Little Man

I had watched The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997) a while ago, maybe even on VHS. Had a hard time finding it again, so when it turned up on streaming, I queued it right up. Never mind what streaming service, it will be here today, gone tomorrow.

Bill Murray plays a chatty, clueless loser type visiting London for the first time. He is makihg a surprise visit on his birthday to his brother, Peter Gallagher. Gallagher is a yuppie ex-pat executive at an international company, nervously getting ready for an important business dinner with some Germans. He is not open to entertaining his brother for his birthday. So he gets him tickets to Theater of Life, a theater game where you play a secret agent in the streets of London. 

They go to a phone booth to get instructions, but - you guessed it - some real secret agents call him. They think they are talking to assassin "Spencer", and give him an address. He thinks they are assigning him a code name and telling him where to go to start the game. And we're off.

The assignment is to kill Joanne Whalley, an escort who has got some incriminating letters. Since he thinks he's doing improv, he quickly gets the drop on her, but when she decides to seduce him, they team up. He's soon having the time of his life. Between his clumsiness and clueless/fearlessness, he is invincible.

This is the second movie made in 1997 with this premise - but I've never seen David Fincher's The Game. There are problably a bunch more - like Game Night. But this was just spot-on perfection, mostly due to Bill Murray. There's some clever writing, like a Murray and his brother planning to enjoy some Ambassador cigars, which is heard as "light up the ambassadors". But it's mostly in the way he plays it, his whole Bill-Murray-ishness. Always clueless, but game for whatever comes his way. 

Maybe it's partly nostalgia - Murray's schtick has gotten a little old by now. But I had a great time re-watching this. 

Save the Last Dance

I enjoy the We Hate Movies podcast, although I don't always take their advice. For instance, in an "On Screen Live" YouTube episode, they talked quite a bit about Venom: The Last Dance (2024). Their conclusion: It's barely a movie, and you should avoid it. But guess what?

It starts rather incoherently: Tom Hardy and the Venom symbiote are stuck in an alternate Earth by Dr. Strange (did this happen at the end of Venom 2? Can't be bothered to check). Specifically, in a Mexican bar, where they are getting smashed to "Tequila". But some random creep played by Andy Serkis in a monster dimension gives us some exposition about destroying all symbiotes and ... We weren't paying attention. But somehow, they open a portal, and we're back in our usual dimension.

They head for New York to clear their names for crimes committed in Venom 2 (I guess), but are forced off of the plane they are attached to the outside of by a creature from the monster dimension, and land in Nevada. It turns out that Area 51 is being closed down, but not the secret lab deep beneath it. This lab, run by Chiwetel Ejiofor and scientist Juno Temple, has been studying symbiotes, and has several in containment. They are trying to give some hosts, but the hosts keep dying in agony. Oh well, science, I guess.

Hardy gets picked up by a hippie family in a VW bus. The dad, Rhys Ifans, is a saucer nut, and wants to see Area 51 before it's gone. His wife is into it, his young son and teen daughter less so, but surprisingly cheerful. 

They stop in Vegas on the way, and Venom figures he'll rich on the slots, but loses everything instead. But they meet Peggy Lu, the convenience store owner from the previous movies (and Across the Spider-Verse). She has won big, gotten a make-over and penthouse suite. Her and Venom have a disco dance number (when did they have time to rehearse?). 

Then it's off to Area 51, where we get some big battles. The trapped symbiotes get released, and bond with some of the scientists (by the way, are these scientists evil, misguided or just dumb?). Even Ifans gets some action in.

I wouldn't say this was a great movie. I think it worked better than Carnage, even though it was a lot shaggier. I think I preferred the lack of serious villains to the attempts at villains in Carnage. Anyway, we sort of enjoyed this, without paying too much attention. And if I left anything out of this review, it's because I wasn't paying attention. 

Aliens Redux

After Ms. Spenser watched it on an airplane, we decided to watch Alien: Romulus (2024) at home. I thought it was a perfect distillation of Alien, Aliens and Alien 3 (didn't I blog this one?). Ms. Spenser decided it was a stale rehash. 

It starts with an expedition finding the wreck of the Nostromo and salvaging an odd black cocoon (with something Xeno-shaped within). Then we go a dark and dismal colony planet. Teen (young adult?) Callee Spaeny is trying to get a transfer to nicer planet, but instead gets her contract extended. Her best friend is a stuttering, autistic-seeming android, played by David Jonsson. He was altered by her dead father so that his prime directive is to do what is best for Spaeny. 

Some of Spaeny's young friends have a plan to get to a better planer: Highjack a ship, then go to the derelict space station to pick up some cryo-sleep pods, and head out. Soon they are stuck on the station with a Xenomorph or two. (BTW, the station has two sides, Romulus and Remus. This may have meant something, or just been a cool name.)

Director Fede Alvarez and writing partner Rodo Sayagues took a lot of what's best from the earlier entries. For ex, the colony world from Aliens. The station had a nice throwback look (CRT monitors - well, maybe the colony didn't have the resources to do flat or holograph screens), but mainly it got the haunted feeling of the original. There were plot points, like someone being quarantined because they'd been face hugged, which is the right thing to do, but some people don't get it. 

Like I  said, I liked how true to the vision this was, and Ms. Spenser thought it was too derivative. On the other hand, I didn't feel like it was the greatest of all Alien movies, and Ms. Spenser enjoyed it for what it was. I'm not sure this is one of those retro-sequels, where the key is nostalgia, but it might be.

