The Signal Watch

Happy Birthday, Lynda Carter

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:58:14 +0000

Today is the 75th birthday of Signal Watch patron saint Lynda Carter. Big milestone!

I'm not sure what Carter has been up to this year. Hopefully she's off having a grand time somewhere.

Ms. Carter isn't just an actor, advocate and sometimes-superhero. She's also a singer and performer.

Here she is a few decades back with our friends, The Muppets:

He-Watch: Masters of the Universe (2026)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 05:14:04 +0000

Watched: 07/23/2026

Format: Amazon Prime

Viewing: First

Director: Travis Knight

Well.

That was sure a He-Man movie.

I'm not particularly a fan of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, the cartoon nor the toy line. In fact, when this movie was pitched, I wrote a whole long post about how weird I thought it was that a movie studio went all in on what I thought was probably a far niche-ier market for this movie than they were probably aware, and I wasn't particularly looking to spend my paycheck on watching the movie in theaters.

But as the movie approached, I thought "well, maybe I'll take the niece and nephew", but neither of them showed the slightest interest - and they'd seen the trailer. Something came up around the release date, and I thought "well, I'll go in like two weeks". But the reviews hit and were unkind, the audience stayed away in droves, and the movie was gone. And I was back to Plan A, which was to watch it streaming.

Meanwhile, my social media was ablaze with the "it's actually really good" assurances, and "all of you will say 'why didn't anyone tell me to see it in the theater?'"

So, I don't know what I was expecting, but at about the fifty-two minute mark Jamie fully tapped out and I put it on pause until after she'd gone to bed.

Pretty clearly, Mattel saw the billion dollars they made with Barbie and wanted a repeat. To get there, they wrote down key-words about Barbie and decided, if it works with Barbie - we can do it again! You can almost imagine the white board in the Mattel offices where they made a word cloud. "Self-aware", "funny", "doesn't take self-seriously", "nostalgia", "doesn't match expectations", "turns common conception upside down", "tries to make a point".

The result is a movie that is very self-consciously meta and desperately wants to be funny, but feels like a kid who saw someone else get laughs with a joke and tries to deliver the same joke, but flubs the timing and forgets part of the punchline.

I'd also argue that the conceit of the touchy-feely Adam just (a) never works as much as they think it does and (b) kinda undercuts itself completely with He-Man beating Skeletor to death with his bare hands by the end of the movie. Kind of like Supergirl, it's having its cake and eating it, too, with the finale. And from what I can tell, people would rather have their familiar-narrative buttons punched than see a narrative that comes to a coherent point.

Look, I'm just not nostalgic for the characters, but I do remember some of them (but clearly not enough of them). I just think the take was weird - for me. It wasn't camp, though I am sure people will apply the word (while being wrong online). Like Barbie, the movie acknowledges the absurdities of He-Man concepts - I mean, Mekaneck, fercrissake - and the cartoon, while also demanding the audience point and say "I got that reference". Which I assume many people between the ages of 49 and 53 might be able to do. This is a feature, not a bug.

me for the two hours of this movie

I just didn't think there was much more there. As a comedy, which the movie most assuredly is, I didn't find it very funny. The same jokes keep happening whether they're funny or not. In the end, the best part of the movie is probably (sigh) Jared Leto as Skeletor. But even that's odd because the goings-on at Snake Mountain were already pretty fucking funny back in the cartoon, and they just do that.

The guy who plays He-Man does great with what he's given - I guess he's Nicholas Galitzine who was very good in Sheep Detectives. But he can't save a role that starts feeling very tedious by the hour mark. Idris Elba is clearly enjoying himself. Camila Mendes has the thankless part of humorless girl warrior, which was always Teela. Alison Brie is actually doing a solid Evil Lyn from the cartoon, so no shade. I just wish they let her do more than be ~~hot~~ the girl who fights the other girl.

