Last of the Old Year

 Since it’s coming up on New Year’s, I’d better wrap up our recent viewing. I could quit now, since I’ve done all the discs, but I guess I’ll throw in a couple of streaming movies we’ve seen.

We loved Bullet Train. It stars Brad Pitt as a scruffy, sensitive international criminal in Tokyo code named Ladybug. His handler calls to give him a job - grab a suitcase of money on the bullet train. AaronTaylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry are “twins” on the train, bringing the kidnapped son (Logan Lehman) of a Russian mobster home - and it’s their bag of money. Then there is a cute little schoolgirl, Joey King, who has her own mission. And many more.

Pitt has been trying to cut down on violence because he keeps killing people, mostly by accident. But not everybody feels that way. So this movie has a lot of violence. But it’s mostly an action-comedy, with lots of silly banter. Like the twins being arguing over their codenames, and Henry being obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine. Setups, like a water bottle full of knockout drops, pay off nicely, and not always the way you expect (someone gets hit over the head with it). There are absurd stunts and wild fights. Ok, not John Wick level, but still good.

In fact, unlike John Wick, this doesn’t really break new ground, or raise the bar. But it is a goofy joyride. Of course, it misrepresents the actual Shinkansen in many ways, but I think we can forgive that.

Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery Featuring Benoit Blanc doesn’t break new ground either. But it does help to reviving the old genre of a star-studded, glamorous mystery, like the old Poirot movies, as well as The Last of Sheila. We start by meeting the suspects… that is, cast. Each one receives an elaborate puzzle box, and they all join a Zoom call to solve it. They are:

• Katherine Hahn, a soccer mom and political candidate
• Leslie Odom, Jr, head of an engineering co. 
• Kate Hudson, a washed up model turned sweatpants designer and party girl
• Jessica Henwick, Hudson’s put-upon gopher
• Dave Bautista, a muscle-head, misogynistic social media influencer 
• Madelyn Cline, as Whiskey, his girlfriend 
• Janelle Monae, a mysterious woman who opens the box with a hammer
• Finally, Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc

The box reveals an invitation to a party on a Greek island, hosted by these people’s mutual friend. Billionaire disrupter Ed Norton. When they arrive, we discover that Craig had not been invited - how he got the invite is a mystery. But  Orrin accepts him, because he has planned a murder mystery weekend.

So the games and puzzles show the influence of Sheila, while the setting reminds you of Evil Under the Sun. The planned play murder is quickly dispatched, but someone is shortly murdered in actuality, followed by chaos. There is a big twist in the second act, but I felt like there should have been a few more.  The solution is a bit unsatisfying - intentionally, because the culprit is an idiot. In fact, they all ate, except Craig and Monae. This is a bit on-the-nose - everyone is some kind of obnoxious internet type, easy targets for the online crowd. But it is fun and funny. And Monae handles her role with a lot of style and dignity. She’s my favorite part, except for a few cameos, like Serena Williams.

I should also mention that we also saw Amsterdam as well. This is a historical romance set between the world wars. Christian Bale is a badly wounded veteran and doctor, and John David Washington is his brother-in-arms. After the war, they meet nurse Margot Robbie, and she is added to their bond. Back in the states, they are confronted by a murder and a mystery, which involves an plot against America, and they enlist general Robert Deniro to help out. The cast is great, but the script seems somehow unfocused and the pacing odd. The ending, for instance, is given almost entirely in voice over. So it’s sort of too quick, but also seems to go on forever. The political message is also a bit clunky, as in Onion. We didn’t find it bad, but can’t really recommend.

We saw all these on streaming, as well as a few more. Since this blog is technically about our DVD queue, consider this a bonus. 

See you in the new year!

Are You Elvis Tonight?

We’re not big Elvis fans, but I did want to see what Baz Luhrman did with Elvis (2022). But it was really Tom Hanks’ movie. 

Hanks plays Col. Tom Parker, a huckster and a showman. We meet him as an old man in a hospital in Las Vegas, then go into flashback.  He was running a carnival down South when he hears about this guy who sings like a black man - but he’s white! He goes to check him out at a show and sees the way he drives the girls wild. This is a great scene -  Austin Butler plays Elvis as if he’s trying in vain to suppress his sexiness, and the women in the audience can’t hold back either. So Parker signs him up, although the other act he’s managing, Hank Snow, isn’t impressed. 

From here we get what I would guess is a highly fictionalized account of Presley’s career. There’s quite a bit about Presley’s love of the black culture of Memphis’ Beale Street, including his friendship with B.B. King, because they frequented the same tailor. It skims over his movies, goes into his big comeback concert and his Vegas residency. Basically, Parker wanted him in Vegas because 1) he was a gambler, and 2) he was a stateless person who didn’t couldn’t leave the country. That meant he had to keep Presley from attempting a world tour. 

All this is filmed with Luhrman’s signature swirling, manic camera and surrealistic effects. It is supported by Butler’s strong Elvis impression, both as a young man and, with makeup and prosthetics, fat Elvis. But this is largely Hanks’ movie. His Parker has a weird Southern/Dutch accent which only makes sense when you learn his true background. Also, his prostheses are even more extreme than Butler’s. Maybe it’s too much. It’s an interesting role, but not very sympathetic. 

In the end, I found this fun, but not very moving. I didn’t feel like we really got inside Elvis, or even Parker. I’m not sure the songs were great, although we don’t particularly love Elvis, so that might be it. Weirdly, I think Kevin Spacey did a better job on Bobby Darin.  

House Arrest

I'm always trying to find good supernatural horror movies for Ms. Spenser. I had one pretty far down in the queue, a left-over from Spooktober: Housebound (2014). Somehow it bubbled up and we're glad it did, even though it turned out to be a horror comedy.

It starts with Morgana O'Reilly and some knucklehead trying to rob an ATM and getting busted. Since O'Reilly had been sent to various rehabs over the years, she is given house arrest with her mother, Rima Te Waita (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) and silent stepfather. Mum is cheery and dim, and O'Reilly is sullen and bratty, also messy and obnoxious.

She hears a radio psychic call-in show where a woman who sounds like Te Waita describing her house as haunted. O'Reilly figures that her mom set that up to scare her out of the house. But her mother insists that it's true. When O'Reilly explores the basement, a figure covered in a ragged sheet attacks her - turns out to be a 3/4 scale statue of Jesus that just fell over. Cute scare. Then a creepy hand reaches out from under a workbenh to grab her. 

Since one edge of the basement seems to be out-of-bounds for her monitoring anklet, the private security guy in charge keeping her home shows up. When Te Waita mentions the haunting, he immediately gets out his ghosthunting gear. O'Reilly still insists there's an intruder, but they can't find one.

It turns out that the house used to be a halfway house for troubled teens and the site of the horrific murder of one of them. O'Reilly finds a dental bridge in the furnace and begins to suspect their gross neighbor, a scuzzy, possum-skinning, NZ hillbilly. But when he catches her and the security guy trying to break in to get evidence, he catches them. He tells them it was probably Eugene, a weird kid at the house who disappeared before the murder.

So our friends are now trying to solve the murder to lay the ghost. Mum Te Waita is sort of blase about the whole thing - it's just a haunting. Security guy (Glen-Paul Waru, who has a kind of a Dave Bautista look and vibe) takes it seriously and logically. And O'Reilly is still a rude brat, alternately scathing and sarcastic and frightened out of her wits. She even panics and stabs her stepdad, thinking he's the intruder.

We were a little worried about the lack of likable characters for a while, but got into the humor of it all. This has more than a little resemblance to Wilderpeople and even What We Do in the Shadows. The same mix of the mundane and the horrible, the same dry style. I guess that's New Zealand for you.

For an added bonus, look for Cameron Rhodes from Deathgasm.

Murder, He Films

As I mentioned, I've been watching random movies that Mrs. Spenser isn't interested in while she works. A lot of what I'm watching is random old mysteries, comedies and mystery/comedies on Amazon Prime (best selection of random old movies without a special subscription). Turns out this has been good training for Alfred Hitchcock's Murder! (1930).

It starts with screams on a small London street. Everyone comes to the window to see what's happening. We finally find out - an actress in a touring troupe has been murdered in a room alone with another actress, her bitter rival. The survivor, Norah Baring, has no memory of what happened.

We'd really like to hear more about what Baring has to say for herself, but this story is mostly told through other people, gossiping or guessing about the case. When it goes to trial, Baring sort of sums up her defense by giggling, "Me, a murderer? Why, it's absurd!" The jury inclines toward a guilty verdict, especially the Misses,  three old spinsters including Una O'Conner. But one juror. Sir John (Herbert Marshall) can't believe she did it. She's so good looking and well spoken. He is a theatrical producer and his dramatic sense of character won't allow it. But he is convinced to make it unanimous - Guilty.

But he soon has regrets, and decides to use his theater powers to find the real killer. There are backstage interviews, a female impersonator, and a final "the play's the thing" from Hamlet. It's full of silly bits, like commenting heads floating around Marshall's head while he's deliberating. There aren't really jokes as such, but Hitchcock has a lot of fun. Since this is only his third sound movie, it's great to see. 

Going to Hell Tonight

I originally queued Gate of Hell (1953) for Spooktober as a horror movie. I reconsidered when I looked at the description closer. But it wasn't far off.

It takes place in Japan in the 12th century during the Heiji rebellion, a struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans for control of the emperor. When the rebellion is closing in on the palace, a samurai warrior, Hasegawa Kazuo-san, volunteers to take a decoy of the daimyo's sister out of the palace. Lady-in-waiting Kyo Machiko-san volunteers to be that lady.

When the rebellion has been put down, a lord offers Hasegawa-san any reward, and he asks to be allowed to marry Kyo-san. It turns out that she is already married, but he still wants her. He becomes obsessed with her, causing lots of gossip in the palace. So much so that Kyo-san tells her husband, Yamagata Isao-san, about it. He is a decent man, and tries to calm her fears.

