Tag Archives: only murders in the building

April 25, 2026 · 5:27 am

Danger in the jungle! Murders in the building! Movies and TV

Although I’m a fan of the film Jumanji I assumed JUMANJI: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) would be the kind of sequel that fails to recapture any of the original’s charm. My friend Ross caught it last year and recommended it, however, so when it turned up Netflix, I gave it a watch. I’m glad I did.

Not long after the original movie takes place (1995), a young man stumbles across the enchanted game, pays it no attention as he’s into videogames — so Jumanji transforms into what he’s looking for. Unfortunately, he plays it … Years later, a Breakfast Club quartet of teens (jock, pretty face, nerd, nerdy female introvert) get sucked into Jumanji and discover they’re now heroic adventurer Dwayne Johnson, nerdy explorer Jack Black, man-killing martial artist Karen Gillen and trusty sidekick Kevin Hart (I’m surprised the character didn’t object to what a stereotype the Devoted POC Servant is).

The only way home is to beat the game but need I say that won’t be easy? Or that they’ll learn life lessons along the way — though to paraphrase Roger Ebert, while life lessons are a cliche, what makes them interesting is whose learning them. The characters in both worlds were fun; the movie as a whole is more humorous and with less of a horror tinge than its predecessor. Still a winner. “There is literally a penis attached to my body right now.”

The fifth season of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING opens as the previous season ended, with the doorman of the Arconia dead in the courtyard fountain. Our intrepid podcasters Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) are on the case, with the occasional help of Oliver’s new bride (Meryl Streep). The mystery soon spreads to involve the mob (including Mafia wife Tea Leoni), a casino in the basement, billionaires Renee Zellwegger and Christopher Waltz and someone making offers on all the apartments in the Arconia — will the season end with everyone having to move out and away? I wondered if this was setting up for a season ender, which I imagine is what Hulu wanted — they didn’t announce S6 until the day the final episode dropped. Fun, as always. “I’m not a Bond villain, though I do own a white cat. And my father does have an office on the side of a mountain.”

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TV and some TV-related movies

The fourth season of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING has the leading trio of Charles, Mabel and Oliver (Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, Martin Short) digging into the murder of Charles’ stunt double and friend Sazz (Jane Lynch) while coping with producer Molly Shannon’s plans to adapt their experiences into a movie (with Eugene Levy, Eva Longoria and Zack Galifinakis in the corresponding roles). And what role do the tenants in the Arconia’s West Tower play in all this? The solution was a little too out of left field but overall this was excellent viewing. “Never hesitate to keep looking, unless it’s at an eclipse, Medusa or the time I stapled my handouts to my jacket.”

Adapted from Robert McCammon’s Stinger, Peacock’s streaming TEACUP was a disappointment. A handful of farm-country residents discover they’ve been cut off from the world by an energy field that kills anyone who crosses it. There’s an alien refugee among them, a bodysnatching alien hunting for the fugitive and nobody knows who’s who — plus all the characters’ old issues are coming to light.

That’s a good mix for a story and for the first half it held my attention. As it approached the end, things began to flag, leaving me wondering if they were just giving us a stretch of calm before the socko, gut-wrenching season ender. Well, no, the ending was bad too, and I can’t say plans for a second season inspire me to watch further. “So is the problem that you’re not telling us everything, or that you’re lying?”

AN ADVENTURE IN SPACE AND TIME (2013) was a BBC special recounting how flamboyant BBC director Sidney Newman (Brian Cox) cooked up the idea of a kid’s program that would involve a grandfatherly figure leading the audience through history (very educational!) and appointed Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine) as producer, a radical move for the early 1960s. She recruits reluctant but respected actor William Hartnell (David Bradley) to play the lead — but is she seriously considering these ridiculous “Dalek” creatues as villains in the second serial? I’m not sure how faithful the details are but this was enjoyable. “Cavemen and doctors and bloody disappearing police boxes?”

When my family first arrived in the US, one of my favorite shows was My World and Welcome To It, a whimsical comedy about a crotchety cartoonist (William Windom) based on James Thurber (one episode has everyone trying to figure out what the Thurber cartoon above means). Some of the creative team went on to make THE WAR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN (1972) with Jack Lemmon as a misanthropic cartoonist trying to cope with the possibility of losing his sight and the equally unsettling possibility he’s fallen in love with Barbara Harris — OMG, is it possible women aren’t utterly awful. This doesn’t work as well as the series did (at least as far as memory can tell) and the treatment of Harris’ stuttering daughter (Lisa Gerritsen, who played the daughter role on the TV show too) — torment her until she gets so emotional she stops stuttering — is, I’m fairly sure, not good therapy (and the story gets close to “You could fix your disability if you only made the effort!”). Jason Robards plays Harris’s ex. “Nothing Henry Miller has to say is of the least interest to me.”