Go Your Own Way

Before Rumours (2024), I had watched exactly one Guy Maddin movie, and thought I had him figured out. Rumours is completely different, but I didn't have to change my opinion at all.

The movie takes place at a G7 summit in Germany, hosted by Cate Blanchett, chancellor of Germany. The final dinner will be held in a pavilion in a park, with just the seven leaders. On the walk to the pavilion, they stop to see an archeological dig, where several Bog Men are being excavated - ancient corpses. perfectly preserved in the mud of a marsh, except their bones are dissolved. Most of the leaders are not impressed.

We also see that Roy Dupuis, PM of Canada, has had a fling with Nikki Amuka-Bird, PM of the UK. He's a young, handsome man with a man bun, interested in renewing the fling, while she wants to keep it professional between them now. But Blanchett seems to be interested.

At the dinner, the leaders try to work out a short joint statement on the summit. Their efforts are not very inspiring. Charles Dance, president of the USA, falls asleep. Dupuis keeps storming off - and hears strange sounds. Blanchett follows him, and, yep, they get it on.

But when they return, they notice that the waiters have disappeared. And there cel phones don't work (except the Italian PM, he didn't bring his). It's getting dark. Dupuis wanders off and finds a brain the size of a small car. Bog men are seen lurking in the shadows. Bog men are doing something freaky in the shadows. And so on. 

There are a couple of comic themes to this. The most obvious is how helpless our leaders are without their aides and servants. But Maddin doesn't really lean on this. He's more interested in how taken up by anodyne, pointless "joint statements". There's a lovely scene where one of the leaders is musing about the first G7 joint statement. He starts to recite it from memory and the whole group joins in. And it's the most boring, meaningless load of BS you've ever heard. 

Of course, Maddin also has to focus on Canadianness (Canadianity?). His Canadian is sexy, brooding, handsome, and in the end, puts together a stirring (boring) statement, and saves the day (?). In fact, I think the biggest joke of the movie is that leaders are people, with romantic entanglements, weaknesses, petty grudges and so forth. Actually, it's a joke on us all. 

The Gorge (Obscured by Clouds)

We recently bought an Apple TV box. It came with a three-month free subscription to Apple TV+, so we figured we should try it out. The Gorge (2025) had just come out, and we felt like some dumb direct-to-streaming action, so we tried it out. 

It starts with Anya Taylor-Joy hiding in a cave in a cliff, and then performing a long-range assassination. She is a Lithuanian working for the Russians, with a terminally ill father. She is going on a year-long mission, he plans to kill himself on Valentine's Day. We then meet Miles Teller, a mercenary whose nightmares keep him from sleeping. 

Teller is "private security", a mercenary and sniper. Sigourney Weaver, a shadowy high-level intelligence operative, recruits him for a year-long mission, the details of which she will not divulge.

The mission turns out to be manning one of two watchtowers, one on either side of the titular gorge. The sides are steep and the bottom is perpetually hidden by fog. His predecessor gives him a 2-minute briefing and takes off. He soon realizes that the watchtower on the other side is manned by Taylor-Joy. 

Teller is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, Taylor-Joy more of a good-time girl. She starts writing signs for him to read through his spotting scope. He tells her they aren't supposed to communicate. Then one day, Taylor-Joy's birthday, he finds out what they are watching for, when  horde of demon zombies come crawling up the walls of the gorge.

They use their automated weapons and sharpshooting skills to repel the attack, and enjoy the thrill of victory. Taylor-Joy calls it her best birthday ever. 

They continue to converse at long distance, until Valentine's Day. Teller wants to comfort Taylor-Joy, and actually ziplines across the gorge. They have a tender few days together, then he has to head back to check in. But the line breaks and he falls into the gorge - with a parachute, thank God. Taylor-Joy armors up and jumps after him.

So up to now, we have had a romantic military spy thriller, with a touch of SF. Once they get down in the gorge, it becomes a monster horror movie. This part is fun too, especially because our two stars get to work together. But it is kind of a jarring shift in tone.

Fortunately, we liked both tones, and were able to hang with the transition. I particularly love Anya Taylor-Joy (as I have mentioned a few times, I think). Miles Teller is a little harder to warm up to. Maybe I just hate him for that weak Reed Richards turn. Of course, Weaver as the villain of the piece was great, if short. 

I think this was a cut above the usual dumb action movies coming out lately. Maybe either half could have been a standard issue direct-to-streamer, but put them together, and add Anya Taylor-Joy, and you've got something. 

First and Last

I think I heard about Last and First Men (2020) on a random film podcast. Someone mentioned it in passing (Josh Olson?) on some random podcast and I was intrigued. Short summary: Voice-over narration based on the Olaf Stapledon story accompanied by slow, black and white shots of Soviet brutalist monuments. Directed and scored by Johann Johannsson.

And that's really almost all I can say about it. The story is told by Tilda Swinton, as a transmission from millions of years in the future, telling a little about the future history of the world, and the comping apocalypse (for them). The visuals are grainy, 16-mm slow pans of concrete sculptures and buildings from the Soviet era. Some could be stills, except for clouds moving in the background. There are no humans, few animals, not even many plants. Mostly concrete and sky. 

The music is very Johannsson: atonal, eerie, organic. It ties the whole thing together. 

