I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not (2026)

Director: Marina Zenovich

Cast: Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Beverly D’Angelo, Goldie Hawn

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Might have made a point of seeing it when everybody else did, but I cut the cord like an idiot and had to wait for a month for it to show up on Max.

Did I Like It: It’s easy to make a hatchet job out of anything related to Chase. He’s eagerly pissed people off for years, and there’s probably somebody out there who hasn’t yet learned that he is often difficult.

I’m not prepared to say the film goes deeper than that, as Chase does occasionally come off as sympathetically broken, but he also never seems unaware that he is being watched. He deals out his prickliness in carefully measured doses. It feels believable, but manageably believable.

Here’s the real problem I have with the whole affair. In the section of the film on Community and his eventual firing, it is depicted as if Dan Harmon—creator of the show—wrote a bit of about Chase’s character doing a Black-face Señor Wences ventriloquism act, that was only made worse by the character’s asian (read: yellow-face) wife, played by Chase’s left hand, and that was the incident which led to him saying things which necessitated likely half-hearted apologies and leaks to the Hollywood Reporter. It also indicates that after the fight between Harmon and Chase occurred, Chase still insisted that Harmon continue to run the show.

Not true.

Harmon was fired after the fight—to my knowledge, it’s never been confirmed that his firing was due to the Chase problem, but it might have been—Chase continued with the show into season 4, and the incident occurred during the production of that season, without the involvement of Harmon. If the filmmakers and interviewees got that wrong—or, worse yet, fudged the timeline through intention or expediency—then I can’t help but wonder what else they got wrong.

This is all to say that I would really like a Community movie as soon as possible. Please and thank you.

Swing Shift (1984)

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast: Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, Ed Harris

Have I Seen it Before: Never. To wit, before this last Friday, I had never even heard of the film. But there sure is something about checking into a hotel late, turning on the TV, working through whatever motion blurring difficulties you might be subjected to, hoping that the cable package includes TCM, and just going with whatever might be on.

It’s a unique way to take in a movie. There aren’t a lot of reasons to miss cable, but TCM is one of them. Aside from re-watching Romancing the Stone (1984), I didn’t get to watch nearly enough random movies from cable this vacation.

Did I Like It: There’s a thinness to the whole affair that I can’t quite get over, that’s only exacerbated after I read that the film was largely taken away from Demme in favor of Hawn, who put more focus on the relationship between her and Russell, even though neither of them are asked by any version of this film to do anything that made them objectively stars, and subjectively undeniably watchable.

What we’re left with is a distressingly tepid World War II homefront drama. Lora mentioned as she was half-falling asleep that there is almost nothing—even up to the structure of the screenplay itself—that wasn’t done during A League of Their Own (1992), and it’s hard to argue that. I’m tempted to give this film a degree of credit for getting there eight years ahead of League, but that movie obviously has more of a hook than what we’re given here, a far deeper roster of a supporting cast, and two leads in Tom Hanks and Geena Davis who are far better cast here than Hawn or Russell are in this.

I’m still glad I got to watch it, though, even if it was by accident.