As part of the victory celebration, there is a horse race, and Yamagata-san loses to Hasegawa-san. There is a party afterwards, a "race-forgetting party". (It is traditional in Japan to have drinking parties to erase the memory of bad feelings - year-end parties are called "year-forgetting parties", for example.) The guests do a little teasing that Yamagata-san ignores, but it infuriates Hasegawa-san, who wants to start a fight. 

In the end he feels he can force himself on Kyo-san, threatening the lives of her husband and family. She feels she must submit, but switches beds with her husband so that Yamagata-san kills her instead of her husband. Shocked and dismayed, he finds Yamagata-san and begs him to kill him. But Yamagata-san knows that that won't bring back Kyo-san. So Hasegawa-san cuts off his topknot and vows to become a monk. 

Right off. this film is gorgeous. It was one of the first Japanese costume dramas to be filmed in color, and the first to be shown outside Japan. It is full of beautiful Japanese brocade costumes in brilliant colors. It is also full of Japanese traditional music - a monk playing spooky biwa, classical gagaku at court, Kyo-san's beautiful koto playing, and a shrill shichiriki when Hasegawa-san is in the grips of madness. The movie is full of little touches, like silk curtains billowing in the wind and ripples spreading in water - to show perhaps, how easily things can be affected by chance and change. 

The Gate of Hell is one of the gates to the palace where the heads of a previous rebellion were hung. It sports a fiery mural of Hell. But it isn't only rebellion that leads to Hell, it is also lust and violence. I had assumed that Hasegawa-san, the forthright noble warrior would win the damsel from her noble, foppish husband. But actually, he couldn't control his desires, while the husband was mild and trusting. 

However, it must be said (and Yamagata-san says as much) that Kyo-san could have avoided a tragic end if she had leveled with her husband instead of martyring herself. That part I just can't work out.

House Party

Although Ms. Spenser specializes in horror, she has been reading some le Carre lately, so I thought I'd queue up The Russia House (1990). Starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, with a script by Tom Stoppard from the le Carre novel, how could it lose?

It starts in a nice round about way: Russian Michelle Pfeiffer walks into a Russian-European publishers' book fair looking for Barley Blair (Connery), while a discussion in voiceover talks about him. He isn't there, so she reluctantly gives the Englishman in the next booth a manuscript for him. Back at the hotel, he looks inside, and realizes that the English government needs to see it. It is a set of notebooks showing that the perestroika Soviet military is a paper tiger. It is revealed that the voiceover discussion is the "Russia House", English intelligence Russian operation, as well as CIA, etc, looking for Connery.

They find him in Lisbon, getting drunk, and bring him in for a talk. He denies knowing Pfeiffer or anyone similar. But there was this time at a Russian writers' retreat and booze-up at a country dacha. Connery was spouting off about the importance of betraying any warlike government - English, American, Russian, whatever. A quiet drunk who went by Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer) approaches him and asks for a promise: If Dante ever decides to be a hero, will Connery be a decent human being? So, presumably, the manuscript comes from Dante (whoever that is).

So they send him to Moscow to find out more. He meets Pfeiffer and is immediately smitten. But he needs to find out if the manuscript can be trusted, if she can be trusted, and if being a spy is really what he wants to do.

Connery is great in this role. He's a lazy, hard-drinking blowhard, with ideals that he doesn't really try to live up to. He goes along with the spy games out of inertia more than patriotism, and because it may improve the chances of world peace and Russian freedom. Then, he does it because he is falling in love with Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer's role is a little easier - a creditable Russian accent and that old Soviet sense of resignation covering rebellion. The spy masters are a fun little group of character actors, including Roy Scheider, Charles John Mahoney, and Kurt Russell (!) as a red-faced, white-haired, foul-mouthed Brit.

The script is clever, especially in the first act, where we get discussions and surveillance recordings in the spy world mixed with the actual happenings. This goes on throughout, although we settle into Connery's viewpoint more and more. In the end, the Brit running Connery has an intuition, and Scheider has the opposite. This is what we love about le Carre - with no reliable information, from another country, spy masters must decide who to trust and figure out the lay of the land. Those who do it well succeed, and most don't. For the spy in the field, it's a little different. 

Going Postal

I wanted to watch The Postman (1997) because I'd read the David Brin novel. I didn't even particularly love the novel, although I do love Brin. On the other hand, it's three-hours long, and stars and is directed by Kevin Costner, who I consider to be a handsome non-entity. On the third hand, it was a long weekend, and Ms. Spenser was working, so I queued it up.

It is set in the American West after a series of apocalypses. Costner and his mule are wandering around trying to avoid the remnants of civilization, or visiting these small outposts and performing half-forgotten scraps of Shakespeare for the yokels. 

While he's in one town, a militia shows up - the Holnist Army. It's been awhile since I read the book, so I heard this as Wholeness Army or something. Don't know why they didn't change the name. Anyway, they took supplies and conscripts in return for not massacring the village, and one of the conscripts is Costner.

The Army is lead by Will Patton and run on fascist, racist principles in a huge open-pit mine. They brand Costner, eat his mule, and make sure he doesn't escape. When he finally does, he hides out in an old mail truck, burning letters to stay warm. Then he steals the dead postman's outfit, takes a few letters and heads for the nearest town.

This town in fortified and they don't want to let him in, until he tells them he has a letter for a resident. That gets everyone teary-eyed over the way things used to be. So he makes up a story about the Restored United States, headed by by President Richard Starkey. His slogan: "It's getting better all the time."

He is celebrated with a party, and Olivia Williams even asks him to get her pregnant, since her husband can't. Costner may be a drifter and con-man, but he's also an aw-shucks cornball, so he lets her down easy.

Later, he meets a young black man who named himself Ford Lincoln Mercury, Larenz Tate. Tate wants to be a postman, so Costner swears him in. Then he takes a bag of mail and heads to the next town. He thinks this postman thing might be an easy gig.

But after he leaves, the Holnists show up. They don't like the idea of a Restore United States, since it could take their power, or even just make the locals hopeful and restless. They burn the post office, kidnap Williams, kill her husband and a bunch of other folk, and head off hunting the postman.

They catch him, but Williams manages to get a weapon and break him free - so they head for the hills. Costner has been trying to get to the idyllic town of Saint Rose on the Oregon coast, so that's where they will head, as soon as the passes are clear of snow. But the Holnists are still coming.

The tone of this movie is interesting: it's a combination of cornball sincerity and knowing irony. The idea is, we know Costner is a coward, a conman and a clown, and his stories about the revival of civilization are imaginary, but they give people hope and something to strive for, and that's what we humans need. I'm not a Costner expert, but it seems very much his thing. Add to that, it's an exciting adventure movie with beautiful Northwest scenery. It reminded me a lot of Dances with Wolves, the only other Costner movie I've seen.

Unfortunately, it is quite long and maybe not as exciting as it could be. Costner's character is interesting - I see a lot of Harrison Ford there. He is goofy and generally non-violent - he even threatens Williams with a spoon when she holds a knife to his throat. He seems to have a good heart. But he's just a little too bland, too slick. So in the end, I'm glad I saw it, but can't say I loved it. Maybe if I'd seen it back in the day.

In conclusion, Tom Petty has a small role, playing himself. He wound up the leader of a prosperous town attached to a hydroelectric damn. Good for him. 

Put a Ring on It

I hesitated when Ms. Spenser suggested we watch Ringu (1998). I was under the impression that it was gory, violent, and slasher-ish. A review mentioned something like "inventive kills" - not our thing in general. But I queued it up anyway - and found that I was wrong. 

It starts with a bunch of kids at a sleepover talking about an urban legend: if you watch a creepy videotape, you get a phone call, then die one week later. One girl mentions that she actually had watched a video like that about a week ago, and of course, she dies (quietly). 

Her aunt, Matsushima Nanako-san, finds out that three other kids died at the same time as her niece. She also hears about the urban legend from some schoolkids. So she starts to investigate. She figures out where the kids were staying in Oshima, and heads up there. She finds an unmarked tape and watches it. Then the phone rings. Now, she realizes, she is cursed. She has one week to live.

She calls in her ex-husband, Sanada Hiroyuki-san, to help. She reluctantly let's him watch a copy of the tape, and he finds a few more clues. Unfortunately, late one night Matsushima-san finds her young son watching the tape. Now he is cursed as well. That really ups the stakes. 

So, instead of being a bloodbath, this is a supernatural tension-fest. The deaths are all or mostly quiet or off-screen. The monster, when finally discovered, is pretty creepy (OK, it's the girl with the hair over her face - we've all seen stills at least). And there are a few scares. But mostly it's just tension and fear. The first section has a lot of teens discussing urban legends, which has a bit of a social media feel - quite modern. In fact, it seems that the modern/ancient dichotomy is driving this movie. 

But I was just glad it wasn't more traumatic. 

Discovery of the Wheel

Here's another that's not from Netflix or streaming: The Wheeler Dealers (1963). I actually bought this. I've been trying to rent or stream it for a while and finally gave in. You see, this is the first movie I remember seeing. I was 7 years old, in my jammies in the backseat of the family car at the drive-in. Other movies I remember seeing from those days include Night of the Iguana,  The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Viva Las Vegas, but they're all from 1964. So, assuming I saw all of these first-run (it wasn't some rural drive-in, it was legit), this is the first. And I remember loving it, and I've waited this long to rewatch it.

It starts with oil millionaire James Garner coming up dry on his latest field, so he has to head to New York to raise some capital. At LaGuardia, he has a hard time getting a taxi, so the first one he gets, he buys. He explains to cabbie Robert Strauss that he can buy the cab and medallion for $22,000, including the services of Strauss, and in two weeks sell it back to him for $20,000, and use tax depreciation to offset to expense. See, he's a wheeler dealer.

