Angels on High

It's a little late for a Christmas movie, but we still wanted to watch We’re No Angels (1955).

Here's the set up: it's late December on Devil's Island. Three escaped prisoners are lounging around by the docks, Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, and Peter Ustinov. As long as they are mistaken for parolees. they don't need to worry. Just just need some money and civilian clothes to get off the island and make a clean break. 

They go to a store run by Leo G. Carroll, and start swiping stuff. They want to rob the register, but it seems everyone buys on credit, and there's nothing there. Carroll is a nice but ineffectual man, and the boys offer to fix his roof (as an excuse to stick around and see what else they can carry off). Peeking down through skylights (like angels on high), they find out that 

• Carroll's cousin in Paris really owns the store, and the place is basically broke.
• His wife, Joan Bennett, loves him and is pretty shapely for a middle-aged mom.
• Their daughter, Gloria Talbott, is in love with the son of the owner, although the owner forbids this romance.

Although they are scoundrels, our escapees begin to feel for these poor people. Then, the store's owner (Basil Rathbone) shows up, along with his son. John Baer. Rathbone is a bully and a jerk, who plans to throw Carroll off the payroll and possibly into prison for not keeping clean books. His son, theoretically in love with Talbott, is engaged to marry the daughter of a rich shipbuilder. 

Now Bogart is a forget and confidence man. He can easily clean up the books given a little time. And if they don't get that time, the other two are murderers, and Aldo Ray is carrying around a little pet viper...

Now, Ms. Spenser loves her some herps - she has a (nonvenous) snake or two herself. So she was disappointed we didn't actually see the little viper. But she loved the the human snakes. Bogart is his usual cool, competent self, politely selling hairbrushes to a bald man and leaning on a credit customer for some cash. Ray is dumb and strong, with an eye for the ladies (and sometimes a pinch). Ustinov is lovely as a somewhat perverted, creepy criminal with a weird laugh. Of course, they're no angels - or are they. 

This would be pretty lightweight and sentimental if the three "angels" didn't have a nice edge. Ray is strong and could be menacing when women are concerned. Ustinov is creepy - he killed his wife. It was all his own fault. He should have written that he was coming home for Christmas. And of course, Bogie is Bogie. 

I'm not sure how funny this would be without these great characters, but with them, it's a Christmas murder miracle.

Nobody Who?

Well, Ms. Spenser's horror movie didn't work out so well, so we decided to be lazy and watch Nobody 2 (2025). We figured that however bad it was, it would surely satisfy.

Retired assassin and wannabe normal family man Bob Odenkirk is back on the job. The last movie put him badly in debt to the Russian mob, and he is working for Colin Salmon to pay it off. So he is unretired and overworked. His family, who now know his secret, is getting fed up with his constant absence. He needs a vacation.

He manags to convince his family to go to a cheesy waterpark and tourist town in the Wisconsin Dells, where he spent his only childhood vacation with Christopher Lloyd, Odenkirk's shady father. Of course, Lloyd will join the family outing. Odenkirk promises that he will leave the job behind, with absolutely no killing. 

So, when a bully steals a plushie from his young daughter, and his son gets into a fight over it, Odenkirk tries to stay calm. When someone smacks the girl on the head, he walks out and counts to ten. Then walks back in and kicks ass. This is not how to make friends. It turns out that the bully's father was the owner of the park, and by the way, Odenkirk has also also antagonized the sheriff, Colin Hanks. And now they are going to kill him.

Odenkirk phones his brother RZA for some intel, and finds out that the town was part of an old bootlegging route, and now being used for drug smuggling and money laundering. And it's all being run by Lendina, Sharon Stone. Remember what I said about scary old ladies? 

Of course, it all leads to a big set fight in the water park. The director is Timo Tjahjanto, Indonesian horror/action director, so these scenes are good. In fact, there's a lot of good action, but that's not all. You get some nice family interactions, with the wife wanting a quiet life, but supporting her man, and the kids thinking he's a dork for wanting a vacation in the Dells, but making the best of it and having a good time. Of course, Christopher Lloyd, a lousy father and grandfather, knows how to come through in a pinch. 

I don't think this was as much fun as the first - the gimmick works best as a surprise. But it was still a lot of fun, and a tribute to overworked dads who need a vacation everywhere. 

Blunt Weapon

Since I owed Ms. Spenser a movie, we tried a recent horror, Weapons (2025), by Zach Cregger.

