Category Archives: Movies

August 24, 2024 · 5:15 am

Truffaut, Capra and Truffaut again: movies viewed

Working through Francois Truffaut’s films, I discovered his next film, A Gorgeous Girl Like Me isn’t available streaming nor DVD (at least not one that will play on my BluRay) and so moved on to Day for Night (1973).

Truffaut plays a movie director struggling to complete his romantic drama Meet Pamela (boy brings girl home, boy loses girl to his married dad) on time and under budget with the threat of losing his insurance floating over his head. He has to deal star Jacqueline Bissett’s mental-health issues, a male lead (Jean-Pierre Leaud, who played the pre-teen Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows) with all the maturity of the adult Doinel, plus routine challenges such as actors who constantly forget their lines or suffer panic attacks. A charming character study that gave French star Nathalie Baye (I crushed on her a lot back when I first saw this) her breakout role as the director’s sidekick (based on Truffaut’s own collaborator Suzanne Schiffman); it’s affection for movies makes me suggest Cinema Paradiso as a good double bill. “The way to make money today is in real estate, not movies.”

Frank Capra’s LADY FOR A DAY (1933) is another pick from Leonard Maltin, based on a Damon Runyon story about Apple Annie (May Robson), a once talented pianist tragedy and the Depression have turned into street peddlar with a drinking problem. The daughter she sent away for a European education years ago is now coming to visit with her aristocratic fiancee — holy crap, what will happen when she learns her mother’s been lying about her elegant, upscale life in all her letters.

Not to worry: slick gambler Dave the Dude (Warren William, described not inaccurately as the poor man’s John Barrymore) considers Annie his good luck charm. Nagged by his girlfriend, Missouri Martin (Glenda Farrell) — based on nightclub hostess Texas Guinan I imagine — Dave begins pulling strings and calling in favors so that he can present Annie as the sophisticate she’s been posing as.

The premise is old hat now (maybe it was old hat even back then) and doesn’t make sense — what’s going to happen when Annie’s invited to the wedding (will she bring her pretend husband, Guy Kibbee, along?). I don’t really mind; as Maltin says, it’s sincerely sweet in a way more recent movies rarely are and Capra makes me believe in it. “That’s one reason i never go to Providence.”

Isabelle Adjani gives a spectacular performance in Truffaut’s THE STORY OF ADELE H (1975), arriving in Halifax where she gives multiple different stories about herself before we learn what’s really going on. Adele is the daughter of the legendary French writer Victor Hugo (now known mostly for Les Miserables, then known at least as much for opposing Napoleon III overthrowing the French Republic), seduced by a British officer which has turned her into a relentless stalker. She’s followed hm to Canada where she’s determined to marry him or sleep with him or pay his gambling debts — anything so he’ll be with her in some fashion. The officer is horrified by this development but is there anything he can do to divert her relentless attention? Like Mississippi Mermaid this feels like an odd mix of historical romance and noir — it feels like this should end with the lieutenant getting a bullet to the brain if the historical facts only allowed it. Good, in any case. “I’m very sorry, sir — there’s no-one at home.”

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August 17, 2024 · 5:15 am

What did you do in the war, daddy? Or after it?

In working through the films of Stephen Soderbergh, I’ve been dawdling on watching THE GOOD GERMAN (2006) because I’d confused it with The Reader, which was good but nothing I particularly wanted to rewatch. Nope, it’s an entirely different film.

George Clooney plays Jake Geisner, a reporter who arrives in post-WW II Berlin, bombed out and under Allied occupation (divided into a Russian, French, English and American zone). Officially Jake’s there to write; unofficially he’s there to find his former girlfriend, Lena (Kate Winslett), a German Jew. By coincidence, she’s sleeping with Tully (Tobey Maguire), Jake’s military driver, a black marketeer who’s trying to pull enough strings to get Lena papers so he can take her out of Berlin. Then Tully ends up shot dead in the Russian zone. Is Lena in danger? Can Jake save her?