Meanwhile, Lee Remick is a working girl, living with a girlfriend (whose boyfriend is somehow related to the art world). She's the only broker in an all-male brokerage, and boss Jim Backus wants to get rid of her. So he gives her the Universal Widgets account (who haven't made widgets or anything since the turn of the century). When Garner stops by looking for investment money, he pretends to be interested in widgets because he is interested in her. 

The part I mostly remember is a gallery opening where Remick takes Garner. It's a very Mad magazine version of a hip party, with people in outre costumes spouting pretentious BS. But Garner finds the artist, Louis Nye, who, it turns out, is also an operator. They have a little discussion about the art market, leading Garner to fly off to Europe and buy up a batch of Expressionist paintings. Wheeling and dealing.

I'll leave out Garner's good ol' boy backers, Ray Jay, Jay Ray, and J.R. (played by Phil Harris, Chill Wills, and Charles Watts - but not the drummer). I'll just mention John Astin as the fed who thinks Garner is committing securities fraud. I'll skip the part where Remick gets fired due to a mix-up.

I will mention a scene where Garner meets up with Nye while Nye is creating a painting by wheeling a tricycle with paint on the wheels over a canvas. I mention this because i had remembered this as girls in bikinis covered in paint rolling around on the canvas. I even remembered the painter on a stepladder directing the girls. Anyone remember what movie that's from?

Anyway, I can see why I liked this as a 7 year old. Garner is charming as always, always on top of things, usually with a complicated angle. The level of sophistication was just about right, especially if you've been reading Mad magazine about the fakes and phonies. It wasn't so great for a senior citizen like me, but not so bad either. I enjoyed for more than nostalgic reasons.

In conclusion, now that I've thought about it, I may have seen this on a double-bill with The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze. But I don't remember much about that except for disappointment.

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

I can't remember why we queued up My Favorite Wife (1940) - we've seen it before more that once. Maybe because we couldn't quite remember which of the "Got re-married because previous spouse was declared dead and now their back and I've got two spouses" movies it was.

It's the one with Cary Grant. He's getting his previous wife declared dead after she has been missing seven years and to marry his girlfriend Gail Patrick (who I always get confused with Gale Sondergaard - two severe, scary brunettes). Well, what do you know? That very day. Grant's old wife, Irene Dunne, arrives at their old house. She has been rescued, and wants to surprise Grant and their kids. The kids don't recogize her, and Grant is on his honeymoon. Her mother-in-law, Anne Shoemaker, explains the situation, and mentions that they are honeymooning at the same hotel he honeymooned with Dunne (the Ahwanee in Yosemite, recognizably shot on location). So she goes to mess things up.

Once Grant sees her, we get a nice little sex farce with Grant unwilling to tell Patrick that his dead wife is alive, but also won't consummate his marriage. So lots of running around, and finally, heading back home.

At his house, he doesn't tell his kids he is married to Patrick, and makes sure not to sleep with her. Then an insurance man shows up to check if Dunne is still deads, so they can pay off her policy. He mentions a rumor that she was rescued along with a man who was on the same island - they called each other Adam and Eve. Grant runs off into the night to find this "Adam" in his bathrobe (he just goes a little gay).

Although Dunne assures him that Adam was a complete gentlemen, harmless really, Grant discovers that he is Randolph Scott, living at the Pacific Club and continually doing diving stunts in the pool. Grant's series of double takes at his physique is delightful. (Even if you haven't heard the stories about Grant and Scott living together in Bachelor's Hall.)

So that's the outline. Grant is married to Patrick and can't tell her his other wife is alive. He is also wildly jealous of Scott. Dunne is lovely and funny, with a deep attachment to the kids - there's a cute scene where the kids figure out that she is their mother and they put her through it for a little. 

I guess there are a few structural problems with this - it lags here and there, and you have to wonder why Grant didn't just explain things instead of trying out increasingly unlikely lies. But it was pretty funny, the leads are all charming, and it has a neat wrap up for everyone but Patrick, who just sort of flounces. 

Plus the whole gay subtext is always fun.

Thud and Blunder

Remember how the first two Thor movies were kind of joyless, po'-faced self-serious slogs? And then Taika Waititi came along and goofy romp? Well, Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) really takes that and runs with it.

It opens seriously enough, revealing our villain's origin: stripy-headed alien Christian Bale and his daughter are dying as their planet dies up. In spite of Bale's prayers, she does in fact die. He manages to stumble upon the lush garden where his god lives - a sun god who has killed a monster wielding the necrosword - a blade that can kill gods. He is completely contemptuous of Bale and his suffering, so Bale renounces him. Since the necrosword is right there handy, he kills his god and swears to kill all other gods in the universe. He becomes the God-Butcher.

We move now to a cave one evening, where rock guy Korg (Taika Waititi) is telling the tale of his old pal Thor (Chris Hemsworth). He summarizes the last few movies, talking about all the friends and comrades he has lost (although the Warriors Three are called, "this guy, this guy, and ... this other guy"). He then talks about Thor's love for Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), their time of living together, and how they broke up. That is handy, because we can skip that movie, which looks like it would have been kind of boring (also, Hemsworth and Portman don't really sizzle onscreen). 

Korg's tale is full of conventions like "typical Thor adventure". It makes Korg (again, director Waititi) the narrator, and an unreliable one at that. So if you see anything silly or naive in the rest of the movie, that's just the way Korg tells it.

So we have Thor, orphaned, divorced (-ish), living a life of simple meditation, when he is called to battle with the Guardians. When they get sick of him (right away), he heads of to find Sif, who was injured fighting the God-Butcher. His next stop is New Asgard, a sleepy Nordic fishing village and tourist attraction. 

Backing up a little, we find out what's up with Portman. It seems that she has cancer. But also, she has Mjolnir. It seems that Thor made Mjolnir promise to always look after Jane, and so it does. So when Thor shows up in New Asgard, he meets Mighty Thor, Jane Foster. It's a funny scene, typical meeting your ex at a work thing, trying to keep it light and civil. 

They hold off the Butcher, but he manages to escape with all the Asgardian kids. Rather than rashly running into battle, he tries to assemble a team. He gets Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), but figures he can get more powerful beings in Omnipotence City, home of the gods. This scene is full of beautiful CGI temples and silliness with the gods.

And so on.  The whole thing is very silly, with Thor's personality at the center. He is a vain and somewhat thoughtless person trying to be better and do the right thing. he desperately wants to save the kids, but is continually having to tell them to hold tight, he get them out real soon, or maybe a little longer than that. Got to go, stay safe, bye! He is pretty upset about Jane getting Mjolnir - it won't return to his hand the way it used to. He then has to sweet-talk his battle axe to keep it from getting jealous. And of course, he still feels bad about losing Jane, but wants to be an adult about it. He wants to support her in her role as Mighty Thor - even though it's hard on him. The clumsiness is adorable, and very relatable.  

There's also a ton of silly stuff like two screaming goats he gets as a present, or when Thor is stripped naked in Omnipotence City, causing several goddesses to faint, or Tessa Thompson being very bi-sexy. In New Asgard, the amateur theatricals get a reprise, this time with Melissa McCarthy as Hela.

There are nice comic book moments, like the final encounter with Eternity, a beloved entity from the old Ditko days. Plus the whole Jane Foster is Thor thing. And it does all this in under two hours.

I understand that a lot of people were not happy with this one. Too jokey, I guess, or maybe too overstuffed. I don't get that at all. I do feel that Marvel has gone a little too silly overall, what with Guardians, Ant-Man, and even the Multiverse of Madness. I would prefer a mix, with some more gravitas for some movies, like Old Logan. But I do like the way they let directors with a style and visions do their thing. Even if that means a misstep like the Eternals. 

Dead to Us

Dead of Night (1977) is not a remake of the British 1944 movie of the same name. It isn't half as clever. Instead, it's a made-for-TV horror anthology directed by Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows). Unlike the British movie, it doesn't have a clever framing story. It just jumps right into the first story.

We sort of liked this one. Ed Begley Jr. is restoring an old 1926 roadster and goes for a jaunt to the next town over. As he is driving, he sees more and more classic cars in great shape. When he finally arrives, it's 1929. He wanders around, taking in the scenery, but when the movie lets out, someone steals "his" car. Quotes, because it's pretty clear that the guy driving it away is the original owner. So Begley has to walk or hitch home (which appears to be 1977, thank goodness).

Later, he goes to meet his girlfriend's (Christina Hart) parents. Her dad has a 1926 roadster lust like the one he restored - one that hasn't been driven in decades. The parents tell him about how, back in 1926, after a movie, the dad had tried to race a train to the crossing. But at the last second, he decided not to risk it and turned off. Why, if they had been killed, girlfriend would never have been born! Did they remember, on that night, some kid yelling at them about stealing his car? Did this maybe delay them a few seconds so they weren't going to tempt fate with that train? No, neither of them remembered anything like that. But Begley still assumes he was responsible. And who is to say he wasn't?

The next one has Patrick Macnee as a Victorian doctor who doesn't believe that his wife Anjanette Comer is being attacked by a vampire. He calls in friend Horst Buchholz to help him in the case. You may not guess right away that it's a scheme of Mcnee's to punish an imagined affair. But you probably will.

The final one is the only one that's really scary. Mother Joan Hackett lost her son to a drowning and has taken to spiritualism and dark arts to get him back. When she casts a complicated spell to bring him back - it works. He shows up soaked from a rain storm at her back door. He wasn't drowned at all, he was rescued by some people who didn't know who he was and he had amnesia. When he remembered, he came home. Or so he says.

At first, Hackett is overjoyed, even when he acts a little cranky. But before the night is over, he'll get worse than that.

This is sort of Twilight Zone level stuff, slightly better production values, maybe a little worse writing and directing. The first story is by Jack Finney, the rest by Richard Matheson, so that shouldn't be the problem. So I'm going to blame Curtis.