I haven't read any Stapledon since maybe high school, but remembered his stories as very cosmic in theme, while down to earth in prose. It was well suited for this kind of meditation. I liked watching this a lot, although I treated it as more of a music video than a story

Twice the Action

I picked out a few mindless action movies with low expectations: The Killer’s Game (2024) and Hidden Strike (2023). I wasn't disappointed.

The Killer's Game stars Dave Bautista as the titular killer. His assignment is to kill someone at a modern dance performance at the Budapest Opera House. Very swank. He makes the kill, and takes a moment to observe the main dancer on stage, Sophia Boutella. When security starts shooting up the place, she hurts her ankle. So in the confusion, he picks her up and carries her outside. They have an instant attraction, but he is struck by a blinding headache, and runs off. 

But he tracks her down later to return her phone, and they start a cute courtship. He is very hesitant and shy, because of his work, and she thinks he's charming. But he goes to the doctor, and discovers that he has Creutzfeldt-Jakobs, and will soon be incapacitated, then dead.

Now around here, I got really excited. First, when he first went to the doc, the doc mentioned his scars and injuries, calling them his "resume", and cautioned him about CTE. In real life, Bautista is trying to move out of action movies and into more human roles, losing a lot of weight. Then he is talking to Boutella about her ankle and they start comparing injuries. So there is a fighting/dancing analogy being. I would like to see dance choreography treated like fight choreography in movies, bringing the excitement and skill without so much violence. I couldn't wait to see how this played out.

I knew the next part from the basic plot summary: He decides to put a contract out on himself, so he wouldn't go through the dementia stages of CJD. He goes to his handler, Ben Kingsley. For some reason, Kingsley is sort of playing his character, the Rabbi, from Lucky Number Slevin. He refuses to kill Bautista, who is like a son to him. So he goes to Pom Klementieff, a Korean mobster whose father was killed by Bautista. She'll take the job, and starts sending killer after him. 

And as you might have guessed, he was misdiagnosed. He does not have CJD, maybe it's just stress? I feel like this is a common movie plot, but can't place it. 

So I'm all psyched for a movie about moving out of a violent profession due to wear and tear, relating it to Bautista's real life aspirations, including some relationship between dancing and fighting. Instead, we get a ridiculous succession of themed assassins trying to kill Bautista and failing. They include a flamenco fighter, two stripper fighters, two violent Scotsmen, moto-cross killers, a gang of Korean pop-star types, with Terry Crews hanging back, waiting for the fee to go up. It was fun and silly, and very much not what I was hoping for. Still thought it was great.

Hidden Strike also starred and ex-wrestler, Jobn Cena, as well as Jackie Chan. It's set in the near future, during the oil wars. In an unnamed Middle Eastern country, rebels are besieging an oil refinery. Jackie Chan's security team is called in to extract them (including his estranged daughter). Meanwhile, John Cena is a mercenary, semi-retired, heading up an orphanage for the kids whose parents died in the wars. His brother convinces him to do One Last Mission to get money for the villagers' water. 

It turns out more or less that Cena's brother is on the team attacking the refinery. Or maybe not - there seem to be many groups at play. Anyway, Cena and Jackie first fight, then join together to save the hostages and the village. 

There's some cute interplay between Cena and Chan, and Chan can still bring it both in the back-talk and fighting. There's one set piece where Chan is fighting the bad guy in a factory with a fire suppressant cannon. A good Chan fight always manages to use all the possibilities of a prop or setting, and this was a good one. There are also several bus fights, a trope I enjoy. But overall, this was a mess. I think the hand of the Chinese government is way too prominent, so the dramatic beats are all undercut by propaganda beats. 

Still, I didn't expect much and wasn't disappointed. I got more than I needed from one movie, and about what I expected from the other.  

Passionless

I'll try to keep this short: After sound came to motion pictures, silent stars like Buster Keaton were considered a problem. Could they be make money in a talkie world? One solution was to pair them with younger, more verbal comics. In Buster's case, this was Jimmy Durante. Hence, The Passionate Plumber (1932).

Quick summary: Parisian Irene Purcell has a married lover, Gilbert Roland. She wants to break off with him, she wants to keep him, she wants to make him jealous. She also has some plumbing problems, so she sends her chauffeur, Jimmy Durante to fetch plumber Buster Keaton. When Keaton shows up at Purcell's place at the same time as Roland, she pretends that Keaton is her suitor. And the merry mixups ensue.

One of these mixups is that Keaton is really an inventor who has added a flashlight to a pistol as an early laser sight. He hopes to sell this idea to the French army, but every time he gets close to a general, he pulls the gun and is assumed to be an assassin. Plus, he gets into duels with everyone he meets, like Homer Simpson with the glove slaps. 

Keaton does get a little bit of physical comedy here and there, although I didn't see any daring stunts. Durante gets to do a little of his patented malapropism, and also some romance with the maid (Polly Moran). But neither is served well by the movie, and don't work especially well against each other. 

Amazingly, MGM made three movies pairing Keaton and Durante (the others were What, No Beer and Speak Easily - ironic, since these movies drove Keaton to alcoholism). Durante went on to become whatever he became (respected comic relief?), and Keaton never recovered until the 60s, when he was slowly re-discovered. 

Oh, well, we still have the silents.

The Last Dance

I finally got around to watching A.K.A. Doc Pomus (2012), and I'm so glad I did. Note that this wasn't a library DVD, but a Hoopla stream - Hoopla is a library of movies, books, and comics, available through many public libraries. 