The film is a visual treat, done in the style of a 1940s Warner Brothers thriller from the opening credits through the Casablanca ending. In its own right, though, it’s an unsatisfying film — Soderbergh knows the music but he can’t quite play it. The acting feels self-conscious and the story (involving America’s efforts to smuggle Nazi scientists into the US) doesn’t have enough drama. “Driving to work, he killed more people than Al Capone in Chicago.”

That led me to rewatch a couple of movies from my sizable recorded-off-the-air collection. In Billy Wilder’s A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948) it’s Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur) who’s arriving in Berlin as part of a fact-finding commission. She’s shocked to discover American soldiers are dabbling in the black market and fraternizing with the local frauleins, despite Col. Plummer (Millard Mitchell) insisting it’s only to be expected (“You can’t pin a sergeant’s stripes on an angel.”).

When Frost learns one soldier is keeping Erika (Marlene Dietrich), a nightclub singer and Nazi wife, she recruits Captain Pringle (John Lund) to help find the man … which he could do just by looking in a mirror (you probably guessed that). He decides the best way to fend off Frost’s investigation is to romance her but damned if he doesn’t start falling for her for real (you probably guessed that too). The result is an odd mix of noirish cynicism and screwball romance that didn’t work as well for me as it did when I first saw it. However that may have been my mood more than anything. “There are 12,000 of our boys policing that pest-hole down there and if reports are accurate, they’re being infested by a moral malaria.”

BERLIN EXPRESS (1948) reminds me of the WW II trope where the mixed-ethnicity platoon (the Texan, the Italian American, the Irish American, the guy from Brooklyn …) must unite to become an effective fighting force. Here representatives of the Allied powers (including Robert Ryan as the Yank and Merle Oberon as a French woman) must work together when a cadre of leftover Nazis kidnaps Paul Lukas, the French diplomat who might be the one man who can reunite postwar Germany’s factions (the idea of The One Man Who Can Bring Peace is a trope with a long history, as in Hitchcock’s Man Who Knew Too Much). Can the good guys overcome their mutual antagonisms to succeed? The film is very much a product of its time, conscious the window to build a more peaceful post-war world is ebbing but hopeful it’s not completely shut (sigh). A solid little thriller directed by Jacques Tournier. “Some day my people will understand that peace is also a crisis — and then you will be done.”

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August 13, 2024 · 5:15 am

Jekyll and Hyde walked into a bar …

This month I began the long project of watching Jekyll and Hyde adaptations for my new McFarland book. I also did a bit of research reading —

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: Life, Literature and the Silver Screen by Scott Allen Nollen is an exhaustive look at the many Stevenson works adapted for movies or TV including Treasure Island, Master of Ballantrae, The Wrong Box and of course The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde. The latter was my primary interest, of course. While I didn’t find any deep insights into the films, he has useful quotes from directors and several films I didn’t have in my list. Even though I skimmed a lot of the other material — I’ve never been able to get into Stevenson — it was a worthwhile purchase.

Now, the movies. First up, we have the eight-minute silent JEKYLL AND HYDE (1912) the second earliest film version that’s survived (the other film, from 1910, is only available to view at the Munich Film Museum). It’s based on a late 1800s knockoff of the David Bandmann stage version; where the Victorian stage plays followed the novel in having Jekyll’s alter ego already established by the start of the story, this film (like those that followed) goes in chronological order, showing us the moment Jekyll first transforms. It’s quite uninspired.

Universal’s 27-minute DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1913) keeps a lot of the story’s plot but without such trivialities as character — we’re given no reason Jekyll (King Baggott) chooses to turn himself into a monster, for instance. And the transformation is accomplished partly by having Baggott crouch down constantly to create the impression he’s smaller (doesn’t work). “Dr. Jekyll is a martyr to science.”