Blades 2

So, if Ms. Spenser is busy or all movied out, I will watch something that she doesn't care about. I thought I found the perfect movie that she definitely did not want to see: Rob Zombie's The Munsters (2022). It started with a graverobber and his assistant. The assistant says, "Master, the crypt is empty", and the graverobber replies, "Ya think?" Boy, that joke is certainly fresh and timely. Next scene, Grampa Munster (with very well done makeup and costume, I must say) rises mysteriously from his coffin, then cries out, "My back!" OK, two short scenes, two monumentally lame gags. I bailed. 

Decided to try Blade of the 47 Ronin (2022) instead. I enjoyed the first one, although mostly for Keanu Reeves (and maybe Rinko Kikuchi). This one is almost completely unrelated, with no overlappiung cast, director or producer. Unlike the original, which took place in medieval Japan, this one takes place in near-future Budapest. In this future, samurai walk around dressed in a mix of kimono and Western business clothes. They have gone international, with African and European members as well as Japanese. They are looking for a blade that is half samurai, half witch. The prophecy states that it must be wielded by a descendant of the loyal retainers to defeat a vague threat.

Anna Akana is bumming around Budapest, doing a little pickpocketing, etc. The samurai, lead by Marc Dacascos, figure out that she is the descendent. They start to train her up, but she notices a strange presence - a hulking seated figure with a ponytail who can deliver magical blows. Based on the ponytail and seated fighting style, I was afraid this was Stephen Seagal, but was actually Daniel Southworth.

I should mention that Dacascos had three young women supporting him, all orphans he picked up and trained. I mention because they are kind of fun and because Akana looks like she'll be another. 

I have to say that the fights are not great, although they do focus on Japanese swords. (When one of our guys just starts using guns near the end, it's kind of cute.) Dacascos does almost nothing in the fights. There's a lot of CGI and wirework as opposed to cool stunt fighting. BUT - the costumes and art direction aren't bad - Japanese schoolgirl outfits, kimono over leisure suit, etc. So, while Ms. Spenser wasn't interested, I was reasonably amused. At least it was better than The Munsters.

Night Tower

I hadn't been having much luck with newer horror, so I decided to go old school, with some Boris Karloff: the double bill Night Key/Tower of London (1937/1939).

Night Key stars Karloff as a scientist who has developed a new burglar alarm. He goes to the company that stole his ideas and fired him 10 years ago to demonstrate, but they blow him off. In the meantime, Warren. Hull, a rent-a-cop from the same company, detains Hobart Cavanaugh, caught in the act of burglary by their silent alarms. Cavanaugh plays Petty Louis, who never stole enough to be charged with a felony. As a result, Hull doesn't call in the police, but detains Louis at the company.

So Karloff just happens to be storming out of the office when he sees Louis locked up. Along with the new alarm system he invented, he also has a gadget that defeats the old system, so he sets Louis free. Petty Louis is grateful and wants "in on it", whatever it is.

So Karloff and Louis go on a crime spree - where they break into stores that use the alarm system, move things around but don't steal anything, and leaving a taunting note. Of course, Louis has to be constantly reminded not to steal anything. 

But some real crooks like Alan Baxter and Ward Bond get wind of this, and force Karloff to help them pull some real crimes. They do this by the usual expedient of kidnapping Karloff's daughter, Jean Rogers. Will he be able to save her? What about rent-a-cop Hull, who has been showing interest in Rogers? And so on. 

Not a great crime movie, and Karloff is playing a quiet old man with a white mustache, not a scary ghoul. But Cavanaugh is a lot of fun as Petty Louis, and the real gangsters are fairly menacing. A good watch.

Tower of London, on the other hand, is a classic. Basil Rathbone plays Richard, Duke of Gloucester, before he became Richard III of England. He had a personal torturer and executioner, club-footed Mord, played by Boris Karloff. The movie deals with the machinations of Richard and his brothers while weak King Edward IV kept in seclusion in the Tower. So Rathbone sets about to eliminate all rivals.

One is the Duke of Clarence, played by Vincent Price. He challenges him to a drinking duel. Rathbone promises to use no weapon except Malmsey. Price figures thatras an old sot, he can't lose. They set about drinking in a somewhat silly scene, but when Price passes out, Rathbone and Karloff dump him in the famous butt of Malmsey.

There are more murders and executions, including the famous children in the Tower. Seeing Karloff tenderly putting them to bed, then measuring them for graves is chilling. Finally, the exiled pretender returns, and there are a few battle scenes. These are chaotic ands intimate, possibly to keep down the cost of extras. (Although the filming of these foggy, rainy scenes in hot, sunny California was apparently a big mess.)

In the little research I've done, I've found that this is considered a bit of a mess. But as far as I'm concerned, it's a classic historical drama with a touch of horror. This is a great double bill. 

With a Purposeful Grimace and a Terrible Sound

 Strange to say, I had never seen the original Godzilla (1954). I'm not even sure that I saw the Americanized edit with Raymond Burr. I have now corrected this.

It starts at sea, with sailors hanging around the deck of a freighter. When something destroys it, another ship comes to the rescue, and vanishes. The few survivors are picked up by another ship, but the joy is short-lived - that ship goes down too. The only remaining fisherman makes it ashore, and babbles about a great monster. People scoff until that monster - Godzilla - rampages through the village. A scientific expedition, lead by Takashi Shimura, arrives and finds destruction, giant footprints, and radioactivity. Then Godzilla itself appears.

There are a number of "our weapons are powerless against him" scenes, but we turn now to Shimura-san's daughter, Momoko Kochi. She is engaged to Akihiko Hirata, but has fallen in love with Akira Takarada. Takarada-san is a salvage boat operator, working with Shimura-san. Hirata-san, on the other hand, is a grim, cynical scientist with an eyepatch. Dashing in a manga sort of way. He has developed a secret weapon, but it's much too dangerous to be unleashed upon the world. 

Then Godzilla shows up in Tokyo. 

We found this to be much more powerful than we expected. The destruction of ship after ship, with no known cause, makes the appearance of the monster very powerful. Shimura-san, the scientist, wants to study Godzilla, not destroy him, and he also correctly notes that H-bombs just wake him up. Then there's the love triangle, with a sweet girl, her manly boyfriend, and scorned fiance, the doomed romantic Hirata-san. The special effects aren't exactly hyper-realistic, but they are very powerful if you can relax your standards a little. 

Now, our favorite kaiju movie. 

When Women Had Tails

Just took a chance on Thale (2012), knowing pretty much nothing about it. In fact, I was tempted to just send it back unwatched - just wasn't feeling it. It turned out pretty great - an odd Norwegian folk-horror.

It starts with a tape playing, with an old man saying soothing things to his "good girl", interspersed with screams. Then we meet our protagonists, Leo and Elvis. They are both in hazmat gear. Leo is cleaning up a lot of blood in a forest cabin, Elvis is puking his guts out. Turns out Leo runs a company that cleans up messy death scenes, and Elvis is helping out. Without saying much, they show us their characters - Leo is stolid and steady, Elvis is a bit of a fuck-up.

So when Leo finds a hidden cellar, he is the one who calls for rest of the crew, and Elvis is the one that starts poking around. He finds a lot of canned goods, a bathtub full of milky fluid and some very grimy scientific equipment, including the tape recorder that we probably heard at the top. Against Leo's advice, Elvis plays some of the tape - it seems to be the notes of a scientist of some kind. 

Then a woman surfaces from the bath - a young, naked woman. Now Leo really wants to get some backup. The woman, Thale (played by singer/dancer/actor Silje Reinamo), is cold and hungry, and seemingly feral. When Leo goes out to the truck to get her some food, we see (although he doesn't), some strange creatures, like naked women with tales, flitting through the woods.

This all unfolds rather slowly until the last act, when a mad scientist and his paramilitary show up to reclaim Thale.

I'll cut to the chase here - I don't know how this played in Norway, but Thale turns out to be a hulder, a Norwegian folk creature that looks like a woman with a tail. This is only mentioned at the very end of the movie - and of course, I've never heard of a hulder. Did most Norwegians get this right away?

This is a rather sweet movie. Although it seems like the man on the recordings was perhaps torturing Thale, it turns out he was protecting her - or at least trying. Leo and Elvis are just guys, but they only want to help the poor naked girl. And Reinamo as Thale is very lovely and seems worthy of protection. There is some horror at the end, and the grimy basement has a very serial-killer vibe, but it's just a vibe.  The movie is also quite short (under 80 minutes), which fits the slight story. 

Morbin', Morbin', Morbin'

 We finally got on the Morb Bus, and streamed Morbius (2022). It was partly so we could listen to the podcast takedowns, but mostly because I watch comic book movies - all of them.

It starts with a helicopter landing on a remote mountain, and Jared Leto as Dr. Morbius hobbling to a cae entrance. He has a rare blood disease that makes him weak and weedy, and needs to study vampire bats to find a cure. As he cuts his palm to get some blood-bait, a swarm of bats fly out of the cage - and we go back 25 years.

At a small hospital in Greece, a young Morbius meets a young Milo - played by Matt Smith later in the movie. These kids bond over their disease. Morbius even saves Milo's life by jury-rigging a fix for his medical gizmo. This established Morbius as a genius, and kindly doctor Jared Harris sends him to America to study medicine.

Back in the present, we see Leto getting the Nobel prize for inventing artificial blue blood. What we don't see, but are told about, is that he told them to fuck off, for some reason - maybe he's just a maverick. We do see him working with his lab assistant/romantic interest (?) Adria Arjona. We also get to meet Milo, now a grown-up Matt Smith, who is a rich, dissolute cynic, still crippled by his disease, now with Harris as his personal physician/ineffective conscience. Milo agrees to help fund Morbius' research, which is illegal and unethical, so it will be done on a Russian freighter outside the 12-mile limit. 

He takes the cure just as the crew decides to come down to the lab and maybe get rapey with Arjona. So it's a good thing that it works, but maybe it works too well. It gives him super-strength, speed, an ugly bat-nosed face, and a thirst for blood. 