One also can't help but note the music, and... I dunno. Brian May was directly involved, and I wanted to love it. It just all felt so on the nose. Like, I get you're doing Flash Gordon, but I've seen Flash Gordon. And I'm the person who really, really wished they'd had May score John Carter. But it all felt very would-be-James Gunn-needle-drop but too obvious? Playing "Boys Don't Cry" when Adam is being sad about Eternia on Earth? Like... isn't that lazy? Isn't "Princes of the Universe" too much? As in - don't make me think of movies I like in your less good movie. (I should also mention there's also a complete rip-off of a James Gunn single-shot-group-fight-scene). But it just made me want to tell film-makers that maybe it's time we stop with needle-drops for a minute until we get better at this.

I'm going to wrap it up. I guess if we want to talk about the movie more in the comments, we can. I guess I was just underwhelmed by the whole thing. So, no, I am not saying "boy, why didn't anyone tell me this was so good?" I think it kind of landed where it needed to - a streamer I didn't pay extra for on a Thursday night.

Also, where the fuck was Stinkor?

Modern Western Watch: The Lusty Men (1952)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Watched: 07/21/2026

Format: TCM on DVR

Viewing: First

Director: Nicholas Ray

The term "lusty" has not always meant "horned up". The dictionary definition just means "healthy" and "vigorous". Or, "Hearty", or, even "enthusiastic, rousing".

So, while Susan Hayward paired with Robert Mitchum may lead one to believe we're heading for "lust-ful" men, and we are, I think they just meant "these cowboys are hale and hearty".

After all, this is a movie about a young, married man (Arthur Kennedy) deciding to join the rodeo circuit in order to make money enough to buy a ranch and settle down. As it turns out, he wants to buy the boyhood home of veteran rodeo rider Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum). The new rodeo-man's wife, Susan Hayward, is reasonably concerned about this decision. After all, rodeo riders tend to get mauled by bulls, thrown from horses to grave injury, and more... It's not what she signed up for.

She was going to get married and live a quiet, domestic life. But she feels she has to support her husband if he's hell-bent on this plan, and so travels with her husband and Mitchum. And immediately finds out "this lifestyle is even worse than you figured".

One thing I started noticing maybe a decade ago is that no one in new movies is ever *poor*. If they are, it's a punchline or a period piece about scraping by on the frontier or something. Maybe sometimes it's something where people have to pull off a big heist or whatever and they're living a little fringey, but it's rare we get a movie where the accepted circumstances are "we're living paycheck-to-paycheck and so is everyone we know". Instead, everyone has a multi-room apartment at minimum, and without roommates.

I find this turn odd. Maybe the constant stream of Ivy Leaguers and third generation rich LA kids running movies don't really have a concept of the kinds of stuff that reflect folks in fly-over country. Maybe our belief we're all one day away from becoming among the folks getting bottle service at der klerb.

But this movie is about grabbing for a dream - actually finding that success - and forgetting what the goal was to begin with. That the best thing you can actually win is that shitty ranch in Bandera, where you and Susan Hayward can have a few kids and run some cattle. It's amazing how the idea of "making it" used to be - many films - "we're basically covering the bills".

I don't know that there's a lot new to The Lusty Men. Mitchum playing a stoic ex-rodeo man who is mostly hanging around hoping Susan Hayward will decide to run off with him (and since it's Susan Hayward, we know she won't) is not the most novel concept/ a bit predictable. The script is written as a series of plants and pay-offs, and what will happen with Jeff feels pre-ordained. And you can see where things are headed.

But that doesn't mean the dialog isn't sharp. The story is a good one, and it's well told, thanks to director Nicholas Ray and his cast. There's real rodeo footage cut in and it's a reminder that this story is fiction based in hard reality. In fact - we have both the Cedar Park rodeo coming up, and there's organized rodeo teams now. Locally, we've got "The Austin Gamblers".

There's no doubt Susan Hayward is lovely and a talented actor. She won at least one Academy Award, was nominated for more, and was an important star in her day. She brings a lot of presence to the few movies I've seen her in. No shade. She's just not my favorite. Who knows why? But I *buy* her choices. And in this film she's not overly concerned with being likable so much as relatable. She's the POV for everyone who thinks "wow, rodeo riding seems perilous - maybe someone should talk someone out of doing that".

And Mitchum is in a role where being cool isn't a bonus - and it works. There's a lot of subtext to what he's doing - not saying what he wants in any scene, but you always know.