THE GREEN GIRL (2014) was TYG’s and mine post-prandial film, a documentary about Susan Oliver, who appeared in dozens of guest-star roles on TV in the 1950s and 1960s, most notably as Vina in Star Trek‘s pilot episode The Cage (later reworked into the two-part Menagerie) — someone quips that as Oliver’s green Orion slave woman was worked into the closing credits, millions of people watching Trek reruns see her in that, if nothing else. As the documentary shows, she was in lots of other shows (this was an era when continuity was loser so she could play one role on Route 66 one season and a different character the next), plus directing (though opposition to women directors killed her opportunities) plus becoming a skilled recreational pilot.

The talking heads (including actors Monte Markham, Lee Meriweather and Biff Manard) argue that the advantages of her guest-star career were that Oliver was never stuck working a series day in and day out; the downside was that as she grew older and parts harder to come by, she didn’t have the studio contracts or steady roles to fall back on. An interesting look at a strong-minded and talented woman. “Under ‘other victims’ — my name, listed alphabetically.”

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October 28, 2023 · 5:36 am

Some TV I’ve been watching

The third season of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING has Oliver’s (Martin Short) new Broadway show jerked off-course when the star (Paul Rudd as a preening, neurotic egotist) is apparently poisoned opening night. He survives but at a party in the Arconia someone shoves him down the elevator shaft. Like the title says, only murders in the building …Mabel (Selena Gomez), Oliver and Charles (Steve Martin) are once again investigating a killing but this time they’re friendship’s strained. With Charles working on Oliver’s show, Mabel feels cut out; Oliver and Charles, who’s a TV actor unused to stage, are getting snippy with each other. The results aren’t their best season but still fun, with Meryl Streep as a new love interest and Matthew Broderick playing himself hysterically (even if it’s a shock to see the kid from War Games is now a grandfather type). “When I was dead I saw the light — yes, the dead person light!”

Annoyingly after I finished the first season of MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS Netflix began bouncing me randomly through the remaining three seasons. Admittedly there’s no character arcs to follow but I was interested in seeing the changes in style as the show progressed — the final season has a number of cohesive plots on which to hang the various absurdities, rather than multiple unrelated skits. Still no end of fun as Wordsworth writes a poem about ants, a cycling tour goes bananas, a doctor asks for donations for the tragic minority of people who don’t suffer from any conditions and we learn about polar explorer Robert Scott’s untold expedition to the Sahara. A real pleasure, even jumbled up (I do not believe the image below is official Monty Python stuff by the way). “If you’ll just fill out the history questions correctly we’ll see about getting you some morphine.”THE OTHER BLACK GIRL (2023) didn’t work for me even though much of it is very good. Nella (Sinclair Daniels) is the sole black face at her publishing company so she’s initially delighted when Hazel (Ashleigh Murray) signs aboard. Only it appears Hazel has an agenda and possibly it’s a dark one. “Your pain is part of who you are? Do you know how pathetic that sounds?”

The British miniseries HIM (2016) was a lot less interesting, a Carrie knockoff about a troubled teenage boy who discovers he’s inherited grandad’s TK. Hmm, what are the odds he’s going to become a force for good, do you think? I gave up after one episode.

While down in Florida I used my sister’s Disney + to catch WEREWOLF BY NIGHT, a one-shot MCU (though obviously seeding for the future) horror special, done in b&w like an old Universal film (though not in the same league). On the death of Ulysses Bloodstone, his daughter Elsa is among the hunters competing to wear the magic bloodstone themselves. The test: taking down the Man-Thing. The surprise: Jack Russell, Marvel’s Werewolf by Night, has infiltrated to help his friend.

This wasn’t as good as I’d heard but it’s certainly fun, though writing Man-Thing as a mute but intelligent character makes him and Jack come off too much like Groot and Rocket Raccoon. I was surprised none of the hunters, as far as I can tell, have recognizable names from the comics but that’s not a fatal flaw. “Don’t be so easy on yourself — you were the greatest disappointment of his life.”

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Only murderers on the road to Bali — it’s a gas!

I finally wrapped up the second season of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING last weekend and it’s just as fun as the first season.After cracking last season’s murder, Charles, Oliver and Mabel are riding high, with their success reviving all their careers. Unfortunately there’s the awkward problem of Mabel found over the bleeding body of Arconia co-op president Bunny Folger (Jayne Houdyshell) while holding the apparent murder weapon — because if they’ve gone from murders in the building to murderers in the building their careers are likely to tank as fast as they rose.

Who did the killing? How does someone keep sneaking into their apartments? Will rival podcaster Cynda Canning (Tina Fey) destroy their reputations? Who can they trust? And what does a valuable painting of Charles’ father have to do with anything? If you liked the first season, I think you’ll have fun finding out. S3 will be out some time next year. “My legs haven’t hurt like this since I directed one of Suzanne Sommers’ Thighmaster informercials.”