Now Morbius is on the run. He can subsist on blue blood for a while, but it loses effectiveness. But he meets with Smith, who realizes that he is cured and wants a little himself. When Leto won't give it to him, but also won't explain the drawbacks, he steals a dose. So now Smith is another vampire, but not so ethical. 

So there you go. On the surface, this isn't a terrible movie. It's got some problems - for instance, there are too many scenes that happen off camera. Maybe they want the viewer to fill in the gaps, but why do they leave out so many fun scenes? Maybe because the action scenes aren't actually that great. Morbius zooms around leaving a trail of purple powder that may just be "trails", or nanobots (?) or just particle-based CGI. Another issue may be Leto's low-affect performance. This worked for Benedict Cumberbatch in the Dr. Strange movies,  but Leto may not have the charisma to pull it off.

But I've got to say, I didn't hate this! It's not my fave, but down around the lesser Hulk movies. Maybe above Wolverine: Origins. But what to I know? I like the Fantastic Four/Silver Surfer movies.

Queen of the Night

Dead of Night (1945)/Queen of Spades (1949) is another disc we didn't get from Netflix - we took this out of the library. If you go to the link, you will see what library we frequent. I am doxxed! We have already seen Queen of Spades, an excellent movie, but we didn't have time to re-watch. But Dead of Night was new.

It begins with Mervyn Johns driving up to an old English farmhouse. His host meets him at the door and gives us some exposition. He has invited Johns, an architect, to the place to discuss putting up an addition. Johns is invited into a cozy living room and introduced to the other guests. But he already knows them. He explains that he has a recurring dream or nightmare. He always forgets most of it, but now he sees the house and guests and remembers them all from his dream. He even says that a penniless brunette will arrive - and indeed, brunette Renee Gad shows up and asks her husband to pay the taxi fare - she "hasn't got a penny."

One of the guests is a psychologist, Frederick Valk. He is skeptical, and offers prosaic explanations. Then each of the guests tells a story of the supernatural that happened to them or a friend. So this is anthology horror, with five stories plus the frame tale.

The stories are all different, some longer, some shorter. The styles and indeed the directors are different, with Basil Dearden doing the frame and the first story, with Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Robert Hamer doing the others. 

One is about a premonition of death, another about a children's game of Sardines where a girl finds a ghost child. One is about a world seen in a mirror. One is basically comic, about two golfers played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. These were the two Englishmen in The Lady Vanishes who are only interested in the cricket scores. 

The last one, told by the doctor, is the most famous, a story about a ventriloquists dummy who wants to replace his ventriloquist. This isn't the first or last movie with this plot, but it's very well done.

In between these stories, Johns is getting more upset, vaguely remembering that something awful is going to happen - that he is going to kill someone. After the final story, he snaps, and finds himself in a series of hallucinations based on the stories he has heard. Then, SPOILER, he wakes up. It was a dream - the dream. He's driving out to that farmhouse to see about putting in an addition. He has already forgotten what the dream was about, but...

We found this to be excellent all around. The pacing was great, with longer and shorter stories with different tones keeping it fresh. The way the frame story worked out - again, not the first or last movie like this, but so well executed. Also, what other movie uses a dream for a time loop?

Double 13

 Here's another pair for Octoberween: 13 Frightened Girls (1963)/13 Ghosts (1960), both directed by schlockmeister William Castle.

13 Frightened Girls really doesn't live up to its title. It stars Kathy Dunn and 12 other girls as students at a girls' school for the daughters of diplomats in England. Dunn is American, the others are from all over, including the USSR and Red China. On holiday, Dunn goes first to visit Murray Hamilton, an intelligence operator she is infatuated with. Since she is only 16, he just has to try to keep her hands off of him. Anyway, he has a girlfriend, another agent nicknamed Soldier, played by Joyce Taylor. 

Dunn overhears that her father the ambassador is going to send Hamilton home is he can't find out who is behind the student unrest in South America. To protect his job, and keep him in London, Dunn decides to solve this for him. Since she loves gossiping with her fellow international students and going to embassy parties, she solves this one pretty quickly. 

Soon, she is solving all sorts of espionage cases, sending the results in anonymous letters signed "Kitten". Of course, the other countries find out about Kitten and soon everyone is looking for her.

Dunn is basically playing a dimestore Hayley Mills in this, and maybe has the chops to pull it off. The script isn't even too bad, but you can see Castle wasn't happy with it. He adds a cat toss for no reason and the final fight, where all the 13 girls (not frightened at all) join in, is just lame slapstick. Aside from the WTF factor, this was not a great watch.

13 Ghosts was much better. It starts with an intro from William Castle himself, explaining the glasses handed out at the theater. If you want to see the ghosts, look through the red filter. If you don't want to see the ghosts, look through the blue. 

Paleontologist Charles Herbert is broke - the company has just repossessed all his furniture, leaving him, his wife Rosemary DeCamp, teen daughter and young son eating dinner on the floor. But lawyer Martin Milner shows up to let them know that rich eccentric uncle Plato Zorba has died and left them a furnished mansion. The catch is that they must live in it, not sell it, and that it comes with a collection of 12 ghosts. 

They don't run into a ghost right away - just a witch, Margaret Hamilton. She's now the housekeeper, who wants to stay on without pay. She was a partner in ghost collecting with uncle Plato. Castle really hammers on the Hamilton = witch "joke".

Herbert finds an odd pair of glasses, and when things get weird, he puts them on. At this point, the black-and-white movie becomes blue-tinted with red-tinted ghosts. Like the audience using the right filter, he can see the ghosts with the glasses on. These ghosts are a mixed lot: a headless lion-tamer and his lion, a dancing skeleton, and cook continually murdering his wife, and so on. 

To add to all this, there's supposed to be no money in the bequest, but there does turn out to be a stack of cash hidden somewhere. 

This is a rather fun movie. It is more a comedy than horror, and the thrills are very low-key. We saw the remake, and enjoyed it, but Ms. Spenser, at least, prefers this version. For one thing, the ghosts in the new movie were horrible, but rather generic, with no in-movie backstory (extensive backstories can be found on wikipedia, etc). But the house was a lot cooler in the remake, and the story a little more coherent. The remake also skips the gimmick, which I'd say is a wash. But, there is no Margaret Hamilton in the remake. So the original wins. 

The Eyes Have It

Here's one that we didn't get on DVD from Netflix or watch on streaming. It isn't available easily, so we bought it: Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948).

It starts in media res with a young woman, Gail Russell, about to throw herself off a bridge. But her boyfriend, John Lund, has followed her and manages to prevent her suicide. He offers to take her for a cup of coffee while she complains about all the stars in the sky, looking down at her like eyes.

They get to the restaurant, which turns out to be a very swinging Chinese chop suey joint (a black couple by the jukebox, etc). Edward G. Robinson is waiting for them. He is the one who told Lund where to find Russell. He tells his story.

He started out as a vaudeville mentalist, working with a beautiful assistant who would become Russell's mother, and a pianist who would become her father. In the middle of a phony act (you figure out that the pianist is sending cues in the music), he tells a woman in the audience to head home. Her little boy has found some matches and set his bed on fire. She rushes out and he continues. After the show, he dismisses it as just something that came over him, and it was probably nonsense. But the lady has come back to the theater to thank him for saving her child.

Robinson begins to see more and more visions, and the three start to get rich by acting on them. But he worries that he may be causing the disasters he forsees, and deliberately doesn't warn a newsboy to be careful crossing streets. He is immediately killed by a truck. So that didn't work.

Although he and his assistant are clearly in love, he sees a vision of her dying delivering their child. So he breaks up with her, and tells her to marry the pianist and settle down with a few stock tips. They do, but she still dies, delivering the child who will grow up to be Russell.

Robinson withdraws from the world, taking Angel's Flight to Bunker Hill in LA, and starting a magic novelty mail-order company. But many years later, he has a vision of Russell's father dying in a plane crash. He rushes to her house and crashes a party to beg her to call him and tell him not to fly. But when they do get through, he has already crashed. 

But it gets worse - he looks at Russell and she realizes that he has had a vision about her - her death under a starry sky, in the next few days. That brings us up to the present.

But now John Lund brings the police in. He suspects that Robinson is running a con, trying to get at Russell's money. Detective William Demarest (!) is able to confirm parts of the story, but also discovers that the plane crash was due to sabotage. Maybe Robinson is not the troubled unwilling psychic that he appears.

So this isn't quite a noir, nor quite a horror movie, but it's a little of both. Since Angel's Flight always makes a noir, we have that section. But the inevitability of Robinson's terrible predictions gives it a horror element. Getting William Demarest as a police detective is just icing on the cake. 

Tall and Gothic

I might as well blog the next two together, although they don't have much in common - other than unreliable point of view characters who are mad.

Tall Men (2017) starts with a somewhat twitchy young man bringing a woman upstairs, telling his grandmother that they are studying for a math test. When the lights flicker downstairs, the grandmother runs up and we hear hear scream, "What have you done?"

Later, the man, Dan Crisafulli, is shown getting a. bankruptcy set up by a group of smug condescending lawyers. Back at home, he goes through his junk mail, and after great temptation, throwing out credit card offers. He works in a warehouse with a group of other troubled or challenged people, including a shy young woman who seems to like him. Their boss is a dick who only talks to them through a megaphone.

One day he gets an offer for a credit card that looks too good to be true - and it is. Soon, he's being menaced by shadowy tall men. The police don't seem to believe him, but find enormous footprints. His friends come to his aid, but disappear. And it gets worse. 

Two things about all this. One is that this is more or less a comedy. But the humor is based on Crisafulli being a twitchy, mentally challenged young man and the rest of the world are similarly challenged or smug, arrogant and disdainful of them. Lot of long awkward moments of handsome, in-control men sneering while Crisafulli suffers under their glare. 