By contrast, Paramount’s 1920 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1920) is a serious production, as witness casting matinee idol John Barrymore in the leading roles (like Richard Mansfield on stage, part of the transformation is carried out by Barrymore’s own facial and muscle control). Barrymore plays an idealist, saintly doctor who unlike Stevenson’s Jekyll has no secret sins to indulge. That, however, annoys Sir George Carew (Brandon Hurst), who sneers that a man with no vices is obviously afraid to confront his passions. When he takes Jekyll out for a night on the town, the doctor is indeed attracted to a sexy dancer (Nita Naldi) — oh, if only it were possible to spin off one’s lustful urges so that one could sin without corrupting one’s soul! Jekyll’s fatal mistake, of course, is that what he does as Hyde will indeed corrupt his soul …

Barrymore gives a solid performance and this film was influential on the Fredric March version, which also gave Hyde a sex interest to parallel Jekyll’s love interest (an element that made it into the more recent Jekyll and Hyde musical). However it’s always felt half-hearted and tame in depicting Hyde’s evil — when he’s done sleeping with the dancer he sends her on her way, which isn’t much beyond what any man might have done. I’m also baffled by an opening scene in which Jekyll’s staring into the microscope and whatever he sees is embodying cutting-edge science. Thanks to my friend Ross for ordering this one for me. “But who is this Hyde, to whom you are leaving everything?”

JEKYLL AND HYDE (1920) strikes me as the first purely Mad Scientist Jekyll — no suggestion of hypocrisy or any problems dealing with his impulses, just that he wants to experiment and split himself in two. This is a definite Z-lister from Hyde (who looks like a brunette Harpo Marx) to an ending revealing It Was All A Dream (I knew one of the silents threw in that twist, but not which)). “No, Bernice, my mind and heart are with a little child who lies deep in the shadow of death.”

Indigo Temple’s music video, Mrs. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde turned up in a Google search and shows how Stevenson’s novel works as a metaphor: the singer went out with a wonderful woman one night, then she ripped him to shreds (metaphorically) on the second date. More googling showed there’s a number of Jekyll/Hyde themed music videos so perhaps this will become another appendix. “Mrs Jekyll stole my heart/Mrs. Hyde ripped it apart.”

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August 10, 2024 · 5:15 am

One movie enters — two movies leave!

Riffing on that old Thunderdome line because last weekend’s viewing was a new movie on Netflix and two Leaving Soon.

The new arrival was GHOSTBUSTERS: Frozen Empire (2024), the sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The new team relocates to the original’s firehouse in New York to revive the ghostbusting business under the financial sponsorship of Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts. That means they have to deal with the scowling opposition of Mayor Peck (William Atherton) and, of course, a new Big Bad in the form of a combined ice/fear demon (“It’s the chill that creeps up your spine — and the last thing you see is your tear ducts icing over.”). The results weren’t as good as Afterlife but it’s certainly better than Ghostbusters II. “I believe in self-winding clocks and the singing cheeses of Copenhagen.”

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES (2021) is the whimsical animated film (based on a SNL skit, I gather) in which a writer staying at an AirBnB discovers he’s rooming with the eponymous being (voiced by Jenny Slate), makes a YouTube documentary about him and turns him into a celebrity — but will that help Marcel find his lost family? This was one of those where the dogs distracted me from giving it the attention it deserves. Still, it’s charming. “She’s the harbinger of the vacuum.”

THE WOMAN KING (2022) has the legendary (but historically real) Amazons of Dahomey clashing with the expanding empire of Oyu over the slave trade, the influence of white imperialism and one Dahomey general (Viola Davis) discovering her connection to the Oyu military leader goes back a long way. While I’ve read a little about this era in Dahomey history I’ve no idea how accurate it is (I’m guessing some of the ninja-esque fighting moves are made up). Truth to tell, this is the kind of epic historical adventure where I don’t really care as long as I enjoy myself, and I did. “No-one fears a farmer.”

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August 3, 2024 · 5:28 am

Famous names on screen: Godzilla, Nixon, Superman and … Danny Ocean?