Now, the film kind of starts in what is supposed to be Bandera, a town west and north of San Antonio, and our Young Rodeo guy is from Big Spring, which is one of those dots on the map out around Midland. But the story does move across the US between Ft. Worth and Southern California. But it made me pay attention that they named towns I'm aware are out this general direction.

The movie is a drama, at the end of the day - and lands on trying for kind of a higher-brow sort of story about choices we make, and the appeal of the spotlight - and at what cost. Not a bad film - this is Nicholas Ray after all, and he doesn't put out anything I'd think was "not good". Apparently well received, I don't know if it was a prestige picture, but it's certainly an A picture, and I think worth a spin.

Kaylee Hottle Merges With the Infinite

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:29:02 +0000

Hottle at the Godzilla x Kong premiere in 2024

This is a tough one.

Actor Kaylee Hottle, who I knew from two of the Legendary Godzilla/ Kong movies, has passed. She was only 18. Because she was so young, I know readers will be curious - she sustained injuries in a car accident.

Hottle played Jia, who was a main character in both Godzilla/ Kong movies, and Kong's connection to the human world. As a young actor, she was terrific. I have no doubt she would have gone on to do great things.

This is deeply sad and unfair to her family. Our deepest sympathies.

Late Edit: I didn't know Hottle was from a town just south of Austin and a student at Austin's Texas School for the Deaf. This just keeps getting sadder.

Arthouse Watch: The World to Come (2020)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:23:22 +0000

Watched: 07/19/2026

Format: Library disc

Viewing: First

Director: Mona Fastvold

I really liked Vanessa Kirby in last summer's Fantastic Four, and was aware she had a career a bit like Rebecca Hall. ~~Be foxy in things~~ After getting noticed in smaller stuff, do a mix of some big, silly crowd pleasers (Hall is in two King Kong movies and an Iron Man) while still doing smaller art films and some prestige pictures. Do all the things.

I happened to find two Kirby movies right off the bat via Austin Public Library, and so I've borrowed this movie, The World to Come (2020) and the Ron Howard flick, Eden.

The World to Come was not exactly a critical darling, but pretty close! It clocked in at a 73 on Metacritic. And I'm not surprised that, especially in the political climate of 2020 - the year of the movie's release - it did well. It got a lot of international attention. It's a period piece about forbidden same-sex love, and it is very sad, and that is absolute critic bait.

First - before we get to the rest - the performances in it are good to very good, and I say that with no small amount of amazement for reasons I shall get to forthwith.

Kirby is stunning in her general Kirby-ness, but also in the performance she delivers, which I think earned her some noms. Lead Katherine Waterston is very buyable as a woman grieving her lost child and married to a man so coded as having the 'tism, it feels like an LLM read social media to write the part. The man in question is Casey Affleck, who - at the time of the film's shooting and release, was probably hiding from Hollywood as he'd been very publicly #MeToo'd. Which may have led to him appearing in a British movie filmed in like Transylvania doubling for upstate New York in the 1850's. But do pity actor Christopher Abbott who plays the villain of our piece - for he is written like a red flag in 1850's garb and has to not twirl a mustache once.

The cinematography is lovely - the rural setting a fantastic backdrop, the interior lighting of the rustic homes handled phenomenally. Photog Andre Chemetoff does some stellar work here, and hats off. You can have a critical darling without this level of craftmanship, but it sure sells the idea this movie is good if it looks like a million bucks.

But, sweet Christ, is this movie plodding, ponderous, predictable and - its biggest crime - pretentious as fuck.

I can tell you exactly when I turned on this movie. It was when I had to turn on the Closed Captions not for the usual reasons, but because the dialog of the two characters - both the wives of farmers in 1850 - in speaking about raising hogs, used the word "asperity" as a punch line.

I'm 51. I read. I have two college degrees. I am fine with not knowing a word. I am also a movie-fan enough that I enjoy some stylized dialog. But it also needs to make sense in some sort of context - and dialog also needs to communicate the movie's ideas in a way that is clear on a first viewing.

The notion that folks in 1850-whatever all spoke like the letters of the best educated and thought-leaders of their day is a choice. And it's a choice I found tedious by the 30th minutes of the movie - it just feels like the third smartest person in your class who reads a lot really doing a flex.