The other is that this starts very slowly, and the horror doesn't really kick in for a while. When it does, it might be a little too horrific for the rest of the tone. 

Other than that, this was pretty good - Crisafulli seems like the kind of indie horror (-comedy?) protagonist we've seen played by Anton Yelchin or Daniel Radcliffe. 

Gothika (2003) has a different tone. It starts with Dr. Halle Berry interviewing Penelope Cruz in a psychiatric prison about a murder she committed, possibly in response to a rape - but she can't tell anything about the rape without going off the rails. 

Berry meets up with Charles S. Dutton, the head of the institute and her husband, along with Robert Downey Jr, another doc who seems to be interested in Berry. Her husband heads home, and she follows a little while later. Downey follows her car a little ways because it's storming and he's a little too involved with her.

On her way home the sheriff tells her a bridge is washed out and directs her to detour. There, she sees a girl in the road, and when she gets out to help, she blacks out.

She wakes up in a cell in the very institute she used to work in. Downey comes in to tell her that she has been unresponsive for days, and that her husband is dead. And it looks like she killed him.

This is a great setup: A psychiatrist imprisoned in her own asylum, accused of murdering the man she loves, her only source of aid is the man who seems to be infatuated with her. There are a few more twists to come, but I think the first two-thirds are better. All throughout, she is plagued by visions of the girl from the road, as well as memories of blood and the words "Not Alone".

So an indie comedy horror and an asylum "gothic". In both cases, the protagonist may be threatened, may be hallucinating, or maybe both. I found both to be only fair, from a film point of view. Ms. Spenser found them both poor from a horror point of view - Tall Men for the too-real horror in the background, Gothika for the too-unreal underlying crimes. I'm not doing great at horror this Octo-boo.

The Day of the Hour

As I mentioned, I have never seen the OG The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). We have corrected that oversight. 

A UFO disturbs the world, then sets down on the Mall in Washington D.C. From the saucer emerges a giant robot and a man, Michael Rennie as Klaatu. He tries to tell the soldiers that surround the saucer about his mission, but is shot by one of them and taken to Walter Reed.

He is met in the hospital by a representative of the President, and says that he has a message to deliver to all the leaders of Earth at the same time. Since neither the US nor Russia will allow the meeting to be held on any ground but theirs, Rennie is stymied. He sneaks out of the hospital to go live among the common people.

In the boarding house where he ends up, he meets a widow, Patricia Neal, and her young son. To allow Neal to go on a date, Rennie volunteers to take the boy for a day. They have a nice outing, and wind up visiting the smartest man in the world. The boy knows about him, because his mother works as a secretary nearby. The smart man isn't in, but Rennie strolls in and fixes some equations on his blackboard.

That night, the genius, played by Sam Jaffe!, invites him back, and they set up a plan to get the world's attention. In a few days time, Klaatu will make all powered machinery stop operating for one hour. That's the hour the Earth stood still.

I liked this a little more than the remake. Although Keanu made an unearthly alien humanoid, Michael Rennie also had a dignified air of otherworldliness. Sam Jaffe made a great Smartest Man in the World - I guess an Einstein figure? Or some other public intellectual? The whole "living among the Earthlings" section was pulled off better here. And we got a better Klaatu Barada Nicto - it was the phrase Neal was to use if Rennie gets shot. It prevents Gort from destroying Earth, and signals for him to get Klaatu and revive him. Pretty important. 

Studying the Blade

We're kicking off Spooktober - our first scary movie is Blade (1998). There are two sequels and a remake coming, so we expect to get a lot out of this. 

It starts with a sexy girl taking a punky guy to a secret dance club, accessed through an abattoir. It's dark, the music is techno, the dancers are sexy, and the guy is a bit lost, but into it. Then blood starts raining from the ceiling, and the dancers grow fangs, and start chewing on his throat. Then appears a dark form in a badass longcoat, leather and armor, sunglasses and a flat-top fade: Wesley Snipes as Blade.

After Blade wipes out most of the vamps, the police come and take one of the survivors, Donal Logue, to the hospital. He recovers and starts to suck the blood from a hemotologist, N'Bushe Wright, but Blade shows up again and scares him off. He takes Wright back to his hideout, where him and his partner, Kris Kristofferson fight vampires. 

Kristofferson is a human, but it turns out that Snipes is a "daywalker", a half-vampire that can withstand sunlight, garlic, etc, but still has the urge to drink blood. He has a serum to suppress it, but it's not working so well. Maybe a hematologist could help?

On the dark side, we find that Logue works for Stephen Dorff, a young vampire who has aspirations to rule the vampire and human worlds. The key is Blade's daywalker blood. 

I'll skip over the plot, which is a little too much for the movie, I think. What we came for was hot techno music, cool martial arts and Wesley Snipes being badass. Although this was a re-watch, I had forgotten Kristofferson being a lovely old curmudgeon. He gets bitten and turned so he has to kill himself. I'd also forgotten Donal Logue (Gotham), who acts as Dorff's sidekick - a goofy Lebowski-esque stoner vampire, who keeps getting his hand cut off. Se we were satisfied. 

My biggest complaint is with the iconic line "Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill." What the hell does that even mean?

Last of the Great Westerns

With Ride Lonesome (1959), we finish the Bud Boetticher/Randolph Scott westerns. We weren't sure if we had already seen it, but Netflix sent it (a surprise from the Wait section), so we watched it.

It starts, as so many of these do, with Scott riding between some big rocks - a familiar location, in Lone Pine, I think. He captures the outlaw James Best, but his gang gets away. Best tells his gang to tell his brother Frank.

Scott and Best arrive at a stage coach stop and find the station man gone, leaving his worried wife Karen Steele to hold down the fort. And so she must do, when Pernell Roberts and his sidekick James Coburn show up, and it looks like they plan to rob the stage. But when the stagecoach arrives, it's filled with dead men - the Apaches got them.

When they Indians arrive, Scott and Steele go out to negotiate. The chief wants to trade the woman for a horse - and it turns out the horse belonged to Steele's husband.

So now we have a pair of badmen, a tribe of hostile Apaches, and a widow, and Scott still has to take Best in for the bounty. By the way, the bad men have heard that the town of Santa Cruz is offering amnesty for all past crimes for anyone who brings Best in, and they want to be the ones to collect.

Also, we know that Best's brother Frank is coming, and he's the real bad-ass. Best is just the kid brother. 

It all ends up by a hanging tree in a dry wash. Spoiler? OK, SPOILER - Frank, Lee van Cleef, killed Scott's wife, and he plans to use Best as bait to flush out van Cleef. 

If you recognize any of the elements to this, like the stagecoach station (Comanche Station), or the hanging tree (Buchanan Rides Alone), the bad guy's dumb sidekick (Tall T), some of the locations, and so forth, I don't think you are imagining it. It makes a good capper to the series. 

Same Old Story

Since we're a big fan of old musicals, we thought we should give the new Spielberg West Side Story (2021) a look. Actually, the old WSS is not one of our faves, but, in this one, at least the Sharks are actually Hispanic (-ish).

It's the old story of the Jets (kids from families who immigrated to New York a few generations ago) and the Sharks (kids from Puerto Rico who recently moved into the neighborhood). They are fighting over the turf which is slated to be torn down to build the Kennedy Center. Tony is Ansel Elgort, an ex-Jet who did time for beating a kid in a rumble. He's trying to keep out of it. He works Rita Moreno, who runs the drugstore that her husband Doc ran in the other movie before he died. 

Maria is Rachel Zegler (Colombian on her mother's side). She lives with her hot-blooded mother and fiery tempered father - they speak a nice mix of Spanish (un-subtitled) and English. Her father wants her to date boring Chino, who wants to be a Shark. 

Tony and Maria meet at the dance. This is the big scene - a long scene with no cuts and a flying, swooping camera. It reminded me of another Spielberg dance sequence, from 1941. Which is my favorite Spielberg on some days.

Somewhat sadly, that is kind of the peak of directorial splendor in the movie. Especially in the last tragic act, where everyone is getting stabbed, the direction seems to get, well, conventional. Nothing special.

And I have to say, that's kind of where we come down on this movie. Some nice touches - the Spanish language, the closer looks at the social context. What came from the original does well - the dances are still very Jerome Robbins, the music is still that Broadway/classical/jazz mix, and the songs are fine (considering I don't especially love either Robbins, Bernstein, or Sondheim). In the end, only Rita Moreno made much of an impact. 

Kid Stuff

I think I'll the next two movies in one post. They aren't really thematically matched, but they were both pretty much mistakes.

First: Tank (1984). This was a "Long Wait" that suddenly showed up. I wanted to see it because it starred James Garner. He plays a Command Sergeant Major - a super-Sarge - moving to a new post with his wife Shirley Jones and son C. Thomas Howell. There is mention of a dead son, and an impending retirement to a fishing boat. There is also a tank that he bought surplus and fixed up as a project with his son.

Garner gets along on base, but the Officer's Club is a noisy disco, and he seeks a quiet place to drink. So he winds up in a townie bar, the kind with some trailers out back for the working girls. He's having a drink with one, just shooting the shit while singing sea shanties. But a deputy sheriff (James Cromwell!) doesn't like him. Since the law runs the hookers in this town, he orders the girl back to work and slaps her. Garner will put up with a lot, but not that. He slaps the deputy to the floor and it is on.

There's a bit of back and forth with the law in town, G.D. Spradlin, trying to get his hands on Garner, and the Army insisting that they have jurisdiction. So Spradlin and Cromwell set up Garner's son of drugs. When he's convicted by Spradlin's brother-in-law the judge, it's time for Chekov's Tank.

The first part of this is actually heavier than you might expect. The low-level misogyny, the violent misogyny, the background racism, the explicit racism against "Jew lawyers", Howell's feelings that he comes second to his dead brother, all pretty upsetting. So it's great to see Garner in his tank with the hooker running down the Sheriff's jail and freeing his son, then heading for the Tennessee line. But maybe not as great as it should be. Also, Shirley Jones gets nothing to work with, and tries too hard to make something of it. Sort of sad.