GODZILLA MINUS ONE (202 ) lives up to its press clippings as a first rate kaiju film. WW II is over and a failed kamikaze pilot is dealing with his guilt over not dying heroically as well as his obligations as part of a found family with a young woman and an orphan girl. On top of which a large reptilian monster is rising out of the water and it’s very angry …

This works both for the monster stomping Japan and for the personal drama, though the latter makes me curious what Japan made of this — it’s very much a rejection of code of Death Before Dishonor (“I forbid you to die!”) in favor of living for others. I also wonder, given how much recent films emphasize Godzilla as a thing of terror, what younger fans would make of the original series’ wave of friendly, if not cute Godzilla characterization.

As Camestros Felapton says, while Godzilla Minus One acknowledges the horrors of war and warmongering it presents them as something done to well-meaning Japanese soldiers, not reflecting anything they did to others (which would make it a good double-bill with Rambo). Nevertheless, the film works well. “It’s my fault for thinking I could dream again.”

DICK (1999) is the Watergate comedy in which presidential dogwalkers and White House “Secret Youth Advisers” Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst end the Vietnam War, bring about the SALT treaty, expose Watergate to Woodward and Bernstein and ultimately bring down Nixon (Dan Hedaya) not to mention causing the 18.5 minute tape gap. With Terri Garr as Williams’ mom, Will Farrell as Bob Woodward, David French as a talking head, Saul Rubinek as Henry Kissinger, Dave Foley as Haldeman and a lot of period detail. TYG enjoyed this one, particularly the lines like “You can’t let Dick rule your life!” — so apparently being too young to remember Watergate doesn’t hurt the movie. “I don’t understand the title of that porn movie.”

Funny, I know I enjoyed OCEAN’S 12 (2004) when I saw it in theaters but rewatching it, it didn’t work at all. For one thing the premise of this sequel is that casino boss Andy Garcia hunts down Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and “Ocean’s Eleven” (“Wait, why do you get top billing?”) and demands they pull off a big enough heist to repay him for the lost money — seriously, what kind of caper film has “repay the guy we robbed” as the motive? Another problem is that the cast spends way too much in supposedly clever conversations to the point the caper gets lost. This does have better women’s roles than Ocean’s Eleven, though, with Julia Roberts participating in the con and cop Catherine Zeta-Jones trying to thwart it. “I want the last check I write … to bounce.”

The second season of My Adventures With Superman is an excellent follow-up to the first season. Superman finally gets to talk with the hologram of Jor-El, learns he has a cousin who survived Krypton’s destruction. He also has to deal with Lois worrying the world’s mightiest man can’t possibly stay interested in her. Less successfully we have Amanda Waller ruthlessly pursuing her agenda of destroying Superman as a threat. I hate Waller as an outright villain (which she’s become in the comics too) and I’m heartily sick of purges against metahumans, mutants or whoever. Overall, though, the good far outweighed the bad. “I’ll be a beautiful widow and you’ll be the bodyguard who loves me but can’t express his feelings.”

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July 27, 2024 · 5:15 am

I can’t give you anything but love, baby: movies and TV

After several mediocre Howard Hawks films, my watching gets to a classic with his BRINGING UP BABY (1938). Cary Grant plays super-serious, head-centered paleontologist David Huxley, about to enter a largely passionate marriage (“There will be no entanglements.”). Then he meets heiress Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn) who generates chaos in everything she does. She also drags him out of his dry-as-dust comfort zone and gives him one hell of a good time (a good bad girl in terms of a taxonomy I once coined).

The film is delightfully daffy and funny; Hepburn plays against her usual type (just as confident, a lot less tough) as does Grant and they’re backed up by a variety of colorful supporting characters, not to mention a pet leopard. Despite all of which, the movie bombed, ending Hawks’ relationship with RKO and killing Hepburn’s career (she bounced back a couple of years later with The Philadelphia Story). Hawks himself blamed it on having too many eccentrics and no normal people to serve as an anchor. Perhaps that’s it — but what’s more important is, 1938 audiences were wrong. The film is marvelous (and the inspiration for one of my personal favorites, What’s Up Doc?). “If one more person mentions that she’s got an aunt I’ll put you on bread and water for 20 days!”

