What I’ve Caught Up With, August 2023:
Film: Hey Arnold!: The Movie (2002)
Both of my girls enjoyed the Hey Arnold! television show, and it was one I was always happy to have them watch. The movie is essentially a very long episode of the show, but it’s a good one. The Hey Arnold! show is pretty much unknown outside of the kids who grew up with it, but it was a solid cartoon and actually did well with a sort of worldbuilding that the film manages to live up to. It’s not a necessary watch unless you know the show, and if you know the show, you’ve probably already seen this. As television-to-movie adaptations go, you could do a lot worse.
Film: Blackfish (2013)
I’ve long had a love/hate relationship with zoos. They serve an important purpose in helping to maintain the existence of threatened species, but they also nothing good for the animals that are actually in captivity. Blackfish is a kind of exposé on Sea World and similar places, looking specifically at the deaths of orca trainers at several different parks. The film is controversial—a number of people interviewed for the film think they have been misrepresented. It’s hard to see what becomes of these animals, though, and it’s hard not to in some respects side with the whales acting out in frustration, no different than any other captive animal acting out.
Film: Design for Living (1933)
When you see a film like Design for Living, you have to wonder what we’ve missed when it comes to sex comedies when the Hays Code became a thing. This film is absolutely a sex comedy, and perhaps the first film that is legitimately about a polycule. Playwright Tom Chambers (Fredric March) and painter George Curtis (Gary Cooper) both fall in love with advertising artist Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins), who loves both of them equally. After essentially shacking up with each of them, she decides she can’t make up her mind. This is a film that is very explicit about the sex that Gilda (pronounced with a soft “g”) and the two men are having. It’s fun, but also pretty inconsequential.
Film: Spider-Man: Far From Home
I’m still struggling to get through all of the MCU material that I haven’t watched. I do like that they’ve finally found someone to play Spider-Man who looks the part. Spidey should be a high school kid; that’s what makes him interesting. Spider-Man: Far From Home takes the webhead and puts him in Europe on a class trip. It’s a bit contrived, but the action is good, and I like that they’ve gone with a new villain in Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio. It’s a solid film with good action sequences, and it’s also refreshingly short for an MCU film at just over two hours. Someone needs to give Ned super powers, because he’s regularly the best part of these films.
Film: The Black Hole (1979)
The classic science fiction story is a spaceship and a distress call, and The Black Hole fills that basic plot about as well as Alien from the same year. This follows a story similar to Forbidden Planet in some ways and is followed horrifically by Event Horizon. While not bad, this is a couple of years after Star Wars. There’s no reason that the effects in this should be this hokey. The plot is pretty good, and the idea of a ship orbiting a massive black hole is cool, but it really should look better than it does. Disney is doing tons of remakes these days. At almost 45 years old, this should be a worthy candidate.
Film: Machete (2010)
Machete started life as one of the fake movie trailers from Grindhouse, and while I would have really liked to see Don’t as a real film, I’m not going to complain about this one, because it really does feel like a grindhouse film. It’s ridiculous and over the top and very much has the feel of a film style that should end in ‘sploitation. Danny Trejo is an ex-Federale code named Machete whose family is killed by a drug kingpin (played by Steven Seagal of all people). Years later, Machete is hired to assassinate a Texas state senator, and all hell breaks loose. Interesting that at least a part of the target audience for this are the very people who would support the bad guys' “build the wall” ethos. One hell of a cast—Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson, Lindsey Lohan, Cheech Marin, Jeff Fahey, Jessica Alba, Tom Savini, and Robert Goddamn DeNiro make appearances.