That is - until when one of our two leads says something *daring* in the plainest possible language, and in close-up. You know, so you know it's *important* and *maybe deep*. Which you will know because of the serious beat the movie takes.

These aren't acting problems - our leads are working their asses off selling this dialog that is the floweriest of purple prose - these are script and directing choices.

The movie is also predictable. There's not all that much happening - and we know from the poster "forbidden girl/girl romance" is the plot. It will be doomed queer love - catnip for some viewers. But it takes absolutely zero work to know from the tone of this movie that Kirby is not making it out of this movie alive (SPOILERS).

Her character is portrayed as spirited and genuine and perfect and unwilling to listen to a word her husband says when he is, at every turn, portrayed as someone who has no problem killing things and is very direct about his expectations and how much it irks him she flaunts his wishes.

And it takes it's sweet time getting there. And when it does, it almost does it as a fake-out, just to really make it suck. We must have profound tears.

So, yeah, the movie a slow, meandering path to get to the point. Which is "things sure were not fair for women in olden times", and, movie, you are right. Things were also bad for people who had same-sex relations. You have cracked a book, congrats. Things were super bad.*

I would be curious how much research was done to get the movie written and made. Frankly, I haven't spent an undue amount of time researching the first-hand accounts of women in that region in that era (it does feel oddly remote for a state that had been established for 230 years and was well-traveled in the 1790's). But it feels like an oddly modern take at times, almost written more like 21st Century people forced into these conditions rather than people who would have known what they were signing up for.

I will say, I bought the romance between the leads - bought their connection in their particular circumstances. There's a story in there that, I think maybe stripped of some of the pretense, I might have embraced more. But it is also a movie that is more or less relentlessly bleak, and I'm not sure has anything particularly novel to say, so tries to make up for that in execution. And the execution just wasn't really my cup of tea.

And I don't know why. This should fit in neatly with films I have enjoyed. The one that comes to mind first is The Piano. But this ain't that.

There are, of course, a million jokes one could make about the title of this movie. Or at least three I've thought of immediately. But this is a class joint.

But, fortunately, Kirby was still hot, so it wasn't all bad.

*And it is baffling in 2026 when people keep voting to bring America back to 1850 when it will be very bad indeed for their children if not for themselves.

Sci-Fi Horror Watch: The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:17:37 +0000

Watched: 07/18/2026

Format: TCM with John Carpenter and Alicia Malone

Viewing: First

Director: Val Guest

SimonUK kept suggesting The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) to me during the podcast era, and I can see why. I think mostly in England, but also among sci-fi and horror-heads in the US, the Quatermass media - of which there's more than you'd think - is considered foundational or classic. Thus, it may have inspired things like Doctor Who (which I confess I never got into) and there's no small amount of John Carpenter's early work in this movie.

And, in fact, I watched it because Carpenter is hosting two days of movies on TCM with Alicia Malone.

I'd also argue - Stan and Jack may have lifted the origin of the Fantastic Four from this movie in a small way. And if you know Jack, he was constantly reworking what he saw on the street, in movies and in culture right into his comics, so it wouldn't shock me.

The movie opens as a rocket crashes back to Earth in a field outside of London - an experiment run by scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass (a bizarrely cast Brian Donlevy in this movie). The rocket is intact, but as the door finally opens, only one astronaut emerges and the other two are missing. Our remaining astronaut is ill, unable to speak and seems disoriented.

Quatermass believes in science and achievement above all else, and while everyone else is freaking out about the missing astronauts and the crash, Quatermass is very much of the opinion that he got his rocket back and one-out-of-three returning ain't bad. However, it's clear something is horribly wrong with the astronaut, Carroon (Richard Wordsworth).

Carroon's wife is rightfully freaking out while everyone else around him is just, like, "yes, but science. He's fine." He is not fine.

SPOILERS

In fact, that's sort of not Carroon anymore - he's inhabited by an alien who is *changing* him. He's a lifeform not entirely unlike the one imagined by Carpenter in The Thing, that takes on characteristics of the lifeforms he touches as he consumes them. And consume them he does - usually just sucking out their life force, sort of draining them. But also leaving behind versions of the animals and humans that are basically an extension of the creature, a horrible, reproducing thing.

