The Paper (1994)

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Randy Quaid

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I did go through a period—I think it was early in the days when I started getting DVDs from Netflix (kids, ask your parents)—where I watched all of the movies Keaton made instead of Batman Forever (1995). Essentially this and Speechless (1994)*. It felt like it might be therapeutic, but it really wasn’t.

Did I Like It: This does a great job of doing that very simple thing which films aren’t all that interested in anymore: allowing a film to live or die by showing as authentically as possible people at work. Aaron Sorkin trucks in this and almost exclusively this. Mid-budget dramas and comedies used to make this sort of thing an art. Historical implications aside, All The President’s Men (1976) is an absolute symphony of this quality. There may be something to setting the film in a Newspaper that really makes the whole thing come together.

It’s a quietly thrilling thing to see in this day and age, when the most frequent job I get to imagine myself having (I do greatly enjoy imagining myself in some other job) while watching modern films is to be a superhero. It’s not so much that the Marvel movies are ruining cinema, it’s that there is something to be said for inspiring people to do things actual human beings do.

That said, the film might be just a bit too slight for its own good. Is Ron Howard ultimately the most breezy of his contemporaries that—aside from a stray Apollo 13 (1995) or A Beautiful Mind (2001)—any film is going to feel thinner than it might from another director? Is it the fact that a Randy Newman score just makes things so light that I can’t help but think we should be looking at something computer animated? Is it the fact that Randy Quaid is here at all? Probably a mixture of both.

*The true film for which Keaton abandoned Gotham City. Keaton and Geena Davis play political speechwriters who fall in love only to have Christopher Reeve cause them problems? Why isn’t that my favorite film of all time. Probably because its more than a little hard to find. But this review isn’t about Speechless.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega

Have I Seen it Before: Clearly, never. I did once have a dream when I was kid that I had lost my VHS copy of Beetlejuice 2, and was bereft to have the film leave my life. There was a time* when I wasn’t even sure I wanted a sequel to Beetlejuice (1988), but the Michael Keaton Rule** does prevail.

Then, I got more and more excited about the whole thing. Couple that with the odyssey that it took to actually get me into a theater on opening weekend, and I would have liked any old thing projected on the screen.

Did I Like It: I’ve seen the movie twice now—once to let it all wash over me, and a second to take more diligent notes for the soon-to-be-recorded episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods—and I’m happy to report it is not only pretty good, it is largely very good, and I’m not damning it with faint praise. It’s easily Tim Burton’s best film since they started beginning years with the number “2” and likely his best film since Ed Wood (1994). Keaton is brilliant again in the role, this time completely game for the prospect of re-visiting his 80s triumphs***. Ryder is a delight as Lydia, perpetually bewildered by the scope of her life thirty-plus years after first deciding she can see ghosts. O’Hara can do almost anything, and once again does effortless work to steal every scene she graces. Newcomer Jenna Ortega does something I didn’t think the film would be capable of and creates a new character out of Astrid, when the film would have likely been forgiven for just making Lydia’s daughter a 1:1 translation of the mother.

That’s the most delightful surprise in the film: for being a legacy sequel, the film is largely disinterested in fan service beyond the obligatory. Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” makes the briefest of appearances, but the needle drops are all trying to forge something of a new path. The original film’s secret strengths were its army of strange and unusual**** dead people, and the fact that its depiction of the afterlife is a near Kafkaesque exploration of the bureaucratic. Both elements are in full force here.

In fact, the only real complaint I have about the film is one I didn’t think I was going to have going into the theater. Elfman’s score is just a rehashing of tracks from the original, with a menu of new noises added into the mix. I wanted more here, but then I realized it has been a very, very long time since Elfman wrote a really memorable score. Burton stepped up to the plate here, but it’s just a bit disappointing that Elfman didn’t do the same thing.

*It was never more profound than immediately after seeing The Flash (2023), around the time this film was already in production. I probably had that thought more than a few times during the endless series of stops and starts in the process. I am happy to report that the film doesn’t end with Betelgeuse being exorcised and being replaced by a different kind of Betelgeuse played by George Clooney. Had they pulled that trick again, I would not have been okay, and I said so.

**Sometimes called the Multiplicity (1996) amplifier, wherein a film is inherently better

***Man, the more that I think about The Flash, the more I have problems with it, huh?

****Apparently I tripped into more fan service in that sentence than the film is interested in for its runtime.

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Cast: Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewen Bremner

Have I Seen it Before: Probably?

