job that does as good a job as possible not burdening new viewers with too much continuity. “Mind-control? Yeah, governments do that a lot — particularly the French.”

Once again TYG and I caught the annual CAT VIDEO FEST (2026) at the local Carolina Theatre and enjoyed shots of cats climbing and failing, wriggling through holes, stubbornly making things more complicated or a quartet of stray kittens getting caught by a rescuer. As usual nothing that we couldn’t find on the Internet and a few too many animated shorts this time around. Still, the second most fun film of the week.

All rights to images remain with current holders. The one Spider-Man panel is by John Romita.