This movie is, in fact, my jam. I even like the weirdo casting of Donlevy as Quatermass - something that makes zero sense both in the context of the film and outside of it.

It's really well shot - really using black and white in a way maybe Hammer should have kept doing instead of relying on tomato-colored blood and variations on the Dracula set over and over. It's one of the most thoughtfully shot movies I may have ever seen from Hammer.

And the ending? Top tier. This was weird and great. And I dug practical FX throughout. Just top tier for 1955. Hammer was really firing on all cylinders. This is creeping terror, and the name in the US reflects that. This was released here as The Creeping Unknown, and that name is very on the nose.

Anyway - I get why various folks keep trying to remake this one, and I think *they should*. I think Comberbatch would kill it as a Quatermass.

Noir Watch: Angel Face (1952)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:14:49 +0000

Watched: 07/16/2026

Format: TCM Noir Alley

Viewing: Third? Fourth?

Director: Otto Preminger

I was a bit surprised I'd already written this movie up twice before, but here's the first (fifteen years ago almost exactly!) and here's the second (about eight years ago).

Y'all, I have been doing this *a while*. And, yet, no one has intervened. None of you are to be trusted with my welfare.

Still love this movie. It's all arcs and curves heading for the very particular, noir-perfect, ending.

I'm still a huge fan of Mitchum in everything, and this is no exception - here playing the cat who thinks he can thread the needle, having his rich girl and his marriage-material, too (and it's likely this wasn't the first "other girl" she's put up with). He's just cool enough to make you think he's got the angles sorted, but he never really does.

Jean Simmons' femme fatale is really just girl who is smart as hell, but doesn't understand real-world consequences. And maybe really does just want to be loved?

In the post-film chat, Muller talks about the framing of the film, and every film student could stand to review how he uses space and moves his subjects around in it - something I did note while watching a few scenes. It's a brilliantly shot film on what I assume were studio sets.

But it's also worth mentioning how horrific the car accidents in the movie are - partially because both use convertibles with dummies inside, and the camera doesn't look away. With the right suspension of disbelief, it's really f'd up stuff to put on camera. We're essentially watching characters we've gotten to know die horribly.

And that's kind of the point.

Anyway, come for the scene where Diana meets Mary. That alone is pretty good stuff. As is Mitchum's last conversation where you realize - he has no idea what he's doing, actually.

Will I watch this again in another 7-8 years and be just as surprised this is my fourth write-up? Probably.

Noir Musical Watch: Blues In The Night (1941)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:33:00 +0000

Watched: 07/15/2026

Format: TCM Noir Alley

Viewing: First

Director: Anatole Litvak

So, this movie is super strange, and maybe in a good way, because it really swings for the fences. I am not sure it goes yard (it doesn't) but it's at least an interesting sac fly.

It's a mix of the "let's put on a show!" spirit of the movie musical and takes a turn down an alley into what would come to be known as noir. As the two collide, Blues in the Night (1941) can make for some strange viewing.

A group of guys tossed in jail for the moment decide to form a band - they want to play "the blues". They are not Black. But in the next cell are Black guys, who are singing the Blues. By 2026 standards, this will be the best performance you will see all movie.

Out of jail they head to New Orleans to pick up a trumpet player and his spunky wife, Priscilla Lane. Travelling by box car (and seemingly unbothered by what seems to be this "band" thing going terribly) they meet Norman Lloyd on the lam - he directs them to his club outside of New York City.

Here our troubles begin as it becomes clear Lloyd is a gangster, and our plucky hero, Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf), falls for The Wrong Girl - played brilliantly by Betty Field. She is absolutely the high light, character wise, in this movie - a character who is damaged and lashing out, because who ever did her any good?

Priscilla Lane and Betty Field demonstrate that there are two whole ways to be a main female character in noir

Why Jigger falls for Field is muy mysterioso - she may be foxy, but she's also clearly nuts. His prior insistence on keeping the band together through thick and thin immediately dissolves as he abandons the band and takes Field to a higher echelon of living, playing swank clubs.