Did I Like It: That’s likely the problem. It definitely doesn’t feel like it would be a movie I would watch twice. In fact, I only started running it because after running through the entire Alien series in the lead up to Alien: Romulus (2024), I found myself re-charmed by those acid-filled critters. Where else was I going to get a fix? Playing Alien: Isolation, the most frustratingly hard game created in recent times*? Suddenly start getting into expanded universe novels and comics? That seems like a crazy move, especially when my life is already filled to the brim with barely coherent EUs**.

And yet, I probably have seen it before, although most of the film has disappeared into the ether of being unmemorable. The entire film has a familiar sameness throughout, and any surprise—the only one I can readily point to is the inclusion of Henriksen as the pater familias of what would one day become the Weyland Yutani—I met with less of an “Oh, really?” and more of a “Oh, that’s right.” Maybe it’s a film made up of dim references to other things that work. Great films can do that, even in this series. Aliens (1986) is just a war movie in space, but it feels like a great war movie in space. This is just a list of films I wish I would have watched instead.

I just wanted some sci-fi cheese, and even on that level I found the endeavor to be a little bit underwhelming. Limiting the scope to the then present day of 2004 and keeping things limited to Earth tries desperately to harness <The Thing (1982)>, but that also just adds one more tepid reference, and limits the scope of a film series whose main attraction is easily the gnarly, fucked up things you’re likely to find in the vast, unforgiving abyss of the cosmos.

Maybe I should just start re-watching the Predator films. That’s probably the most sensible way forward.

*I have been watching a lot of Youtube videos of people eating it in Isolation. And, yes, I am thinking of getting back into the game.

**I did start picking up EU novels and comics. Sometimes I just can’t help myself.

As Good as It Gets (1997)

Director: James L. Brooks

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding Jr.

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Everyone loved it when it came out, pulling of the The Silence of the Lambs (1991) trick of sweeping both of the lead performers awards at the Oscars. No film has ever done it since. It’s occasionally heartwarming, often very funny, and there’s no reason why everyone wouldn’t have loved it.

I suppose the question in 2024 is, can it possibly hold up? Other celebrated films from the era—I’m mainly thinking of American Beauty (1999), but it isn’t precisely a 1:1 analogy—have been thoroughly dismissed as celebratory of our worst impulses. One would imagine that this film isn’t going to be immune from such considerations, when it is frequently both willfully and gleefully politically* incorrect.

And yet, I think there’s something telling in the fact that while the film did win those acting awards, it was completely cut out of any other attention in favor of Titanic (1997). The performances are key here. I’ve always said that more than any other movie star, Nicholson excels at portraying awfulness and charm simultaneously. He certainly had it as The Joker in Batman (1989) (although that would be a bit of a pre-requisite for the role), and I can only imagine what The Shining (1980) would have been without that quality**. So even now Melvin Udall (Nicholson) says and does deeply terrible things, you can’t help but be charmed somehow.

That wouldn’t be much to hang an entire film on anymore, though. The quality that makes the film still largely work when it might otherwise gone sour is the same quality that likely kept it from unqualified praise in the 90s. Yes, the role is tailor made for Nicholson’s talents, but the film does reach for a redemption for its characters, if even in small measures. Even if it wasn’t for love, Udall wants to be better. Will he succeed? Probably never nearly as much as the people around him might want, but if the horrors of the current age are ever going to abate, we might need to afford the assholes in our lives the grace to improve.

*You know what? I’m not thrilled with the amount of adverbs in that sentence, either.

**Likely something approaching the TV miniseries The Shining (1997), but I digress.

Side Street (1949)

Director: Anthony Mann

Cast: Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, James Craig, Jean Hagen

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: You’ve seen one b-noir film (or even more than a few of the a-list examples in the genre), you’ve probably seen them all. Hapless Regular Joe* wanders into a situation where a “whole lotta dough” is his for the taking. Figuring “Hey, why can’t a lucky break come my way? Why shouldn’t it?” he either takes the money outright or agrees to the scheme at hand which is the only imaginable obstacle between him and that money.

Things don’t work out. Often because a dame (see that footnote) is either too wise to be good or too good to be wise. Mix. Repeat.

This sounds like I’m about to complain that Side Street is a little humdrum. It might be. Even at 82 minutes, it feels like there may be ten minutes to cut out of the thing in the middle. There are some Side Streets featured in the film, but not nearly enough to prevent me from wanting to suggest a different title. I would really prefer the film to at least be called Side Streets (plural), but alas I wasn’t working for MGM’s publicity department in the 1940s.