If you don't know Doc, he is most famous (maybe) for writing Save the Last Dance For Me. Or maybe Viva Las Vegas, This Magic Moment, or Teenager Love. Or maybe he's famous for having written (with collaborators) just so many great rock songs. But he was born Jerome Felder, a Jewish boy in Brooklyn. He was a happy, athletic kid, until age 8, when he contracted polio. After a long convalescence, he wound up on crutches. 

But as a teenager, he discovered the blues. He started hanging around the clubs of New York. Since he was young, he didn't drink, and one manager tried to throw him out. So he said he was a performer, and got on stage and sung a song. He went over so well that this became his career. Imagine how good an underaged, short, crippled Jewish kid had to be to make it in the New York blues scene. He changed his name to Doc Pomus, because it sounded good.

Then Lieber and Stoller rewrote one of his songs, Young Blood, for the Coasters, and he became a songwriter. He was one of the kings of the Brill Building, writing songs for anyone who wanted them, usually with his collaborator Mort Shuman.

Although he spent a few years married in the suburbs, he had a hard time commuting, so he got a room at a hotel next to the Brill Building. He used to hold court in the lobby with musicians and songwriters, but also hookers, gamblers, addicts, and almost anyone with a story to tell. 

When the Beatles made it normal for bands to write their own songs, the Brill Building system broke down. He had ups and downs. For a few years, his source of income were the poker games he held in his room. He met with, wrote for, and mentored a bunch of people, including Willy Deville, Dr John, and B.B. King. He gave songwriting classes for upcoming writers like Shawn Colvin - and with the women there is a hint of some physical stuff. Apparently an older, overweight, disabled man could be pretty sexy. Someone described him as encompassing the two poles of Genius and Cool.

It's an amazing documentary, including not just his musical world, but also his family, his ex-wife and children, his sister and others, who seemed very down-to-earth Jewish Brooklyn. It's a great snapshot of a few eras of New York and popular music. And the stories!

No Dark Sarcasm

Pink Floyd fans come in two varieties: Those who like the more psychedelic sound, before Dark Side of the Moon, and the those who prefer the more accessible after. I am of the first group. Since The Wall is post Dark Side, I was not a great fan, and I have never seen Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982). Until now.

It's a surreal story about a rock star called Pink, played by rock star Bob Geldof. It starts in the trenches of WWII, where Pink's father is fighting while his wife and son wait for him at home. But he never comes back, leaving Pink confused and wishing for a male presence at home. 

At school, the teachers ridicule and bully him, maybe more than the other kids. You know how the song goes, "Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone."

In the present day (I guess), we see Pink as a zoned out, blank young man, staring at Dam Busters on the TV. When he does get on stage (which by the end requires a lot of drugs and the song "Comfortably Numb"). he acts like a dictator at a fascist rally, with the audience throwing salutes and goose-stepping along. 

However, all this isn't presented quite linearly - you get zonked Pink in between scenes of young Pink. There is some animation as well, a lot of it abstract, sexualized flowers. And of course, it's all set to the songs from the album.

In the end, I just wasn't sold on the movie. Alan Parker's direction and cutting was very cool, but I'm not sure the story held together. The war-ruined childhood, the evils of the schools, the entertainer as fascist: these themes didn't hold together as well as I felt they should. And the shellshocked empty-eyed rock star at the heart (?) of it: not very engaging, and also, boo-hoo, the rich and talented are so oppressed. 

Plus, the songs just aren't my favorite Pink Floyd. I guess it's back to Pompei.

Quiet Please

Who would have expected that A Quiet Place: Day One (2024), a prequel to two recent monster/horror movies, would be so poetic? Maybe knowing that it starred Lupita Nyong'o would have been enough of a clue.

It starts with Nyong'o in hospice, with her emotional support cat, dying of cancer. She's depressed and sarcastic, sharing a poem in group therapy about how shitty the hospice is. The only thing keeping her going is transdermal fentanyl. Alex Wolff, who works at the hospice jollies her into coming to a show in nearby New York City. She agrees, if he promises that they can get pizza.

The show turns out to be a puppet show, which actually starts out nice, but gets dark. Nyong'o decides to wait outside, and Wolff shows up to let her know they have to get back to hospice imeediately. She argues, demanding her pizza, but the get everyone into the bus. And then they notice things falling from the sky.

It's the blind monsters from the other movies, showing up for the first time. They start tearing up everything in the city that makes noise (everything). Nyong'o is knocked out, and wakes up back in the theater, now a temporary refuge. Happily, her cat is still with her. So is Wolff, but he makes too much noise, and is killed. She also meets Djimon Hounsou, who we know makes it because he's in A Quiet Place 2. 

The government tells everyone to head for the South Street Seaport to be evacuated by sea - the monsters can swim, and the military have blown up the bridges. But Nyong'o doesn't want to be saved. She wants her pizza in Harlem. So she starts walking north, against the crowds. She picks up a traumatized English law student, Joseph Quinn. Although she tries to get him to join the evacuation, he just keeps tagging along with her - and her cat. 

So a lot of the movie is Nyong'o and Quinn traveling through an apocalyptic New York, in search of pizza. We learn that nyong'o was a poet, and her father played piano in Harlem. After the show, he'd take his daughter for pizza. Hence her quest. She and Quinn don't exactly bond, but they give each other comfort.

