So much cool shit going on around the edges, so little going on at the actual story level. An illuminated manuscript pulled from the middle of the YA pile at a scholastic book fair.
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Now and Then - The Last Beatles Song 2023
Love the lads, and the song is decent enough, but sorry to me this whole thing just felt ghoulish and more than a little mercenary.
I like how they repeatedly go out of their way to reassure us that John totally would have been fine with this but they say nothing about George because he obviously would have fucking hated it.
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Amazing World of Ghosts 1978
“The sea, for example, has seen many things.”
An intermittently boring but in-ECKS-plicably entrancing load of cheap nonsense. Gets a lot of good will from me for reminding me of two of my all-time favorite films (Tribulation 99 and the pipe strip episode of Lasagna Cat).
If it never quite reaches the Ed Wood pulp-poetics to which it clearly aspires, it does at least have one rare quality that I find nearly as precious and elusive as ghostly visitations themselves, that being “Fishing With John vibes.”
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Please Baby Please 2022
I love how assured and well-realized this is visually, and how much palpable fun everyone is having (Riseborough and Melling are both fantastic), but ultimately it's just way too safe, timid and academically detached to really grab me.
The midcentury erotic iconography being pastiched here drew its power from the genuine gnawing tension underlying all that tasteful ellipsis and coy suggestion, the tension between the real desires being expressed obliquely and the real danger of having those desires exposed. Please…
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Super Mario Bros. 1993
Watched the superior if still tragically compromised "Morton Jankel Cut," and if nothing else I'm beginning to understand why this was such a perennial Blockbuster fave for me as a kid. For all its many flaws, this remains in its own way one of those special, vivid film fantasies that genuinely sparks the imagination like nothing else can, a cracked and malnourished but still identifiable branch on a family tree that includes the august likes of Metropolis, The Wizard of…
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Homicide: The Movie 2000
The last season of Homicide: Life On the Street did my man Tim Bayliss so dirty, flattening six seasons of sensitive, nuanced, still uncommonly progressive character development into "haha get a load of Zen Cop," and the movie only twists the knife even further.
That said, Homicide remains one of the best TV shows ever made,* and it's a real bummer that it's been dropped into the memory hole along with everything else that isn't available for streaming.
*with the…
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Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners 2020
"It's like, what happened to the fun partying stuff? It's all legal stuff now...I mean, it used to be pretty good around season two and that was when we got invested."
I guess Inchworms in Paradise is the Vanderpump Rules of this universe.
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