But it has more than enough going for it to make one not resentful for the time spent viewing. I’m having a hard time these days not enjoying any film in black and white, even if it is a little weighed down by voice over narration. That might once again qualify as damning with faint ambivalence. The action in the film’s final minutes is quite good, but the big recommending factor? While he’ll be remembered for Strangers on a Train (1951) or even Rope (1948), I’m struggling to think of another actor who is more capable of communicating simmering guilt with a simultaneously hangdog and twitchy expression than Farley Granger. The man was built for noir.

*It is never a Hapless Regular Jane, because A) Women are incapable of haplessness in these films, unless they’re freshly (or about to be) murdered. B) They have a different role to play in these stories.

Airplane II: The Sequel

Director: Ken Finkleman

Cast: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Lloyd Bridges, William Shatner

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. An extended cameo from Shatner actually led me to prefer this over the original Airplane! (1980) when I was a kid.

Did I Like It: But kids are idiots. Everything is tired here. The jokes are the same. Anything new is mostly jam-packed into the film’s opening minutes. I caught myself laughing at the courtesy van for Air Iran, even though it’s not a great joke, per se. Jokes about Ronald Reagan’s senility work now, but I can’t give extra credit for something being accidentally funnier than it had any right to originally be.

Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar steer clear, and it’s not exactly like Sonny Bono is an adequate consolation prize. Those that remain try their best to keep things breezy, but they are largely repeating old gags with only the slightest variation. Hagerty understands the assignment and remains adorable, while there are several times Hays looks at the camera, as if to beg us not to make the film a success to keep him from the threatened indignities of an Airplane III.

And yet…

The parts with Shatner still kind of hold up. He’s playing a character similar enough to Kirk that we all get the joke, but different enough that Paramount would have to cut one more check to Roddenberry. It’s largely some tame gags, but he is game and understands we’re laughing at him more than with him. He’s at the heights of his cinematic charms, having also had Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) under his belt earlier in the year. I’ll be honest, my most guileless laugh in the whole movie came when Shatner’s character was gently shoved into the outer orbit of a nervous breakdown at the sight of a glass tube with an array of blinking red lights. Those things were built for The Wrath of Khan but are recognizable to any Trek fan for being reused ad infinitum for decades in the franchise.

The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew and Associates (1964)

Director: Robert Drew

Cast: John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, George Wallace

A note (or, the bulk of the review, whatever works) before we begin, as I was a little unsure of how to organize these reviews, per se. Whereas each film normally warrants its own review (although Justice League (2017) and Rocky IV (1985) both managed to get two*) but this review will cover four films. Primary (1960) focuses on Kennedy’s fight in that year’s Wisconsin primary against Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Adventures on the New Frontier (1961), produced for ABC, attempts a fly-on-the-wall study of the early days of the Kennedy Administration. Crisis (1963) depicts Robert Kennedy’s standoff with Alabama Governor George Wallace as Federal Courts order the admission of black students to the University of Alabama. Finally, Faces of November (1964) is a nearly wordless few minutes depicting the funeral services after Dallas They are grouped together as a series. Footage from several of them overlap, primarily New Frontier borrowing from Primary. Some could barely be considered feature length, while Faces is barely over ten minutes**. Taken together, they are worthy of their own review.

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: After all of that? It’s a slight split decision. Adventures in the New Frontier is easily the weakest of the four entries, roping in too many disparate threads into something less than total of its parts.

Primary is exactly what you would hope for from a deep-access political campaign documentary, but there is probably a note of warning needed. The film seems to have more insight on Humphrey than Kennedy. That might be more to do with the fact that John F. Kennedy might not have had another layer to peel back.

Faces is exactly what you would expect, but it does have the virtue of letting the aftermath of the tragedy play out without even the slightest bit of commentary.

But Crisis is the one by which I was most delighted. We all know the story of the integration of the University of Alabama and Wallace parking himself on the wrong side of history. However, just exactly how this standoff was going to play out. Exactly how Wallace would have to back down. Did those kids get enrolled without any problems. The film goes through all of that in an hour that builds the tension surprisingly well.

*If you had gone back in time and told me that I would be making reference to Justice League and Rocky IV in this review, I’d believe you, because it sounds like me… But also suspicious because you haven’t used your time travel abilities to negate the need for Faces of November to be made. I was fairly sure I’d probably make a time travel reference before the review was done.

**Nearly an hour of people looking very sad is certainly an idea for a documentary.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Maria Richardson

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah. I was probably in my twenties or even younger, and I felt like how I felt about a lot of Kubrick films on first viewing. I just didn’t get it. I would be a little leery of any teenager or person in their twenties why got anything out of this film other than nudity up to and including Kidman.