HE’S ALL THAT (2021) is a teen rom-com built around a premise I’ve seen before, a Makeover Bet where a teenage influencer sets out to turn a dour outsider into the school’s prom king. Only it turns out there’s more to him than being surly and he finds she’s not as shallow as he thought — but will their love survive learning about the bet? Nothing I needed to see, but pleasant enough to fill 90 minutes. “Smelling my hand is the horse’s equivalent of saying hello.”

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO (2008) when lifelong Dioscuri and current roommates Emily Banks and Seth Rogan decide that’s the quickest way to resolve their ongoing cash crunch. Fortunately their feelings for each other are completely platonic so having sex on camera with other people won’t bother either of them … right? Kevin Smith’s film has a rom-com heart under its raunch, though as usual I’m irked by the assumption straight opposite-sex friends can’t be really platonic. Brandon Routh and Deb Mazar play former classmates; Traci Lords plays a professional porn actor. “I call that look ‘Nickelodeon chic.’”

FIERCE CREATURES (1997) reuses the Fish Called Wanda cast in an unrelated story. When Rupert Murdoch-clone Kevin Kline appoints John Cleese to takeover a small British zoo, Cleese is under orders to weed out every non-fierce creature (I feel this is a parody of When Animals Attack videos). Can the zookeepers (including Michael Palin) change his mind? Kevin Kline plays a second role as the CEO’s marketing-expert son (“We have eliminated the non-event interest deficit!”) and Jamie Lee Curtis is a sexy career woman. A fun absurdity. “Contrary to all available evidence, you actually think people like you.”

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July 20, 2024 · 5:25 am

Outsiders in America, India and Markovia: films and TV

EL NORTE (1983) is Gregory Nava’s story of what he describes as the “shadows,” the vast mass of illegal immigrants doing all kinds of blue-collar labor — gardening, busing tables, laundry — throughout California’s cities (and beyond). It’s an amazing movie and as relevant today as 1983.

David Villalpando and Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez play Mayan siblings in Guatemala. When gunmen target their family — dad, a coffee picker, was talking union — they have to flee to El Norte, the United States, where they’ve been told even poor people have cars, refrigerators and flush toilets. After they complete their long odyssey (one horrifying highlight is crawling through an abandoned tunnel filled with rats) they have to find jobs, adjust to the culture and struggle with the pressure to compromise on their own values. It also has some remarkably funny moments, such as when someone teaches them how to pass for Mexico (so they won’t be sent back to their deaths in Guatemala) by cussing more.

It’s not an upbeat movie or a feel-good movie but it’s beautiful to look at and an engrossing drama. I think it’s well worth watching. “No-one fights over bad land.”

SHAKESPEARE WALLAH (1965) was an early Merchant/Ivory film in which a troupe of British Shakespearians struggles to keep performing in post-colonial India despite competition for their audience from cricket matches and Bollywood films. And what will happen when the daughter (Felicity Kendal) gets involved with Bollywood director Shashi Kapoor, who’s also having an affair with film star Madhur Jeffries (yes, the future cookbook author was an actor in her younger years)?

By today’s standards the Shakespearian performances on stage seem extremely mannered, making me curious if that’s a shift in style or that the characters aren’t good actors. Either way, it’s a better film than the same producers’ The Wild Party a decade later. “We are all forced to make cuts in the text written for us by destiny.”

It’s been almost a decade since I watched the YOUNG JUSTICE cartoon, not from lack of interest but not having access to HBO (now AKA Max). That changed and I recently finished up the third season, YOUNG JUSTICE: Outsiders. Restrictions on JLA activity and an investigation into metahuman-trafficking in the European kingdom of Markovia leads to Beast Boy creating a separate team of yes, outsiders (including versions of Halo, Geo-Force and Terra) to protect meta-kids outside the League’s rule-bound set-up. Good stuff. “That break-in at Good’s was a ‘rogue op’ where we were saved by the co-leader of the Justice League and a Batman Family drone!”