But in short order, Field is picking up rich guys while Jigger's on stage and refusing to cover up her trysts. Terrible girlfriend, really. Field, you see, doesn't give a crap about our hero, she's in love with Norman Lloyd, and he'd given her the Heisman.

Things go side-ways for our hero he ends up in the looney bin.

I'll go ahead and say, if this unpleasant, shouty lady leaving causes you to literally lose your mind, she must be really good at something. And it wasn't singing.

There's a whole sequence where Jigger tries to train her to sing, and it... is kinda painful for everyone, including us, watching. But it's also my segue to mention that the movie has I think four montage sequences, and those, alone, are worth the price of admission. It may be a movie that feels bobbled together from other movies, but when they get to those montage sequences, it's hard not to get a bit impressed.

The movie winds up with a crime-thriller ending that feels deeply at odds with the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and it is a wild ride all the way. In some ways, it's a real WTF-is-next? sort of experience as the movie lurches around figuring out what it wants to do and be. And I suspect at some point there was probably a decent script, but this movie sometimes feels like it's two or three movies stapled together.

The result is that Blues in the Night feels plot forward, with too many characters, and no real resolution to fairly major bits. A whole storyline seems to be brewing for Pricilla Lane and her philandering husband, and is just chucked out the window 4/5ths of the way into the movie. Two of the guys in the band barely speak. It almost feels like half-way through writing, someone saw a good crime movie or something from the more realistic Group Theatre and decided "THAT'S what we should do", but failed to rewrite the beginning. And somehow... this went in front of cameras that way.

And, remember when I said it was sort-of a musical? It is. They keep stopping for numbers, the montage sequences are musical numbers. The title song became a pop standard that is still sung today - written by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. Good stuff. And not the last time a song would be more popular than the movie that spawned it.

The movie does have some interesting casting. Priscilla Lane had already been in big pictures and would be in plenty more - she's in both The Roaring Twenties and stars in Arsenic Old Lace if you're looking for a name movie. After this, she's in Saboteur.

Jack Carson I know mostly from Mildred Pierce. Wallace Ford is in... everything. Along with Lloyd Nolan.

Elia "I name names" Kazan is in this in a cheesy supporting role as the guy who really wants to play music, not be a lawyer. His arc is done in the first ten minutes. After that, he's just there to ham up every scene.

Star Richard Whorf would only do a handful of movies in front of the lens and go on to direct a lot of television.

The much mentioned Betty Field was in a 1939 Of Mice and Men adaptation, would play Daisy Buchanan in the 1949 Great Gatsby and then get absorbed into TV. I had never heard of her, but she gives the great Ann Savage a run for her money as one of the most unpleasant femme fatales in noir-ish films.

I don't know if I'd watch this one again, though. The part I enjoyed - Betty Field - isn't in the movie enough to warrant that the time. But I guess if someone dared me to show them a deeply weird movie masquerading as a normal movie, I'd pull this one out.

The ending of the movie - which I think is supposed to be happy? - is almost unsettling. The band, now down a baby, led by a guy who needs a shrink, and jobless, jumps a train again and is back to hoboing like this is the best life imaginable.

I have never seen people who needed to more all go their own way for their own safety and happiness.

Dave Kendall Merges With The Infinite

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:48:44 +0000

As a kid stuck in the suburban sprawl of Austin and then Houston/ Spring, Texas, where music tastes skewed in such a fashion that AC/DC was literally playing on a radio station somewhere 24 hours-a-day, Whitney Houston was playing endlessly in mall sound systems and my classmates positively wet themselves for Garth Brooks - finding the music I liked was a part-time job.*

MTV had not yet pivoted to dumb game shows and reality TV, but during normal waking hours, you were more likely to see them play Warrant's "Cherry Pie" on a loop more often than anything I cared about. And then one Sunday night, I caught 120 Minutes, hosted by a guy who seemed like a true believer when it came to the kinds of music I was already kind of liking by 1989.

Dave Kendall's run on 120 Minutes - a show he conceived and produced - and which he would go on to host, lasted from 1989 - 1992. If you ask a lot of people, they won't recall 120 Minutes prior to Kendall, and will barely remember the show continued after he handed hosting duties off to Matt Pinfield. Once I was headed for college in 1993, I really didn't pay much attention, and then had no cable for a few years to even notice he was gone.