I was compelled to come back to the film when my festival screener duties* drifted into an inexplicable new adaptation of Schnitzler’s original novel. All it did was want me to re-visit the Kubrick of it all.

Did I Like It: It’s immaculately made—naturally—and that’s all the more mystifying when one thinks that Kubrick couldn’t possible have been in the best of health when the entire production was going through the Sisyphean task of a year-plus shoot. It’s frank and unblinking in the things it depicts, with several moments legitimately feeling like we got a peak into Cruise and Kidman’s marriage. I can only imagine what putting those moments—both banal and intense—on display did to them.

But we can talk about the sex—also both banal and intense—in the film for days, but it is only a surface reading. The sex is incidental. I’m struck in this viewing by the dynamic between Harford (Cruise) and his old medical school chum Nick Nightingale (Todd Field). You might have one read from their scenes together, but Eyes Wide Shut isn’t about those surface readings. I tend to think that if Bill hadn’t met someone at that party who rejected everything he himself had done to have a comfortable, stable life, he probably wouldn’t have gotten in nearly as much trouble as he did.

You might think I’m reading the movie wrong. I’m not, but then again it’s very hard to read a Kubrick film entirely wrong.

*No, I’m not saying which festival. You just keep submitting.

Top Secret! (1984)

Director: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker

Cast: Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, Christopher Villers, Michael Gough

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know, I’m not sure how I made it this far, either.

Did I Like It: I laughed, mostly at non sequitir, but then again I’m a sucker for that which avoids sequitirianism. On that front, as a comedy, it hit its target. Did I laugh as much as I might have in Airplane! (1980) or The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)? Probably not.

What went wrong? A couple of things. First, Val Kilmer isn’t really funny. At all. I’m mystified to learn (and am still more than a little skeptical that it actually went down this way) that he sang all of his songs through the film, but he’s just not funny at all. Somebody like Robert Hays or Leslie Nielsen can milk all of the laughs they want out of playing things straight, but Kilmer can’t find that magic. I did like seeing Kilmer play off of the great character actor Michael Gough—who can be funny—but that’s more for other reasons.

Any movie would be doomed if it is that fundamentally miscast for the number one on the call sheet, but problems go deeper than that. Spy movies can be spoofed, sure. As much as the whole shtick got a little tired, the first Austin Powers largely works. Other genres are apt, like cop movies and the disaster film. By now, literally every genre has gotten the treatment with wildly varying degrees of success. But who literally cares about Elvis pictures? Even those who view the King as some sort of semi-religious figure can’t with a straight face claim that Viva Las Vegas (1964) and Blue Hawaii (1961) were worth a damn. A genre has to have some sort of quality to it before it can be ripe for satire. The Elvis movie is barely a genre, much less a beloved one.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Director: Fede Álvarez

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced

Have I Seen it Before: No… Except for… No. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Did I Like It: With last year’s strike, it feels like there just haven’t been that many movies released this year, and as such I was a little worried that my best-of list at the end of the year would be mostly 2023 films which didn’t see a wide release until this year.

Happy to report that his film shoots up to the tippy-top of the list. It is the best film of the series since Aliens (1986) by several miles. The production design of the film is top notch, always selling me on the fact that this takes place between Alien (1979) and its sequel. I’ve never been more delighted to report that in the future, the Commodore 64 will see something of a renaissance.

The movie takes the Xenomorphs in new directions, and nearly all of those new directions are terrifying. I spent most of the two-hour runtime with my with my jaw on the floor or recoiling in terror. Much of my obscene tank of popcorn masquerading as a small did not get eaten.

This praise is not without some very real reservations. While it is the best since Aliens, neither of the first two movies’ positions as all-time greats are threatened here. Mainly my qualms comes in the shape of fan service. I’m not reflexively anti-fan service. A film can truck exclusively in fan service (I’m looking in your direction, Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) and still be enjoyable within that context. References to what has come before are fine too. I’m honestly kind of charmed by this film being a soft reboot for the franchise, while also not being at all ashamed of what came before, when we might have forgiven them for ignoring some of what had come before. The problem comes with dialogue call backs. Andy (Jonsson, easily the MVP of the cast) indicates he prefers the term “artificial person,” I’m fine. When Andy also tries to give one of the xenomorphs an order which we all heard before, I rolled my eyes, but everyone else in the theater cheered. Maybe I’m wrong? When Rain concludes the film with a log entry proclaiming her final girl status, I can’t help but be a tad disappointed that a film which was so well-crafted and felt so fresh (the intermediate stage between full-xenomorph and chestburster, anyone?) decides to offer us these sort of nuggets that never feel quite as right as the rest of the film surrounding it.