I queued up Sky High (2005) on. the recommendation of Laird Barron, Ms Spenser's favorite horror writer. But it isn't a horror movie, it's a teen superhero spoof. The setup is: Kurt Russell and Kelly Preston are the biggest superheroes in Superheroville. Their son, Michael Angarano, has no powers, but he can't tell his parents that. He is starting superhero high school, along with his best friend, Danielle Panabaker. She has the minor superpower of controlling plants. The school hovers above the clouds, served by a flying schoolbus.

At the titular Sky High, they fall in with a group of the usual goofballs, but Angarano is attracted by senior Mary Elizabeth Winstead (to Panabaker's distress). They also discover that they will be tested by taskmaster Bruce Campbell (yay!) to determine if their powers are great enough for them to be classed as heroes, or if they will be relegated to the sidekick track. Angarano and most of his goofball friends wind up as sidekicks.

But it turns out that Angarano has an arch-enemy, Warren Peace (Steven Strait, Holden from The Expanse). Strait is the smoldering, leather-jacket-wearing loner with long greasy hair that often threatens the hero in these teen movies, later becoming an ally. But first, he attacks Angarano in the cafeteria, and Angarano finds his powers. 

Now, that Angarano will be in the hero track, will he forget his sidekick friends? Will he drop Panabaker for Winstead? Will Winstead be good for him? And all that stuff. You know the answers - there's even a scene where he makes a date with Panabaker and forgets about it when Winstead offers to spend time with him. Ever seen that before?

Although this isn't all that original, even adding in the superpower stuff, it's all done well enough. The kids are cute, plot is handled competently, and it was a good role for Bruce Campbell. (And Lynda Carter as the principal.) There are also roles for Dave Foley as a forgotten sidekick, and Kevin McDonald as Professor Medulla, with a giant brain. But overall, this just isn't really our thing. 

So, Ms. Spenser enjoyed Sky High and wandered off during Tank. I guess I owe her some good movies.

Klaatu, Barada Say What?

Even though I still haven't seen the original, I felt like watching the Keanu Reeves' The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008).

It really stars Jennifer Connelly as an astrobiologist who is suddenly woken up by the military and hustled off to Manhattan on a secret mission. They ignore her step-son, Jaden Smith (son of deceased husband by his first wife), but fortunately a neighbor is able to take him in. 

The mission turns out to be an asteroid heading directly for Earth, impact in minutes. The asteroid turns out to be a spherical spaceship, which stops at the last instance in the middle of Central Park. A creature comes out, and in a moment of confusion, is shot. A giant robot who accompanies him gets ready to destroy, but the creatures hastily orders him to stand down. This is the "Klaatu barada nicto!" moment, but it is so distorted you can barely hear it. Bummer.

The creature turns out to be a sort of amniotic spacesuit, which falls off and the being inside quickly becomes Keanu Reeves. He explains that he is here to save the Earth from humanity. When the military tries to hold him prisoner, he breaks out and runs for Connelly.

Connelly brings him together with mathematician and philosopher John Cleese, who is able to make a pretty good case for mankind. But little Jaden is pretty P.O.ed with his step-mom, claiming she never wanted to keep him after his dad died. So Reeves picks up quite a bit of negativity too. He has a funny relationship with Reeves. When they are stopped by a cop, Reeves kills him, then resurrects him. Smith is horrified by the murder, but impressed by the resurrection. He seems to want to make Reeves a father figure, but also considers him a murderous alien.

The giant robot, named GORT by the military based on a very clunky acronym, is being held in a sort of missile silo. When he goes active, they try to destroy him, which doesn't work. So he starts his mission. He sort of disintegrates into a swarm of nano-robots and begins destroying all man-made objects.

We watched this on a Friday night in a rather drowsy state. I might not have been maximally attentive, but I did like some of the dreamlike imagery: the looming, red visored GORT, Reeves' intense, yet inhuman acting, the sphere in Central Park, the many nighttime scenes. I'd say we watched it in the best way.

We'll save the original for Spooktober, coming up soon.

Hot Torch

Hot Saturday / Torch Singer (1932) makes a good pre-Code double bill.

Hot Saturday is set in the small California (?) town of Marysville. Nancy Carroll works in the bank, and all the young people like to go up to Willow Springs on Saturday evening for dancing, and maybe some parking. Carroll is sort of going with slick Edward Woods (not the director), although Grady Sutton, the comic relief, does make a play. 

Cary Grant, who is renting a place nearby stops by to cash a big check. He has a chauffeured limo with his high-class mistress in the back, but he makes a big play for Carroll. When she doesn't tumble, he has Woods invited the kids to his place for drinks on Saturday - which will give him some time with Carroll.

On Saturday, he cuts Carroll out of the herd for a long walk and a boat ride on the lake. He is open, honest, and clearly interested. His mistress has left (and Carroll has seen the check he tried to pay her off with), but Carroll still doesn't tumble. She leaves with Woods who also takes her for a boat ride (in a little rowboat), but he gets aggressive, and she has to walk home. She stops at Cary Grant's place, and he sends her home in the limo in the early hours - to the shock of the neighborhood gossips.

In the kitchen, who should she meet but Randolph Scott. He's one of her childhood pals who is now a mining engineer, surveying the area from the old Indian cave. It's pretty clear that he is pleased with the way she's grown up. Her parents were hoping that they would get together and it looks like it will work out.

But the next day, the town is buzzing with the scandal. Carroll is fired, and everyone turns on her. She runs to the Indian cave to find Scott, even though it starts storming. She barely makes it there before passing out from exposure. She comes to with under a blanket with all her clothes driving above the stove. Hm. But it's OK, he proposes and they are going to get married.

But Scott will have to hear the news sometime, and when he does, he calls off the engagement. Want to guess how it is resolved? Here goes: Scott changes his mind and wants to take her back. But Carroll went ahead and slept with Cary Grant that night, and now they are leaving town. They are headed for New York, and who knows what adventures. Whew!

Torch Singer (1933) starts with Claudette Colbert showing up at a Catholic maternity hospital, broke, unmarried and desperate. She has the baby and gets a place with a widowed young Swede - but times are hard, and she has to give the baby up for adoption to the same nuns.

She starts singing torch songs for a living, and does very well for herself. She gets rich and lives a wild drunken lifestyle, although she never forgets her baby. She is particularly nice to a rich, married sponsor, and one day her drunken party drops in on a radio broadcast of a children's show. When the nervous new host chokes on air, Colbert takes over, and is a surprise hit. So she's hired for the gig, and eventually starts to use it to try to find her baby. All she knows is a first name and a birthday. But it's a dead end - the first child she finds is black (this is not played for laughs - she is disappointed, but also sweet and compassionate). 

But she does find the kid's father - a rich playboy who headed for China on business before he realized that his one-night stand produced an heir. He wants to be re-united, but she is not having it. She's happy with her lifestyle and her manager, Ricardo Cortez. Want to guess how this one comes out?

She finds her daughter, and she's been adopted by the playboy. He makes a deal: Colbert can marry him and get the kid - she won't have to give up her life as a singer, she doesn't even have to love him. But they will be married snd raise the kid together. A cold but happy ending.

This movie has a lot of fun with the wild parties and a few songs. Colbert sings Give Me Liberty or Give Me Love, which I knew from Janet Klein's recording. Hot Saturday has some good parties, too, and some star power, with roommates Grant and Scott playing off against each other. But Grady Sutton is my favorite part.

Mental

Since we are pretty big fans of Alex Garland, we were pretty excited about his new horror film Men (2022).

It starts with Jessie Buckley witnessing the suicide of her husband (Paapa Essiedu), plummeting past her window to his death. She is now heading to an English country house for some quiet healing time alone. The owner, Rory Kinnear, seems nice enough, although he is about awkward enquiring about Buckley's marital status. She tells a friend on the phone that he's a very particular type of Southern man. Still, the place is beautiful, in a peaceful wooded setting, and she is set to enjoy it.

She walks through the woods, enjoying the natural environment, and comes on an old railway tunnel. As she harmonizes with the echoes, she sees a figure at the far end - a figure that screams and charges at her. She runs away, gets lost, and comes out by some deserted outbuildings. As she takes a cellphone photo, she notices a naked man staring at her. She rushed home.

She is telling her friend about this when we see the naked man (played by Kinnear), covered in cuts walking around the yard. When she finally notices, she calls the police. They take him away, assuring her that he's probably just a harmless homeless man. (One of the police looks a lot like the landlord - played by Kinnear). 

She stops into the church, which is decorated with the Green Man (man with leaves for a face) and Sheela na gig (a naked woman spreading her vulva with both hands). She screams out her sorrow and frustration, remembering her husband's death. Outside, she meets a creepy child in a Marilyn mask, and the priest (both looking like Kinnear). The priest counsels her, but begins to blame her for her husband's suicide. She angrily leaves and heads for the pub. She meets Kinnear (her landlord) there, as well as the policeman (Kinnear), who tells her they let the naked man go - no real charge to keep him. 

Back at the house, she calls her friend to say she's going back to London, but her friend says she'll drive down and join her. Then all hell breaks loose.

The naked man is back - he's locked out but he's grabbing through the mailslot. She stab him through the wrist, pinning him in place, but he slowly pulls his hand back, letting the knife split his hand. We note here that her husband landed with his hand impaled on a fence spike when he killed himself. Then it gets weirder.

The ending scenes are so surreal that you can't really explain them - mystic occurrence, mental breakdown, self-assertion, homicidal mania? You choose, or don't, just accept it as horror.

I guess you can take this as a warning. The first part has an almost simple combination of sorrow, guilt, and the healing beauty of nature, along with a creeping dread of, particularly, men. Then it becomes something different and more mad. Some people don't seem to like the second part. I don't see how he could have gone in any other way. 