Kendall was British, which was a bit of a novelty, but seemed terribly on-brand for a show that featured far less in the way of big American hair-bands and more in the way of imports like Love and Rockets, Jesus and Mary Chain, Suede, Lush, Kate Bush, Sisters of Mercy and even The Cure, who I didn't see on MTV until 1989 when Kendall played the video for Pictures of You.** And I watched a lot of MTV.

He also featured plenty of other bands from the US, Australia and elsewhere. It's where I saw Pixies videos that wouldn't run in daytime, Jane's Addiction, Nine Inch Nails and plenty of others. It was where I first heard Cocteau Twins, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Radiohead and plenty of others.

Kendall wasn't a gatekeeper - we had plenty of those at the labels and in radio programming. I would argue he was an advocate who identified a taste for this music which was, at the time, not as popular as, say, "I Want To Sex You Up" by Color Me Badd. He seemed to care in a way I think other VJs, who were too exhausted from playing the same 15 videos all day, couldn't be bothered to do anymore. And he only had to do his show two hours per week.

He also got interviews with bands as they swung through New York, which was always a kick.

In the end, the 120 Minutes watchers entered into the creative arts, kept loving some of this stuff, and you'd think a lot of 120 Minutes music was mainstream at the time, and I assure you: it was off the radar for most of my fellow student at the KOHS - who, if they knew the bands - it was likely only from the shirts of a few people who went to shows. But now that music from 89-92 is in everything, like it was what your parents were listening to, Youths. It was largely not. Your parents were into a lot of trash.

I think you can credit Kendall in some ways with why these acts had a following as big as they received in the US. But also - it seems fitting that he bailed as host in the era when Alt-Rock was suddenly the hip new thing, and labels sought to cash in.

Here's to a guy who had an outsized and unknown impact at the time, and who was not given his proper due at the time or since.

* I'm no music aficionado, and I don't claim to have any particularly eclectic musical tastes. What I will say is that I was not a Top 40 guy by the middle of middle-school, but was as likely to be jamming to Buddy Holly as Violent Femmes or The Ramones. But a lot of what you'll throw at me from the era - I completely missed.

** I was well aware of their existence and had heard The Cure before this, but their video presence was limited on MTV until this time

Sam Neill Merges With The Infinite

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:58:15 +0000

Actor Sam Neill has passed at 78.

Neill was most famous for his role in Jurassic Park as Dr. Alan Grant, who made his way across the island with two kids in tow. I honestly think that role changed my opinion of what you needed for an "action hero".

I was also a fan of his work in Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World and Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness and plenty of others. Just this year I watched Possession.

He was also active on social media showing his farm, Two Paddocks, and maintained a clever, funny presence for years.

As big a movie as Jurassic Park is - and the subsequent sequels in which I think he appeared in two - Neil will be remembered for a good, long time. And rightfully so.

Happy Birthday, Mikaela Hoover

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:32:19 +0000

Hey! It's a second Super Birthday today!

Happy Birthday to Mikaela Hoover! She played Cat Grant in our most recent Superman film. You will remember her in that movie with blonde hair and glasses. She absolutely nailed the character in a few scenes, so... hats off!

Hoover also played Floor the Rabbit in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3.

May Ms. Hoover have a terrific b-day and a fabulous trip around the sun.

Melodrama Watch: Written on the Wind (1956)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:52:39 +0000

Watched: 07/11/2026

Format: Criterion

Viewing: First

Director: Douglas Sirk

I've been pretty plain that - while I rarely think a Sirk movie is aimed at me - I think he's a good director and makes some interesting films. He was considered the master of a certain kind of melodramatic "woman's film", and I don't generally mean the term melodrama in the derogatory sense. They're simply dramas contained to the character's lives, focusing on the emotions they experience. Rarely do the conflicts that drive the stories have consequence outside of the sphere of the main characters.

But Written on the Wind (1956) is both the most melodramatic of his films I've seen in the way we mean the term these days. It is big feelings playing out in a way that feels like an alternate pilot for TV's Dallas as much as anything.