UHF (1989)

Director: Jay Levey

Cast: “Weird Al” Yankovic, Kevin McCarthy, Michael Richards, Victoria Jackson

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Oddly, the thing I remember most from the film is that the DVD commentary goes a step above and “Weird Al” (must I use the quotation marks each time?) offers specific addresses for every location used. A weird running gag for everyone else, but for someone living in Tulsa, it was pretty helpful.

Also? Family lore does tell that for that brief moment where there were signs for the fictional “Spatula City” my mother expressed that it was a good idea and that we needed new spatulae*.

Did I Like It: Yes, but I can see why this wasn’t the beginning of a long happy career as a comedic leading man for Yankovic. When being the frontman of parody and comedy songs, he’s got more than enough charisma to sell spoofs of a wide genre of music. As a leading man, he never feels anything other than awkward. We didn’t buy him at the head of a movie, and I don’t mean that as any kind of insult. I think he would agree with that, hence why he didn’t try again in the ensuing 35 years.

Here’s where the film kind of works, some of the movie spoofs are a little scattershot, but they’re of a generally higher quality. I’d put them right up there with the best of the ZAZ crew. I laughed several times despite myself.

Other comedic performances are pretty good. Always nice to see John Paragon. Victoria Jackson isn’t all that funny, but she isn’t especially annoying either, so that’s something. Michael Richards manages to create a sort of proto-Kramer here that works so well that there are moments you forget the pariah he eventually became.

But you know what really brings me into the film, or at least what lured me into watching it this week? I saw Twisters (2024), and while I didn’t like the film very much, I was most annoyed by the fact that it is a very Oklahoma film, but from an Oklahoma that doesn’t mean much to me. The two main characters have their obligatory bonding during a rodeo in Stillwater. The female lead says at the top of the film, “I love Oklahoma,” where I spend most of my time trying to tunnel my way into pretty much anywhere else. The cowboy is hero here. And not the John Wayne cowboy that’s problematic enough or the Clint Eastwood cowboy that might as well be a samurai, but the kind of cowboy that lives exclusively in music videos that air on CMT, and would likely die because they were out and about on days when bad weather was coming in. Every Oklahoma movie, including the original Twister (1996) and The Outsiders (1983). But this movie, even though it is silly and occasionally proudly stupid, is an Oklahoma more interested in making weird stuff, unnerving the buttoned-down establishment, and confusing creativity and imagination with having seen too many movies. You know, the real Oklahoma. Or at least the one I’ve seen every day for forty years.

*That’s the plural of spatula, right? Or is that the plural, and the singular form is spatul?

Twisters (2024)

Director: Lee Isaac Chung

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Maura Tierney

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Took me more than a few weeks to get around to it. For this whole time I just wasn’t excited by a sequel to Twister (1996).

Did I Like It: In a word, no.

I like that the climax of the film (spoilers) takes place in a movie theater, although I don’t love so much that it is at least possible in the Twister-verse, a 35mm print of Frankenstein (1931) accessible to theaters in Oklahoma perished under the tantrum of an F5 cyclone.

Anything else, I’m pretty not wild about.

The original Twister wasn’t exactly a thinking man’s thriller, but it had a breezy (pun not intended, but I accept your condemnations), unassuming quality that makes it likable enough. The cast though was a murderer’s row of interesting character actors. The cast here is—with the exception of Ramos—drab and boring. Powell is handsome and charming, and I spent several seconds thinking thinking that David Corenswet should be playing Superman before I remembered that he is, in fact, on deck to perform that very task.

There are other, deeper problems with the cast. I like Maura Tierney. I watched NewsRadio and the later seasons of ER just like everyone else should. But you’re never going to convince me that her role was originally supposed to be played by another performer, but Helen Hunt said no after the producers had any sort of inclination to fundamentally re-work the beats of their script.

There’s an ounce of freedom if—even if it is by necessity—that the film doesn’t feel compelled to be slavishly devoted to what came before as many legacy sequels can’t seem to help. As a matter of fact, the only slight reference to the original in the entire film is a Dorothy doppler device in the film’s opening scene that is judged to be past its prime.

If only the film could somehow overcome an absolutely plague of “As you know, Bob” dialogue. The original Twister had the good sense to bring along someone who didn’t know anything about tornados to be a receptive vessel for exposition. Here, everyone has a advanced degrees in meteorology, but feel the need to tell everyone else about every little thing that happens.