Take Care TCB

I mainly wanted to watch Respect (2021) to hear Jennifer Hudson do Aretha Franklin.

It starts with Aretha as a little girl. Her father, Forest Whitaker, is throwing a party, and he wakes her up to come down and sing for the people. Although he's a minister, this is a hot party, with dancing, drinking, some gay hand-holding, Dinah Washington (Mary J. Blige), etc. And the song she sings isn't a gospel tune, but a hoochy number. 

We also see her at her mother, estranged from her dad. With her mom, she does sing gospel - and also gets the warning that she doesn't have to do whatever her father tells her, even if she loves to sing. But her mom soon dies in a car crash, and Aretha goes silent. She is also molested by someone from one of her dad's parties, and refuses to name the man. But she does start singing again in church.

Then we have grown up Aretha, meeting a dangerous man - Marlon Wayans as a manager. To keep her away from him, Whitaker introduces her to producer John Hammond (Tate Donovan). Hammond had discovered everyone from Billy Holliday to Bruce Springsteen, but he was a little square for Aretha. He produced her singing orchestrated jazz standards, and was getting good material, but no hits.

She's now marries to Wayans, and he does at least one good thing - gets her signed with Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron). Wexler took her down to Muscle Shoals, where she and Wayans are surprised to find that the session men are mostly white. We had seen all this in the Muscle Shoals documentary. They even made the motel Aretha was staying at look authentic.

There's a similar thong with Aretha's gospel comeback album, which was made into a documentary. The film looked a lot like that, and Hudson's Amazing Grace was quite amazing. They left out the Rolling Stones standing in the back, though.

The story has its ups and down - a lot of Aretha's life was good, but she did not live a trouble-free life. Hudson plays her a little close to the vest, as if her childhood silence infected the rest of her life. But there are two things about Aretha that the movie gets right: Her insistence on respect and living her life her own way, and her transcendently beautiful singing. Hudson seems to be capable of handling that as well.

Family Ties

I think the reason I never saw Family Plot (1976) is that I had it mixed up with The Trouble with Harry. I've figured it out now.

FP starts with two separate threads. In one, we meet Barbara Harris as a medium, doing a reading for a rich old lady. Said lady is tortured by the ghost of her sister, who had a child out of wedlock. The old lady had forced her to give the kid up at birth and knows nothing about him - not even a name. She wants Harris to find the kid and bring him into the family to let her sister find peace. Harris sets her boyfriend, taxi-driver Bruce Dern to find the kid. I was very surprised that they never considered trying to pass him off as the heir.

in parallel with this, a tall mysterious blonde is negotiating with the law for the return of a kidnapped bishop in exchange for a huge diamond. The exchange goes off smoothly, and she is picked up by her boyfriend, William Devane - who looks like Robert Goulet playing Gomez Adamms. She strips off the blonde wig and high shoes, and she is Karen Black.

To cut to the chase (there isn't really a chase scene, by the way), Dern slowly uncovers that Devane is the heir. Devane thinks he is being traced because of his criminal activities, not realizing that he could inherit millions. Instead, he tries to kill Dern and Harris. 

This is more of a comedy than Hitchcock usually goes for, with Dern exasperated by Harris' schemes and super-criminals Devane and Black brought down more or less by mistake. It kind of rambles, with the whole missing heir theme mostly forgotten by the last act. But it keeps moving and is always fun. 

This was Hitchcock's last movie, but far from the last one we haven't seen. Plenty more fun to be had.

Heat and Serve

First, sorry for the long delay - I was on vacation, and was surprised that I didn't feel like spending the day blogging. Anyway, there was only one movie in my writing queue: The Heat (2013), the Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy buddy cop movie.

We meet FBI agent Bullock in a bust going wrong. A dozen agents search the place and find nothing. Bullock showily finds both the big bag of pot and all the hidden guns, making the agents and particularly the drug dog hang their heads. 

Instead of getting her a promotion, her boss tells her that everyone hates working with her because she's a show-off and know-it-all. He wants her to go to Boston to find a notorious dealer who no one has ever seen and who kills everyone who gets close in horrible ways.

Meanwhile, McCarthy is a Boston plainclothes cop staking out a street corner. When a john stops to pick up a girl, she busts him and calls his wife, just to mess with him. On the way downtown, she notices a kid (pimp?), gives him a hard time, notices his joint and off they go. Now right here, I have to say that the image of a white police woman chasing a black teen with a car is more appalling than funny - so not a good start.

Any way, the kid gets put into jail and Bullock shows up and starts interrogating him. When McCarthy comes in and wants to know why someone is questioning her guy, you just know that Bullock and McCarthy will be forced to team up, will fight, and will finally learn to trust and respect each other. Because it's that kind of movie.

Basically, it's every mismatched buddy cop movie, except with women. Bullock plays her old role from Miss Congeniality - the stuck-up, by the books agent who has to learn to be more human. McCarthy plays her standard role of a rough-hewn slob. She is shocked when she sees that the windows in Bullock's apartment have those, what do you call 'em, window blankets. At least the joke isn't that she's a nice lady who says "fuck" a lot.

But honestly, this isn't a bad movie. There are some funny jokes - McCarthy's Boston family wants to know if Bullock is a "nawk", and she can't figure out they mean "narc".  The two characters are well drawn (if sort of off-the-shelf) and the actresses know how to handle them. Not a great movie, but I didn't mind watching it. 

Romancing the City

The Lost City (2022) looked like a lot of fun - just like Romancing the Stone was. 

We meet romance author Sandra Bullock moping around her apartment, mourning her dead archeologist husband, trying to finish her latest. Her editor, Da'Vine Joy Randolph keeps bugging her, reminding her that they need the book because there's a big tour planned. So she just sort of types: "They kissed. The End."

Later, at a Romance Con, Bullock is forced into a purple sequined jumpsuit and thrust on stage for an interview with her cover model, Channing Tatum. Tatum is completely gung-ho about the series "he" (the character who he plays on the book covers) co-stars in and the genius of Bullock. She, on the other hand, is dismissive of him, her works, the whole scene. She finally gets offstage, goes outside and is kidnapped and brought to the island of the McGuffin.

Her abductor turns out to be billionaire Daniel Radcliffe, who wants her help finding a historic McGuffin on the lost city in her book. She claims it's fictional, but he knows she borrowed the story from her dead husband's research. 

Meanwhile, Tatum and Randolph suspect foul play. Tatum met a guy at a meditation retreat who handles this kind of situation. He's a physical trainer named Trainer, and he's played by Brad Pitt. They follow her cell phone signal to the island. Pitt is a shrewd tough ex-SEAL, and Tatum is tagging along because he thinks he is, too - although he knows deep down he only plays one on romance novel covers.

So we have Bullock. still in her sequined jumpsuit, tied to a chair. She gets rescued, but they don't have time to untie her, so they load her in a wheelbarrow. And the chase is on.

This is a silly movie and, to me, a lot of fun. Of course, the best parts are the cast: America's sweetheart Sandra Bullock, Tatum, America's favorite male stripper (or is that McConaughey? Haven't seen it), Brad Pitt in a small role, and Da'Vine Joy Randolph in full kick-ass mode. Special props to Radcliffe, (Switzerland's favorite corpse?) as villain, a role he excels in. The writing is fine, and in some places, hilarious. I have no problem with it ripping off Romancing the Stone - I want more movies like that. Romance, action, comedy - what's not to like?

Modern Times

So, the wife was out for a Fri evening, so it's a Guy's Movie Night! Something she'd never watch in a million years: a 2-hour-plus midcentury semi-musical: Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967).

Julie Andrews is Millie. We are introduced to her as a sensible turn-of-the-century woman, with a full dress, long curls and a sensible hat. In a montage on the streets of New York, we see her get her hair bobbed, get a short skirt, a cloche hat, and finally, a long string of flapper beads. Next we meet Mary Tyler Moore as Miss Dorothy, a sheltered, spoiled, and oblivious orphan girl from California. Their rooms are across from each other in a women-only hotel. The proprietress is a moral old woman played by Beatrice Lillie. We know a secret about her - she and her Chinese laundrymen are kidnapping her guests and selling them into "white slavery". She has her eyes on Moore.

Andrews has a plan in life - she is going to be a Modern Girl, have loose morals, make out in the rumble seat of roadster, and marry her rich boss. She just has to find a job with a single boss. In the meantime, she meets James Fox, a devil-may-care paperclip salesman, at a dance. He charms her by creating a new dance craze, the Tapioca.

I'm afraid this big dance number is atrocious - I suppose it is intended to be. The movie isn't quite a musical, but it does have several musical and dance numbers. My favorites, however, are the ones that just sort of slip in, with Andrews and Moore just breaking out in a few simple steps. The elevator in the hotel won't work unless you bang on the walls and stomp on the floor, so they always do a little dance number to get it to go. These aren't big production numbers, just some accomplished hoofers doing their thing.

Andrews does get a single boss, impossibly handsome John Gavin. But she is being chased by Fox, who has a boss who lends him cars and even an airplane. He takes Andrews and Moore to a party at a palatial estate in Connecticut. It's owned by Carol Channing. It's a swell party, but Andrews sees him sneaking Moore into his room and is disillusioned.

But she can't seem to get Gavin to tumble for her. He is strictly business - nicknames her "John" because she's one of the boys. Worse, he falls for Moore. Will Millie find love with a rich man? Will Miss Dorothy be abducted by the Chinese? And what of Carol Channing?

She's my favorite part - a real 1920's cartoon character, with a couple of great numbers including the suggestive Jazz Baby. The next best number is a Jewish wedding party (Trinkt Le Chaim), with a surprising klezmer twist. No idea how it got in this movie. 

This is a long movie, and really isn't great. But there's at least a bit of bouncy fun in some of the dances. And at least Ms. Spenser didn't have to sit through it.