But the main thing I took away from the movie was Nyong'o's face, her eyes wide with terror and her hands over her mouth lest she scream. It's very Us. She is amazing in this, sensitive, doomed, in pain, with troubles deeper than the end of the world. Also, her cat, played by two cat actors, not CGI, was great, and she survives. The action scene that cat goes through! Nyong'o famously was afraid of cats and had to work very hard to get comfortable with them. And now she actually has a pet cat.

But I have to say, I sometimes felt like the monsters had a point. Maybe people should be quieter - not torn to pieces if they squeak, but hushed up a little. I can imagine a sequel in the far future, where mankind has become quiet and introspective and learns to live among the monsters. 

Gently Down the Stream

Ophelia (2018) was another library impulse. I didn't expect we'd get around to watching it, but Ms. Spenser wanted me to put it on (because she had to work and didn't want something on that would distract her). It is basically a retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia's viewpoint. 

It starts with Ophelia floating in a lily pond, mimicking the John Everett Millais painting that was on all of our dorm room walls in the Pre-Raphaelite 70s. In voice over, Daisy Ridley lets you know that you may think you know the story, but she wants to tell it her way.

It starts with motherless child Ophelia running around wild in Elsinore, but her father Laertes gets her a post as lady-in-waiting for Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts), to the disgust of the other ladies. She meets Hamlet, and they start getting close, but he has to go back to school. Then the king gets killed, by Claudius (Clive Owen) etc., etc.

The main difference between this and Shakespeare's version (aside from the dialog being modern or a modern paraphrase of Shakespeare)  is the addition of a witch (also played by Naomi Watts). She supplies Gertrude with stay-young potions (or dope, it's hard to tell), and also the poison that killed the king. But she also has one of those looks-like-you're-dead potions. Ophelia takes that and goes swimming, which explains how the movie continues after she should be dead. 

I have to say, I enjoyed this, but mainly for the sumptuous look - beautiful people in fancy clothes in classy castles is hard to beat. So as not to disturb Ms. Spenser, I kept the sound down low, so I missed a lot of the dialog. I don't think that was a problem. 

Wally World

Here's another Well Go special: Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024). We saw the preview in front of another movie, and it looked fine, so I gave it a spin (you probably guessed that Ms. Spenser worked through it).

It stars Raymond Lam, a poor refugee from the mainland in 1980s Hong Kong. He has a fight in an underground fight club to earn money for an ID card. When he wins, he goes to triad boss Sammo Hung. Hunng invites him to join the triad, but he just wants the money. When Hung cons him, he grabs a duffel bag from Hung's HQ and takes off, goons in pursuit. He ducks into the Kowloon Walled City, outside Hung's jurisdiction. 

The Walled City was a real place - a square block where police wouldn't go, or building inspectors, or pretty much anyone who isn't crooked. It's claustrophobic and crazy, with walls, floors and roofs built and demolished any which way. But Lam finds the people there are kind, willing to give him a meal and a job. He also finds that the duffel bag is just drugs, not money like he'd hoped. 

He meets the informal ruler of the Walled City, Louis Koo. He's a barber, a martial arts master, a criminal and a benevolent dictator. When he fights Lam, he knocks him to the floor, kicks him into the air around head height, then socks him across the room. 

Here's the odd thing about the movie. Parts are modern one-man-army fights, sort of like John Wick. Some are over the top comic style wirework fights. One character has spirit powers, so his skin can't be pierces. Then there's a scene where a pimp beats his drug addicted woman, and is later beaten by the rest of the gang for beating a woman. And that second part is played for laughs. 

The movie definitely has some great fights, in several different levels of realism. It also has a lot of well-known faces (although Sammo Hung is the only one I could have named). But the real star of the show is the setting, the chaotic, dystopian, but somehow cozy Kowloon Walled City. It reminded me of the best parts of the 2012 Total Recall - a very, very lived-in universal city. 

Withers with a Glance

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we'd gotten a bunch of DVDs from Movies Unlimited. Another part of our haul is the Hildegarde Withers Mystery Collection. A long time ago, when I was taping (VHS) any old movie from cable, I saw Penguin Pool Murder (1932), and I got real excited when I saw this collection of all six in the series in the catalog. 

Miss Withers is Depression-era New York school teacher, spinster, and amateur sleuth from a mystery series by Stuart Palmer. Her Lestrade is Inspector Oscar Piper, a grumpy, cigar-chewing bachelor and homicide detective.  

Penguin Pool Murders is probably the best, because it includes Miss Withers' school kids. She is played by Edna May Oliver in this and the next two movies. She is taking her class to the New York Aquarium, where they discover a freshly murdered corpse in the penguin pool. Part of the reason I like this is that it shows Miss Withers with her kids, including adorable black and Jewish stereotypes. Anyway, the mystery involves a crooked stock broker (at the start of the Depression), his cheating wife, the boyfriend, a friendly shyster, and a mute purse thief called Chicago Lew.

Oliver plays Withers perfectly. She has necessary plain horse face and the astringent manner necessary to banter with Inspector Piper. Piper is played here, and in all six, by James Gleason (Max Corkle in Here Comes Mr. Jordan). Piper is a short, balding, cigar chewing guy in a bowler hat, so he fits perfectly. The best part is his relationship with Miss Withers. She is a snoop, of course, and loves to solve mysteries - and she lets the Piper know when she thinks the police aren't up to the job. He, of course, resents her interfering in official matters, but doesn't dismiss her help. He's known to say, "That ain't a bad idea, at that," to some of her suggestions. Although he does slip up and say "I solved," when he means, "We".