Somehow, I came out of Twisters not only finding it kind of an eye-rolling bore, but it made me realize I may owe Jan de Bont an apology for spending the better part of thirty years rolling my eyes at a movie better than its reputation.

Cast Away (2000)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt, Nick Searcy, Chris Noth

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, boy. How much time do you have? I’m reasonably sure I saw it three times in the theater. I can remember so clearly being at my first job—sacking groceries for a now defunct purveyor of “fine” foods—being told that they had over-scheduled for the shift and needed someone to clock out. They had barely gotten the sentence out by the time I was already walking to my car, and heading to screening #2*.

And yet, for some reason, I have not seen it in… I don’t know how long. I’m going to guess its been about twenty years.

Did I Like It: I spent so much time writing about my experiences with watching the film in the far flung past, what more is there to say? It’s a rather brilliant way to make a movie, leaning into the central problem of trying to depict a man stranded on an island and just make two separate shoots out of the thing. Can any other actor hold a film all by himself for as long as Hanks does here? Everything is working to the film’s favor.

Some might complain about an ending that tries to put a bow on everything, but I couldn’t disagree more. The real movie for me starts when Noland (Hanks) gets back to the civilized world. He had to be so terrified that he would only make things worse by trying to leave the island once it became even remotely possible. And when he returns, the reality of the situation is not all he imagined (or had to imagine) it to be. But then he is free to live any kind of life he might imagine in that final moment. Leaving the island paid off. Some might say he goes immediately back to the angel wing girl (Lari White) and that puts too much of a bow on things. I think he might do that. But the point is he can do whatever he wants.

*I said once recently that “leaving work early to go see a movie” is my love language, and it not only goes back that far. I was not-yet six and my first time seeing Back to the Future – Part III (1990) (something about Zemeckis films released in years ending in “0”, I guess… Don’t bring up The Witches (2020), please.) was probably the incident which wrinkled my brain in such a way, and I wasn’t even the one taking off of work for it.

Prometheus (2012)

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba

Have I Seen It Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: Is it possible to give a film partial credit? The last entry in the Alien franchise*, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1997) benefited from an (just ever so slightly) above average script, but was weighed down by visual effects that removed any of the threat from the xenomorphs. This is working with the other formula and hoping for some degree of better success. The visuals are often stunning. The interiors of the ship Prometheus pull elements from the design of the Nostromo in Alien (1979) but extend it into a new environment that is always interesting to look at. I almost don’t mind that I can’t even kind of believe that the tech on display in this film looks wildly more advanced than the tech on the Nostromo, despite that first film taking place thirty years later.

Then there’s the story. One of the great “what the hell is that?” moments of Alien is the landing party coming across the Space Jockey. Alien doesn’t feel the need to tell us everything about how that poor unfortunate soul got something to leap out of them. It is content instead to let us wonder about how deeply weird this universe might be the deeper into the cosmos you drift. Jumping off with the idea of how that guy got into that seat is a shaky one to begin with. Jamming all of the wonder of that moment into its own two hour movie is pretty much guaranteed to dampen that wonder when one goes back to watch Alien again. But the film isn’t even really about that. It’s about those people, but LV-426 is kept as far away as possible. Even those squirrelly xenomorphs are only injected—sort of—as an afterthought that reeks of a studio note. How does one classify a bad idea that’s ultimately also a half-measure? “Uneven” is probably the nicest one for which I can immediately reach.

*I’m not looking in your direction any vs. Predator films, not because I’m looking down at you, but more because I can make the following point more smoothly without you getting in the way.

Thelma (2024)

Director: Josh Margolin

Cast: June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Richard Roundtree, Clark Gregg

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. I’ve been oddly thwarted in my attempts to see the film over the course of the summer. Not the troubles I had with Wildcat (2023), but then again few things are. Imagine the egg on my face when I emerged, bleary-eyed from a screening of Horizon – An American Saga: Chapter One (2024) weeks ago to find that my plans to immediately pick up a screening of this, only to find that it had been sold out.

Did I Like It: This movie is sort of spooky, if I’m being perfectly honest. Sure, it’s a wonderful twist on a tried and true format of someone getting wronged, finding the world doesn’t really care, and the taking matters into their own hands, except the Charles Bronsan character is played by a woman in her 90s (Squibb). That subversion of the form provides some fresh avenues for humor, but it is never at anyone’s expense. Thelma may be diminished (as her friend Ben (Roundtree) might say) by age, but she is no dummy, nor is she the kind of quaint bumpkin-sage who Forrest Gump’s their way to a successful evening of the score. Similarly, her gen-z grandson Daniel (Hechinger) is lost in and overwhelmed by a world for which he wasn’t ready, but he takes enough after his grandma that when Thelma tells him she never had to worry about him, we aren’t worried about him either.