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July 14, 2024 · 5:19 am

Rome, indexes and madmen: nonfiction reading

THE ETERNAL DECLINE AND FALL OF ROME: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Edward J. Watts looks at how people were bewailing Rome’s collapse long before Edward Gibbon wrote Decline and Fall Of the Roman Empire. Even in the Empire’s peak eras, Romans were writing about how they’d fallen from the greatness of their ancestors and wondering where they’d gone wrong, though part of that was new emperors promoting themselves as the ones who would make Rome great again.

After tracing the Roman lamentations, Watts looks at how Rome’s fall became a symbol countless later writers and leaders would invoke (A Coup discusses how it plays into the image of decadent empires crushed by barbarians). Whatever contemporary bogeyman they want to vent about — gays, feminists, immigration — they can hold up Rome’s fall as the example of what they’re fighting against. The end results are interesting but at times this is too much a Roman history — I wish Watts had spent more time looking at how Rome was invoked by post-Roman rhetoric.

INDEX, A History of The: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan shows, like Judith Flanders’ A Place for Everything on alphabetical order, something that seems intuitively obvious isn’t that at all. Duncan shows how different some eras treated the index, for example going by chapters or quartos when page numbers weren’t a thing, the role of indexing in the digital age, the problems of writing a good one (I’ve done enough of them to say his diagnosis is pot-on), satirical indexes and worries that indexing was a tool for lazy readers who don’t want to tackle whole books. A good job.

Now that I’m working on my Jekyll and Hyde book, it’s time for research reading. I’d thought my first book would be the original Stevenson novel but for various reasons it wound up being A LITTLE MAD SOMETIMES: Film Psychopaths from Jekyll and Hyde to Hannibal Lector by John McCarty. I will keep some of his ideas (that Spencer Tracy’s Hyde is more about sex than Fredric March‘s) in mind as I watch the films but mostly I’m underwhelmed. I don’t agree that any killer who hides behind a seemingly normal facade is a Jekyll/Hyde riff and I spotted too many errors, from misspelling actor Valentine Dyall’s name to repeating a now debunked legend about the silent Cabinet of Caligari. Not the worst filmreference book I’ve read, though.

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July 13, 2024 · 5:30 am

Subways are for sleeping! The Founding Fathers sing and dance! Movies viewed

Like last week this is a “double double feature” — not that I’m making a habit of them, it’s just a coincidence. First two films Leonard Maltin recommended in 151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen —

DARK DAYS (2000) is Marc Singer’s (a British filmmaker, not the star of V) documentary on the outcasts living in New York’s abandoned Amtrak tunnes, making homes from abandoned plywood, scavenging for food, hustling by selling discarded paperbacks or DVDs, variously driven underground by personal trauma or drug addiction. Very low key but it works better for that reason “What some people throw away, other people can use.”

KONTROLL (2003) is a Hungarian film set in the Budapest subways where the ticket takers feud, fall in love, hunt the infamous free rider “Bootsie,” and discover several recent suicides are actually a mystery figure shoving people onto the tracks. Like the homeless of Dark Days, the central character lives underground, sleeping in empty stations rather than return to his life up top — can a woman wandering around in a bear costume change his life? Strange, but absolutely fascinating. “I started to worry what would happen if I wasn’t the best.”

Next, two musicals about the Birth of America:

Lin-Manuel Miranda is Alexander HAMILTON (2020) in his celebrated Broadway show, which I caught streaming on Disney. This presents Hamilton as an ambitious visionary in contrast to opportunistic frenemy Aaron Burr, who’s baffled how Hamilton does so well (“Why must you say what you believe?”), then happy when it appears Thomas Jefferson’s rising tide will lift Burr’s boat too (Jefferson is written singing jazz rather than hip-hop to emphasize his years in France have set him apart from the other founders). Lives up to its press clippings. “I’m laughing in the face of casualties and sorrow/For the first time I’m thinking past tomorrow.”