He even proposes marriage in the last scene, and we see them rushing off the marriage bureau. This is ignored in the next movie, but handled in the books. On the way to get the license, Piper got called into a crime scene, and they just sort of dropped the idea. They are both secretly happy - too set in their ways to change now.

The next two movies are set in Miss Withers' school and Catalina Island. For the fourth, we lose Oliver, and Helen Broderick takes over as Withers. She's a little softer, and even a bit more romantic than Oliver. The final two use ZaSu Pitts, who is a bit more comical, almost dizzy. Neither make a great Hildegarde Withers, but are great to watch anyway.

The movies all have some snappy back and forth between Oscar and Hildegarde, mostly right out of the books (which I also love). The rest of the characters are so typical of the Thirties RKO movies: clever and naive cuties, shady boyfriends, shysters with skinny mustaches, and colorful petty crooks. There's even a couple of cameos for Willie Best, credited as "Sleep 'n' Eat" in one case.

If you like this kind of thing, I'm going to recommend that you dig up the books or the movies and enjiy. 

Attack of the Bikini Ghost

In our quest to watch the worst of the Beach Party movies (that is, all of them), we watched The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966). I guess we figured it used the same green-screen bikini gag as How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, so why not?

It starts with a framing story (added in post). Boris Karloff arises from a coffin, to be told by the much younger Susan Hart that:

1. He's dead.
2. He's not going to heaven unless he can do a good deed in 24 hours. But he can't leave the tomb, so Hart must do the work for him. 

They decide that his good deed will be to make sure that his lawyer, Reginald Ripper (Basil Rathbone) doesn't steal the inheritance, but lets the rightful heirs (people Karloff had cheated while he was alive) get what's coming to them.

The will will be read at midnight, and anyone not present forfeits their share. Rathbone brings in some henchmen to make sure everyone clears out: Jesse White as J. Sinister Hulk, Benny Rubin as the Indian that Buster Keaton usually plays, and his girlfriend, Bobby Shaw. 

The heirs are Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley, two teens destined to become closer, and Patsy Kelly, an older woman who is "with it". In fact, she invites her son, Goo Goo (Aron Kincaid) and a bus full of teen partiers, to hang out at Karloff's spooky mansion. One of the kids in Nancy Sinatra, in. love with Goo Goo. Also, the Bobby Fuller Four is there to give her a backing band. 

Hart shows up now and then as a green-screened presence in a bikini that shows the background through it. She does some kind of mischief that would have happened anyway and doesn't affect much, becasue, like I said, post-production. Since Rathbone's henchmen aren't doing a very good job scaring off anyone, they call in Eric von Zipper and the Rats. 

OK, most of this is just a shitty version of the regular Beach Party movies: Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley as cut-rate Frankie and Annette, Sinatra and Bobby Fuller Four doing less than their best, Buster Keaton missing for the racist comic character. Karloff shoehorned in any old how. BUT! When everyone is gettingready for bed, Kincaid puts on a striped nightshirt. If you've seen the MST3K version of Attack of the Eye Creatures, you remember one of the greasy drifters wearing similar bedwear. So we had a couple of good snickers at that. Then he opens a closet, and out jumps - an Eye Creature! 

So now it's our favorite. 

Squibb, No Squibs

We hadn't heard a bad word about Thelma (2024). Besides, Beekeeper but the old lady does the vengeance sounded like it couldn't miss.

Ninety-three year old theater veteran June Squibb plays Thelma, an independent grandmother living alone in LA. She lives on her own, but her slacker grandson, Fred Hechinger, visits to help out, especially with her computer. One day, she gets a panicked phone call, seemingly from Hechinger, saying he got into an accident and needs money. She is talked into sending $15,000 in cash to an LA address. 

When it turns out that Hechinger is fine, him, Squibb's daughter Parker Posie and her husband Clark Gregg get together with Squibb and advise her to forget it, and worry about whether she needs to be in care.

But she doesn't take their advice, and sets out to track down her money. She doesn't drive, so she starts out walking. She tries calling some friends, but they all are dead. She has lost track of everyone. But she does remember her dead husband's friend Richard Roundtree. He lives in an assisted living facility, and is very happy there - the lunchroom does a nice fruit tray, and he is acting as Daddy Warbucks in their presentation of Annie. He is also very proud of his mobility scooter. 

Which Squibb steals. With him on the back, they are soon tootling through the sleazier side of LA.

When they finds the scammers, it turns out to be Malcolm McDowell and grandson. Her vengeance on them is actually not so terrible. She does hold a gun on them and threaten to cut off McDowell's oxygen assist. She also tells him he's a terrible liar and could never be an actor. And she leaves him $500 just to be nice. 

She also needs her grandson's help to get the money back, because it's in a computer banking system. And so she admits she needs help from others, including Roundtree. And everyone goes to see his Daddy Warbucks.

The movie is directed and written by Josh Margolin in his first feature. He based it on his own grandmother, Thelma, who almost was scammed the same way. The movie has some well observed and played bits about the life of the very senior, especially with Squibb and Roundtree being the central characters. It was also Roundtree's final film, and he died before it was released.