But how is it spooky? Well Daniel is a 24-year-old underachiever rambling around town in a mid-80s Diesel Mercedes barely kept together and far too messy for any reasonable adult to comprehend. As someone who was once a 24-year-old underachiever (some may say I got my act together just under the wire before 24, others may shake their head just as hard at the 40-year-old version) that strikes a little closer to home. There’s that moment in your life where you look at your parents and it seems like you’re being asked to play poker with Monopoly tokens, and your grandparents are similarly put upon for exactly the same reason. Maybe I just miss my various grandmas, but I’ve been thinking about them and Thelma since finally getting to see the movie.

Zoolander (2001)

Director: Ben Stiller

Cast: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Christine Taylor

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. In fact, as I was watching it, I was surprised to realize that bits of the movie had drifted into my vernacular over the years. Any time I hear the world derelict, I want to put the accent on the wrong syllable. Mer-man. Crazy pills. The film has far more sticking power than I would have thought.

Did I Like It: It’s humor still holds up reasonably well, which probably elevates it above many of the other comedies of the era. We may try to forget the movie after the rather odious sequel (a film I couldn’t even bring myself to finish) but giving it another shot is bound to give you some degree of enjoyment. It may not be at the level of some of Stiller’s other, more cerebral work like The Cable Guy (1996) or Severance, but if we judge every film for not having any sort of idea behind it, we probably wouldn’t watch much of anything anymore.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s my one irretrievable problem with the movie. I’m not going to name any names*, but I was supremely not in any sort of mood to laugh after hearing from the fourth person in the movie to have any dialogue. You’ll know the moment when you see it**. He shows up in all sorts of movies during this era. And I can’t help but wonder if there is truly nothing—from the “On Our Own” music video from Ghostbusters II (1989) to Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—that this guy can’t ruin just by showing up. That’s clearly not Stiller’s fault, but one wonders if those odious platforms designed to edit out any sort of adult content from films could actually be re-directed to doing something useful.

*If for no other reason than one does want to avoid getting into an equal time problem…

**If you don’t know the moment, then you may need to re-think large portions of your life.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Your mileage on this film is going to largely depend on the era in which you watch it. As a diligent movie freak in my younger (and now older) years, I made a point of watching it. In the early 2000s, the threats of the last century had already seemed quaint, and so, too, did the movie itself.

But now?

With a world swinging wildly between the abjectly horrific and the sublimely absurd (or is it the other way around?), the jokes hit quite a bit harder. That might be a bit unfair, and risks drifting into that same nostalgic way of thinking that insists that the world was a simpler place when we were younger. It isn’t so much that I wasn’t able to get into the film in the year 2000, it’s probably more that the world isn’t crazy enough for a fifteen year old to really enjoy the potshot.

But Kubrick isn’t a comic filmmaker at his core. Judging the film just by the standard of how much it makes one laugh is only part of the equation. Normally immaculate in each of his films, Kubrick lets the film surrounding this funhouse mirror reflection of the world in 1964. The expansive war room brought to life by Ken Adam—you’ll see his aesthetic all over the early Bond films—contrasts with the cramped spaces of the B-52 bomber. Visually, it keeps one interested, but all stays of a piece with each other. Aurally, too, the War Room echoes cavernously with every shout while the bomber clicks and whirrs with every mechanized horror they implement. Kubrick never cedes control over his films, even when what is being displayed is pointedly chaotic.

Alien Resurrection (1997)

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Dan Hedaya

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. You buy an Alien box set in a couple of different formats, and you’re bound to give in. My biggest memory of the film, however, is it opening along with the grand opening of the AMC Southroads 20 here in Tulsa, and my poor little 13 year would have wanted nothing more in life than to just go to the theater of my own accord and watch a mindless monster movie sequel.

Did I Like It: I’ve been watching a lot of 90s late-series genre movies lately, and there’s no way to judge this movie by exceptionally harsh standards. Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) should have probably been cancelled before shooting began. Batman & Robin (1997) is a movie I have been spending a lot of my life really loathing, and for some good reason, but I’ve come to understand that someone out there might enjoy it. Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) I keep referencing in recent reviews, mainly because the more I think about it, the worse the movie gets. Ultimately, this one could be a lot worse, and sort of works in fits and starts as a b sci-fi movie. It’s a step up from Alien 3 (1992), although the last entry didn’t exactly leave us with a lot of beloved characters to suddenly kill in a prologue.