It says something that I’d have sworned I never caught THE ROAD TO BALI (1952) but checking this blog shows I watched it in 2011. The “Road” movies cast Bob Hope and Bing Crosby as traveling entertainers constantly stumbling into peril and comedy, but this was the tail end of the series (the final film would come a decade later) and the formula is definitely worn down. That said, there are lots of amusing bits in this story of traveling entertainers coping with sexy Indonesian princess Dorothy Lamour and sinister prince Murvyn Vye (there’s a lot of brownface makeup, so be warned) but the plot is too flimsy to support them. “What else can we fight over when we don’t have any money (that’s for Washington)?”

GAS! or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World In Order to Save It (1970) — also known as just plain Gas-s-s! — was the B side of the Wild in the Streets DVD I watched recently, but it’s a much less successful youthsploitation movie. An experimental WMD goes off, wiping out everyone over 25; the hippy protagonists wander around the country encountering a variety of weirdos and dealing with their own wacky issues.

This Roger Corman film isn’t as funny or freewheeling as it tries to be, but it has its interesting points. The developing local cultures they run into — footballers, golfers, car thieves — comes off now like a dry run for TV’s Genesis II or the comics’ Kamandi. It’s also one of several stories that involves an apocalypse without physical destruction, often wiping out only a particular subcategory of humanity — adults over 25 here, men in Y: The Last Man and true godly Christians in Left Behind and other Rapture-based stories. “Now that you are sole heir to our world you will have every opportunity to achieve wickedness.”

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February 5, 2022 · 5:00 am

A whole lot of mysteries

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING was a 2021 comedy-mystery series from Hulu. Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez star as three residents of the Arconia apartment building. When one of Mabel’s friends is murdered, the trio strike up a friendship; discovering they’re all fans of true-crime podcasts, they launch their own. Which, of course, requires investigating the mystery: could fellow resident Sting be the killer? What is Mabel (Gomez) hiding from the guys? Who poisoned a neighbor’s obnoxious cat? Solidly cast (Nathan Lane and yes, Sting) this was a great deal of fun. I genuinely did not see how it would play out (I spotted a couple of twists along the way) which is a plus. While I normally find climactic reveals that the killer is insane disappointing, the show even got that to work. “I understand now why all those doctors were so mean to Doogie Howser.”

NANCY DREW only had 13 episodes this season (S3 — reviews of S1 and S2 at the links) which I hope isn’t a bad sign. That said, it was a solid season as Nancy and the Drew Crew become entangled with Nancy’s ancestor Temperance (Olivia Taylor Dudley), having broken the spell laid by the Women in White that kept Temperance away from Horseshoe Bay. All she wants, though, is help reuniting with the spirit of her deceased daughter — surely that’s not so bad, is it? There were also some great humorous bits such as crashing a mystery convention and learning George Fan (Leah Lewis) has “Fan Fans” who see her as a daring ghostbuster ably supported by her sidekick Nancy. This has enough cliffhangery stuff in the final episode I really want it back — but hey, I’m a fan so I’d have wanted it back anyway (the CW has yet to confirm or deny S4). “So they’re evil relic-hunters who also sell their homemade crafts online?”

After watching that Sherlock Holmes collection I got for Christmas, I decided to rewatch the other Arthur Wontner Sherlock Holmes films in my library. Unfortunately one of the DVDs fell out of another boxed set so all I have on hand is Wontner’s THE SIGN OF FOUR (1932). As I remembered, a much stronger film than Wontner’s first, The Sleeping Cardinal (review at the link), adapting the second Holmes story well. “If you absolutely insist on weeping, may I offer my shoulder?”

Shifting away from mystery — THE EMPIRE OF CORPSES (2015) is a steampunk anime set in an alt.history where Victor Frankenstein’s research has led to reanimated corpses functioning as everything from the servant class to cannon fodder (“It’s said only The One that Frankenstein created had a soul.”). M of British intelligence recruits medical student Jon Watson to race the Russian scientist Karamazov to obtaining Victor’s Lost Notebooks and attaining true power of life over death. This mash-up of Doyle and Mary Shelly sounded intriguing but the film’s a generic adventure for two-thirds of the running time. “The sublime won’t be missed in a world unable to contemplate it.”

With the core Fast and Furious series winding down, the franchise branched out with FAST AND FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS AND SHAW (2019). Squabbling tough guys Hobbs (Duane Johnson) and Shaw (Jason Stathairn) go up against cyborg Idris Elba (“We’re being chased by the Terminator?”) to save Shaw’s sister, who’s fleeing Elba with a capsule containing a doomsday virus (like No Time to Die, it can be tailored to wipe out people with specific DNA strains). This is way more tedious than any of the main series, with Hobbs and Shaw playing endless rounds of Whose Is Bigger and long stretches of mindless action. Hobbs and his daughter were much more engaging in conversation. “What I’m upset about is that Jon Snow had sex with his aunt, then killed her and nobody seems to care.”

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