It starts with a little girl telling a story in voice-over. It's about how one day, grade school teacher Julia Garner came to class and only found one boy there. It turns out that the previous night, at 2:17 AM, all the other children woke up and left their houses. They ran into the darkness with their arms out and behind them, as creepily shown on some security cameras. These children couldn't be found. The remaining boy, Cary Christopher, wasn't able to give investigators any information.

The townspeople suspected Garner of something. They painted "Witch" on her car. Her principle, Benedict Wong, put her on leave. She started drinking (again), and hooked up with her old boyfriend, patrolman Alden Ehrenreich.  She also started to investigate Christopher, who seemed to just want to be left alone. But there's something funny about his house...

The focus shifts to Josh Brolin, father of one of the missing children (one of the children who used to bully Christopher). He isn't going to rest and let the police bungle this investigation.

Again the focus shifts to Ehrenreich. We learn that he's a recovering alcoholic now married to the police chief's daughter, June Diane Raphael. He stops a meth head from breaking into a warehouse and gets a needle prick, beats up the junkie and lets him go.

And so on. The film shifts perspective, sometimes sliding the timeline back to before the disappearances. The horror starts slowly, with a lot of social and psychological stuff, with Garner being ostracized, threatened and slowly going out of control. There are hints of the supernatural, before you get a to the third act, where you discover what has been going on. 

I won't tell you what that is, but I have to mention Amy Madigan as sweet, creepy Aunt Lilly. There's something about a cheery, controlling old lady that really gets you. 

In the end, Ms. Spenser wasn't satisfied with this. It got a little silly, especially the ending, which was basically comedy-horror. So I still owe her. 

Dead Final

I made it through Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025), and I enjoyed it - but I wouldn't call it good...

I don't think I'll try to recap. As you remember, in our last episode, a super-AI is taking over the world, and only Tom Cruise can stop it. I found this part of the movie very Scientology coded. The AI controls us by lying to us and trying to divide us, sow distrust through misinformation, make us fight each other. Again and again, the Impossible team try to reason with their human adversaries, offer team up for mutual benefit. Fortunately, they usually refuse, for the sake of a good action scene. 

And there are action scenes aplenty, including a frankly silly biplane fist-fight. It looked like an amazing feat of stunt-work, and just not that exciting. We also had characters aplenty, pretty much everyone from the team including recent additions Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff, with Shea Whigham as the son of Jim Phelps - going back to the first MI. There are also plentiful flashbacks to the whole series, and also flashbacks to points in the movie that happened while we were looking at something else. This got a bit confusing for me. At one point, Cruise and a baddy are in a discussion while the rest of the team are either in the room, or in a flashback - I'm not sure. 

There's a nice callback to an earlier movie - Rolf Saxon as a disgraced agent exiled to an Aleutian island post, where he met and fell in love with a Native woman, Lucy Tulugarjuk. It was kind of sweet, plus allowed a dramatic dogsled rescue. I think the dogs were all CGI, sadly. 

I was a little disappointed that the super-AI's manipulation of reality was a bit crude. I thought Dead Reckoning made it a little more psychedelic. Here, everyone knows what it's doing but falls for it anyway. I guess that's pretty realistic, but disappointing. However, there is a scene where the AI communicates directly to Cruise's mind in a sensory deprivation tank. When he gets out, he asks, "Is this real?" I'm still seeing Scientology influence. 

Also, Ving Rames gets killed and has a long recorded posthumous monologue. We call this a Tasha Yar. 

With a runtime of 2-2/3 hours, there was a lot of fat on this one. But of course, that means you're getting your money's worth. It also means I now owe Ms. Spenser, who skipped this entirely, at least two choices of normal length movies. 

Happy? New? Year?

Well, 2026 is getting on and I guess it's time for the year-end wrap up. In Japan, there's a tradition called Bonenkai - a Year Forgetting Party, where you gather with coworkers or classmates to forget the trials of the last year. I forgot to do that this year.

It wasn't a great movie year for us. I only blogged about 77-80 movies, the least ever. We watched more than that, but without Netflix DVDs, we have resorted to re-watching old favorites. Some of these, I even blogged about, if I had seen them first before the blog started.

We did watch a lot of recent movies - 20 from 2025, more than most years. I got to see some of the big comic book movies, which I still love, and enjoyed them, mostly. Like Thunderbolts*, Superman, and Fantastic Four. Not so much Kraven the Hunter. 