One doesn’t necessarily want to engage in a lot of blind praise for Joss Whedon, but the story of this film is its strong suit. Ultimately the pitch of “a prototype version of the crew from Firefly and Serenity (2005)) up against a new batch of Xenomorphs is a nice idea for a movie. Sure, the notion that some of Ripley’s (Weaver) memories survive into a clone is a little silly, but the cloning plot line does give the movie something of a reason for existing, and more importantly gives Weaver new and interesting things to do. All of this concludes with an ending that seems ready for a future (that was not meant to be) for the series—which Alien 3 was resolutely against—even if that history was meant to focus on Ryder’s Call, always inhabiting the film as if she is waiting to take over in the event Weaver gets bored.

Special effects are the film’s Achilles’ heel, though. There is some interesting and genuinely unsettling creature work when the film focuses—really only for a single scene—on the array of Ripley clone drafts. But our friend the Xenomorph never looked—and never would look—so underwhelming. Physical actors in suits look like the costumes were hastily put together. The otherworldly quality of H.R. Giger or Stan Winston are gone. The less said about the more extensive attempts—Alien 3 tried it occasionally—to render the creatures using CGI, the better. If I had wanted to play the Alien Resurrection game on the original Playstation, I would have just done that.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024)

Director: Mark Molloy

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, Judge Reinhold

Have I Seen It Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: The fourth film in the series is occasionally quite amusing, and always a little more than amiable. This immediately puts it ahead of Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) which is an interesting anti-comedy singularity, whose super gravity makes everything around it less funny, and for which I keep wanting to add things to my review*.

It’s also not nearly as funny as the original Beverly Hills Cop (1984). That’s not a terrible sin. Quick: Name a sequel that’s as good or even better than the original. I’m sure you’re coming up with several examples. And you’re right. Let’s make it a little more challenging: Name a comedy sequel that’s anywhere near as good as the original. I’ll wait**.

The slightly more troubling quality is that the film is thoroughly committed to eliciting memories of the first film, especially with those needle drops, that I think I may owe Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) an apology, as I callously accused that film of the same thing, and now never in a million years would I accuse Tony Scott of eating Martin Brest’s leftovers.

Also, did I hallucinate this, or did Axel (Murphy) claim to be celibate at the weirdest possible time in the weirdest possible way in this film? I mean, the notion of a comedy action star claiming to eschew the flesh isn’t the worst jumping off point for a movie, and in fact it would have been weirdly original idea. But here, it’s thrown in the mix without anything to back it up or pay it off, I can’t help but wonder if Murphy insisted on adding it into the film. Which only makes it weirder…

*Why the hell didn’t John Singleton direct that? He was right there. Come to think of it, why are all four directors in this series white? This feels a pointedly dumb ongoing choice.

**I might, might, give you Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) up against Lethal Weapon (1987), but I would contend that the original Weapon is far less of a comedy than the first Beverly Hills Cop, and it would likely be the least controversial opinion I would express that day.

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939)

Director: Frank Capra

Cast: Jimmy Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Edward Arnold

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. It’s been a couple of years. I’m reasonably sure that the last time I watched it was probably 2008. I’m going to take that as a positive omen and not dwell on it much further.

Did I Like It: I always feel as if I’m on uneven footing when I embark on reviewing a movie so classic that everyone has seen a few minutes of, and almost everyone hasn’t actually seen the whole movie. How can I convince you to see it if you’ve not already seen it? More importantly, is there anything new—I’d settle for unusual—to say about it?

I suppose the thing I’m most struck by is not the heart-on-the-sleeves optimistic patriotism, or the pure “aw, shucks” energy that was encased in a shell that looked like Jimmy Stewart. I’m most struck by the things that Capra and Company might have said about America in the years leading up to World War II, but either couldn’t or might never have thought to say.

In an effort to reach for a timeless quality, the film doesn’t seem to acknowledge that the world at large is mid-disaster at the time. I’m sure a Boy Scout camp is a great idea when Europe is swinging hard towards fascism. There’s a layer of optimism beyond Smith’s (Stewart) wielding of the filibuster in that. A cynic in 1939 might try to hedge their bets and allow for the possibility that western civilization was nearing its sell by date.

This is also a profoundly white movie. An absolute infant of a traditionalist might blink at that observation, but you can’t help but focus on the dejected faces of porters in the train station sequences, but the ret of the film has people of color throughout. They’re in the background, as if they are waiting in the background of America. Maybe Capra is trying to say something additional that the one-two punch of the Hays Code and Harry Cohn would have never let get to the surface.

Maybe I’m wanting to see it in the film. Maybe I’m wanting to see that in the world.