But I'm afraid we were only mildly amused. It had plenty of laughs, but it was far less off the wall than Beekeeper, for ex. Of course, that's not what they were going for, and it would be pretty silly if they did. But, hey, like Tom Cruise, Squibb did all her own stunts for this.

Odd Bell

I have been sort of shortchanging Ms. Spenser on horror, so I thought I'd make an effort. Then I just grabbed Oddity (2024) off the shelf at the library. But it worked out.

We start with Carolyn Bracken, renovating a magnificent little antique stables. She finds one corner with cell phne bars and says, "We're connected!" (I missed the phone, and thought it was a philosophical comment. I was part right.) She talks to her husband, Gwilym Lee, a rather cold doctor at a mental institution, telling him she'll be there all night. She has a tent set up in the middle of an empty space.

A pounding comes at the door - she sees a horrible face with a milky eye through the peephole. He says he has seen a man come in, and tells her she is in trouble. He begs her to let her in, but she refuses, so he says he will run to find help. Shortly after this, she is murdered horribly in her tent.

Some time later, Lee has a new girlfriend, Caroline Menton, who doesn't much like staying at the stables. She asks him to invite his murdered wife's twin sister for a visit, as a gesture. He visits her at her odd curio shop. She is played by Carolyn Bracken again, a blind woman. She tells him that all the items in her shop are cursed in some way. He gives her the milky glass eye that belonged to the madman who presumably murdered her sister, said madman having been horribly killed at the institution.

She arrives with a house-warming gift, a kind of mummy mannequin, a life-sized wooden man. She also brings them a haunted call bell - ringing it brings a ghost bellboy. She explains that she can read the past of items like this through psychometry (don't think she actually says psychometry). After Lee leaves for his night shift at the institution, his girlfriend is stuck with Bracken. She seems inclined to stay, and everyone is too polite to outright kick her out. After awkwardness turns to terror, Menton wisely takes off.

Then Lee manages to kill Bracken remotely.

There's so much great about this movie. First, the stables - I'd live there, no matter how haunted. Then the game of wits between blind, beautiful Bracken and cold, calculating Lee. The comedy of manners when Bracken comes to visit and won't leave is cute, then gets very scary. The cursed objects are a little cheesy - the big wooden man was more WTF than OMG. The haunted bell seems almost silly. So, beauty, a little comedy, some twists, and a lot of scares. Ms. Spenser liked it. 

Bordering on Insanity

I went into Borderlands (2024) with no more knowledge than that Cate Blanchett was in it. I sort of expected it to be about urban fairies (I guess that's a different borderland). I also knew that it was universally hated, but that didn't deter me.

After an infodump about a planet and MacGuffin, we find soldier Kevin Hart on a space station, rescuing/kidnapping cute little girl Ariana Greenblatt. On the way out of the station, they pick up Florian Munteanu, a "psycho" - violent nutcases endemic to the planet below.

Across the galaxy, bounty hunter Cate Blanchett is in a nice bar with her living captive, getting a celebratory drink. When a man with a couple of gunmen approach her, she kills them quickly, not interested in their pitch. But galactic zillionaire Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) finally gets through to her. He wants her to go and rescue his little girl, Greenblatt, and will pay a lot. Since Blanchett was born on that particular shithole, it will take a lot to get her to go back.

On planet, she meets up with a small robot with a tough shell, and a dumb demeanor. This is Claptrap, played by Jack Black, but sounding exactly like Patton Oswald. Oh well, a lot of people sound like Patton Oswald these days.

When they find Greenblatt, it turns out that she was not kidnapped, but ran away, because her father had nefarious plans for her. So Blanchett, robot, Hart and Munteau now must battle their way to the MacGuffin. They also pick up a scientist, Jamie Lee Curtis, who was Blanchett's mother. They did not part on good terms. 

Oh, and Greenblatt is no maiden in distress. She loves blowing things up, and has a bunch of explosive teddy bears for people she doesn't like.

It's important to realize that this is an action comedy - even though Kevin Hart actually plays it straight. In the first scene, Hart appears in a storm-trooper helmet, breathing like Darth Vader -then taking it off and complaining about the lack of airholes. We get trope after trope: the planet's landscape is mostly modeled after Vasquez Rocks from the original Star Trek series. There are even sci-fi vans in some of the scenes. You've probably seen a lot of these in 1980s cheapo sci-fi: ordinary vans with some doodads and paint to look futuristic. For some people, this is tired and cliched. For me, this is fun.

In the end, it was just watching Blanchett being a gunslinging badass. I kind of expected her to be a side character, but she was front and center the whole time. She does really well - sort of like Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. OK, Blanchett is a much better actor, and Jolie's act hasn't aged well. But remember the thrill when it first came out?

One note - I'm not sure how much of the body acting was actually Blanchett and how much was stunt motion capture/CGI. Not just the action either: There's a scene where she stands hipshot with a hand on the hip that is so extreme, so comicbooky, that it must be faked. If not, kudos to Ms. Blanchett. 

Mask of the Devil

We start the New Year off right with a couple of noir or noir adjacent movies that I ordered last year from Movies Unlimited: Alias Nick Beal (1949) and Mask of Dimitrios (1944). I've had my eye out for these on streaming platforms, etc, but finally decided to get the physical media into my life.