1776 (1972) is my semi-regular July 4 viewing (though watching right after the Supreme Court restored the monarchy is jarring), as William Daniels’ John Adams keeps getting told he’s obnoxious and disliked (“Yes, I’ve heard.”), Howard DaSilva’s Ben Franklin tosses off aphorisms, and Ken Howard’s Jefferson tries to balance writing the Declaration of Independence with the need to relieve his sexual tension with wife Blythe Danner. Always a pleasure, though I’m conscious this viewing that despite John Cullum’s “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” this avoids that topic as much as possible (soft peddling Jefferson’s own slaveholding, for instance). Thinking about that got me wondering if anyone’s ever done a What If where the American Revolution doesn’t happen but America (or parts of it) rebels when Britain ends slavery. “That can’t possibly be true — I have an aunt in New Brunswick.”

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July 6, 2024 · 5:10 am

A double feature, doubled! Movies viewed

First, two MCU films that did not succeed at the box office, though I enjoyed both.

In Ant-Man and the Wasp, the eponymous heroes (Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly) rescued Janet Pym (Michelle Pfeiffer) from the subatomic Quantumverse. In ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: Quantumania (2023) Scott Lang’s daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) probes into the Quantumverse despite Janet’s warnings and sure enough, the entire family gets drawn in.

Behind it is Kang (Jonathan Majors), a time-traveling conquerer exiled by his parallel-timeline counterparts due to his conviction he needs to wipe out entire timelines — lots of them — to stabilize the timeline. He hoped to use Janet to escape; instead she left him there. He harbors some resentment — and some terrifyingly advanced weapons.

This is an odd mix, putting superheroes into a Guardians of the Galaxy setting, though it comes off more as a Star Wars knockoff (I did wonder if someone on the writing side was a fan of Marvel’s Micronauts because they have a lot in common). Overall the results were fun enough, though turning Modok into Kang’s comic-relief sidekick doesn’t work (and assault charges against Majors have apparently stymied plans to make Kang a Big Bad going forward). “It’s Schrodinger’s box — and you’re the cat.”


MARVELS (202 ) has fangirl Kamala Khan’s Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) over the moon as a malfunctioning dimensional gate keeps switching her, Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) around (“You mean Captain Marvel was in my house? And I wasn’t here!”), then joining forces with them against a Kree fanatic out to avenge Carol’s destruction of the Supreme Intelligence. A winning cast (the writers definitely nail the comics’ Kamala) whose bonding makes this more appealing than Quantumania; however the plot is less interesting. The villain, for instance, is a recycled version of Ronan from the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, right down to wielding his hammer. “So we’re literally herding cats?”

Next, two movies starring the cast of Family Ties (I supposed I could have watched Michael Gross in Tremors for a threeway).

TYG periodically watches SATISFACTION (1988) out of nostalgia for her teen years and this time I watched it with her though unsurprisingly I was less engaged. Justine Bateman plays a blue-collar girl trying to turn her garage band into a professional gig which leads to a romance with retired rocker Liam Neeson (Debbie Harry shows up as a Close Personal Friend of the latter). While the music’s competent, having the songs mostly from previous decades hardly makes them hip (I’m guessing it was a matter of getting rights as cheaply as possible). Forgettable but we’ve both seen worse; Julia Roberts makes her screen debut right before the superior Mystic Pizza. “It makes me laugh.”

THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS (1988) has mailroom clerk Michael J. Fox exploiting his corporation’s dysfunctional structure to reinvent himself as a new executive and launch a romance with finance whiz Helen Slater. Fun fluff to rewatch; with Margaret Whitton as Fox’s lecherous aunt and Fred Gwynne as a corporate raider (though he spends so much of his brief scene sitting still, I wonder if he was in bad health?). Fox getting judgy about Slater’s sexual ethics when his are certainly a mess is an unpleasant moment, though. “My office hasn’t looked like the men’s room since I had them remove all the urinals.”

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