We also watched some old movies. We got the complete set of Hildegarde Withers movies, mostly starring Edna Oliver and James Gleason. Miss Withers is a tart-tongued schoolteacher who solves crimes. We also got a few Glenda Farell/Joan Blondell team ups. These are mostly about two broke party girls looking for wealth and romance, and usually ending up with one or the other. 

I also wound up watching a lot of kung fu movies. As I often mention, Ms. Spenser can't always take the night off to watch a movie. She doesn't mind if I watch one, as long as it isn't something she's interested in. So, kung fu. Some were good, some less good, none that really stuck with me. Although I did find out where Ghost Face Killer comes from. 

As a result, we didn't get to watch as many good, quality movies as we might have wanted to. I'll propose The Phoenician Scheme as my favorite. I'm not sure how good it is as a movie, but I loved it. Sinners was definitely a good movie, that we also enjoyed - maybe tied for first place. 

One trend I noticed is a bunch of Nobody clones - ordinary guy gets pushed to far, and turns out to be more dangerous than anyone imagined. Take, for ex, Novocaine, The Amateur, and Love Hurts. They were all pretty enjoyable - at least I liked them. More than a bunch of women led action movies, like Ballerina. Not that it was that bad, but it didn't raise the bar on the John Wick movies. I don't think it even cleared that bar. 

Our first movies of the New Year were the Hobbit trilogy. We'd watched them earlier this year, found them better than we remembered, and swore to watch them first thing in 2026. Done.

For cocktails, I'm actually drinking less. It just seems a little boring, and too much work. I don't mind a nice cocktail on a night out, but my consumption has dropped below three drinks a week. We'll see if that lasts. 

But I did make a celebratory cocktail: I call it the Nameless. 

• 1 shot dark rum
• 1/2 shot Galliano
• 1/2 shot lime juice
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
• Top with sparkling wine

It's weird but I kind of liked it. Besides, I'm trying to use up a bottle of Galliano.

We'll leave it there. The state of movies seems precarious and troubled, the state of the world much more so, but I hope for a better 2026. But I'm not so naive as to think it can't get worse. 

Take Me to Church

Before I do my dubious year-end wrap up,  one final movie: Wake Up Dead Man (2025), a Knives Out sequel. 

It starts with Josh O'Connor, a young priest decking another priest. It seems he used to be a boxer until he killed a man in the ring and turned to the Church. He assigned to a lovely church in New York, Our Lady of Perpetual Whining. The head priest there is Josh Brolin, a charismatic but confrontational man. He tends to select members of the parish, call out their sins with fire and brimstone and drive them out of the church. The exceptions are his little cult:

• Jeremy Renner, a doctor whose divorce has driven him to drink
• Andrew Scott, a sci-fi writer who has stopped producing to write a true-life spiritual biography of Brolin
• Kerry Washington, a lawyer who puts loyalty to the church and her adopted son above her career
• Daryl McCormack, the adopted son, an arrogant right-wing influencer and wannabe politician
• Cailee Spaeny, a concert cellist, suffering from debilitating muscle pain, hoping for a miracle

Glenn Close plays the woman who keeps the church running, and Thomas Hayden Church the groundskeeper who worships her (and sometimes swats her bottom).

During Mass, Brolin would often become fatigued, and step into a small alcove near the altar, and O'Connor would perform the offices until he recovered. One Sunday, while he was tucked away, the congregation heard a thud. Brolin had been killed, stabbed in the back with a devil-headed knife. A devil's head that O'Connor was known to have taken from a bar.

It was a classic locked-room mystery. No one could have entered or left the alcove, no mechanism or trap was found, and O'Connor, known to be at odds with Brolin, was in plain sight the whole time. Police chief Mila Kunis did the right thing: call Benoit Blanc.

I won't go into the twists and turns of the mystery, except to say that there wasn't as much of a big mid-movie twist as I expected after Glass Onion (although there is a glorious knockout punch). I will say that the cast is awesome as usual. The characters were interesting - like in Onion, many caricatures of right-wing types. I was interested in Scott's author character - he resembled P.K. Dick in some ways: a pulpy sci-fi writer who got obsessed with Bishop Pike later in life.

It's also a beautiful movie in many ways - the neo-gothic church, the forest outside it, the cozy, yet threatening rectory. And of course, Daniel Craig's Blanc, an egotist stumped by a mystery, an atheist who granted his quarry grace, and all without losing his faith in himself and reason.

Watching this made us hungry for more - so we watched some of Branagh's Poirot. Not quite the same, but you can see the connections.