Alias Nick Beal features Ray Milland as a gangster/fixer/tempter, who is literally the devil. Full name is probably Nicodemus Bealzebub. It stars Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy) as an honest DA who'd sell his soul to convict mob boss Fred Clark. As soon as he says this, out of nowhere, Ray Milland. He invites Mitchell to a low waterfront bar, where he hands him the books to Clark's criminal enterprise - the books that the bookkeeper was sure that he had burned.

Mitchell's coup leads his friends and other civic leaders to run him for governor. Milland picks up a tramp played by Audrey Totter and sets her up as a campaign donor and volunteer. She wants to play it like a sexpot (but classy), but Milland coaches her to be a prim society type - all the more alluring when she "falls" for Mitchell.

When Mitchell wins, Milland expects him to appoint some crooks to government positions - or to go to the Isle of Lost Souls if he forfeits. I won't tell how it comes out, but George MacReady is involved - and he's not a crook this time.

Mask of Dimitrios is based on a novel by Eric Ambler. It features Peter Lorre as a Dutch (?) detective novelists. At a party in Istanbul, be meets a Turkish policeman who tells him about this criminal, Dimitrios Makropoulos. He has been trying to catch him for years, but now he has been found, dead, washed up in a beach. Of course, no one knew what he looked like, but this corpse had his jacket and ID papers, so the case was closed. 

Lorre was interested in the man's story, and started tracing him back. We see much of this in flashbacks, with Zachary Scott as Dimitrios, In Smyrna, Dimitrios was a poor fig packer (or a fig packer's mate) who killed a money lender and let a friend take the rap. Next we hear the story of Faye Emerson, who took him in when he was starving and fleeing the police. When she sees him next, he's dressed in flashy clothes, and pays her back for the meal. In the end, he steals from her and takes off again.

As Lorre follows Dimitrios' trail across Europe, he meets up with Sydney Greenstreet, a shady character with an interest in Dimitrios. He doesn't believe in Dimitrios' death, and tries to rope Lorre into a scheme to somehow make half a million francs. 

Of course, they do eventually find Dimitrios.

Alias had a great premise - skip the metaphor, go right to horror/fantasy - and a great villain in Ray Milland. He was handsome, slick and cold as ice. The main character, Mitchell, was a bit cliched maybe, a bit to naive. I also could have done with more of Audrey Totter. She didn't really have much effect on the plot, and sort of disappeared in the last act. When she was onscreen, she was great, playing multiple roles. 

The best part of Mask might have been the simple pairing of Lorre and Greenstreet. Scott made a good villain as well, although Ms. Spenser thought he should have been played by Lee van Kleef. Like Milland, he had a way of suddenly appearing when you least wanted him to. A good double bill.

I'll let you in on the rest of our Movies Unlimited haul when we've finished them.

Happy (?) 2025!

Happy New Year - plus a few days. We took our time getting going this year.

I considered skipping this year. I was never planning to do Year End pieces; I think they are lame. But then I did one, and it took on a life of its own. Or at least I didn't stop. But I'm still missing the old reliable Netflix DVDs in the mail system, and it shows. I posted about 95 movies in 2024, down from a normal 100-150. Of course, I might have skipped a few because they were not notable, but it's mostly down to lack of a system. We're just not watching quite as much as we used to.

As far as new movies go, we watched 18 movies made in 2024. That may even be a few more than some years. That included the latest sequel/series entries, like Dune 2 and Furiosa, and lesser entries like Ghost Busters: Frozen Empire. I'm going to rate Deadpool & Wolverine as our favorite of the batch. It wasn't exactly fresh and new, but it was diverting and funny as hell.

There were also plenty of oddball indie and otherwise new pics on our screen. I'll give Abigail the prize as our fave one-off. But I want to note Jonah Ray Rodrigues' Destroy All Neighbors - a low budget, gross-out horror movie about the dangers of prog-rock.

The oddest of the oddballs was probably This is Me ... Now, J-Lo's surrealistic auto-biopic. I kind of liked it. 

We also watched our share of new action movies. I'm going to nominate two Ryan Gosling movies as worst and best. Worst was The Gray Man (watched late in 2023, I guess - oh well), a very bland and stale movie. Best was Fall Guy, also not especially fresh, but it just hit the spot. Maybe it was the drugged fight sequences, maybe it was just my mood. 

We didn't watch as much horror as usual this year. For one thing, Ms. Spenser, our household's horror hound, was busy in Oct, so we didn't have the Halloween month we usually do. But we did make our own double bill of Ghostwatch and Late Night with the Devil. These are two movies with roughly the same theme - a TV show investigates a haunting, and things get too, too real. Late Night made us solid fans of David Dastmalchian. 

For number one watch of the year, I'm going with another double bill: White Noise and Asteroid City. I liked Asteroid best, but seeing both in succession really worked for me. 

On the cocktail front, I've been trying to drink down my collection. It's tricky, because some ingredients go together - you need to drink Singapore Slings to get rid of Benedictine and cherry brandy, so you need to buy gin... So I'm also trying out odd combinations. On returning home after seeing the family over New Year's, I made an odd drink. I call it the Forest Fizz:

1/2 oz Zerbenz stone pine liqueur
1/2 oz St. Germaine elder flower liqueur
Flute of prosecco

The Zerbenz is really good with the fizz. I've had the bottle since at least 2007, and there's still enough left for a few drinks. 

The first movie of our year was the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts. It's out of copyright this year! And as always, the best movie of the year, nay, all time, is Bringing Up Baby.