It is also the horniest of Sirk's movies I've seen thus far - a movie entirely about sex that cannot say the word "sex" and instead relies on cloaked language and imagery as subtle as a 95 mph fastball to the noggin. For example: when a certain character is in flagrante delicto at a motel room, in the foreground of the frame, an oil pump is hard at work.

The story is that Rock Hudson meets Lauren Bacall in a New York advertising firm, takes her to meet his pal Robert Stack and Bacall goes for Stack (I don't buy it, except he's an oil tycoon and Hudson is not). Stack marries her and they all return to the oil town in Texas where Stack's family owns the works.

Back home, Stack's sister - Dorothy Malone - wants to be on Rock Hudson so bad, she's kind of gone nuts and is now sleeping her way through town (see: aforementioned pumping imagery). Hudson is in love with Bacall, but doesn't let it show.

Stack finds out his boys don't swim, and goes crazy. No, really, that's the big pivot to act three.

It's a movie, as I say, about who wants who, what is manhood, how wild would you go if you found out you had fertility issues, and what's wrong with Dorothy Malone, anyway? (Nuthin'! I contend. Absolutely nuthin'!).

If you came to see a sumptuous Douglas Sirk movie, this is that. The color palette is painterly, the costuming exquisite, the hair impeccable. The sets are a mix of Sirk-ian woods, mansions and then what I guess is West Texas not-Midland. I have no knocks about the visuals of this movie - it looks like 1950's print ads in Good Housekeeping and illustrations from Saturday Evening Post come to life.

Rock Hudson is Rock Hudson. If that's what you want, that is what you get. He's the quiet middle of the movie holding things together. Robert Stack plays a mad drunk we know is going to fall apart because of the movie's flashback structure and because everyone keeps talking about how great it is he's sober. Lauren Bacall sleepwalks her way through this one - not given much to do other than worry about Stack and look phenomenal in dresses. And Dorothy Malone just plays batshit crazy, all but shaking her pelvis at Hudson. It's like she's in a different movie, but in the most entertaining way possible (but for me - not for making the movie work).

Anyway, no, I don't understand why Hudson turned her down. We can tell he was fine with her at one point. And one thinks, well, my guy... if nothing else you'd be marrying into millions with a hot lady who keep yelling about how much she wants you. The downside is that she's crazy, but at least everyone already knows that.

It is, in some ways, an entire movie about how Dorothy Malone is less appealing than Lauren Bacall. I guess with The Big Sleep, that's twice I've been given this message.

My recommendation, be like Weird Al.

This is also a reminder that one of the great things we had in the 1950's that people are so fucking hot to return to were "morality laws". A major plot point - that kills Stack and Malone's dad - is that Malone is arrested for having consensual sex outside of marriage, in private. She then dances to *jazz*. It's just too much for the old guy.

At the movie's end, our hero leaves for Iran. I am sure everything remained great there and nothing ever went wrong. And Dorothy malone is left clutching a bronze oil derrick statue as he departs.

Anyway - if you want to see a movie that is not shy about oil derrick = dick, I have the movie for you.

I want to give movies like this a shot knowing the context of the time, I was never the audience, etc... but sometimes, man. Sometimes these things just age like blue cheese in the sun for a month.

WWI Watch: Hell's Angels (1930)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 15:18:53 +0000

Watched: 07/11/2026

Format: TCM

Viewing: First

Director: Howard Hughes

Even back in film school I remember hearing or reading that Howard Hughes' production of Hell's Angels (1930) had been kind of out of control. It took years to make as Hughes was, ahem, a tad OCD and then The Jazz Singer happened during the already lengthy shoot, sound suddenly available during the middle of production. Of course, Hughes wanted in on that.

So - they had to fire one of their leads who had a serious Swedish accent and replace her with Jean Harlow, effectively locking Harlow in as sort of the first blonde bombshell. I also was aware a few people died making the movie - and having watched this thing, I can see how that could have occurred.

What I did not know is that Hell's Angels is actually a very watchable movie and was not really what I was expecting.

The plot sounds fairly simple on paper - a pair of brothers at Oxford, one a rule-follower and romantic, the other a bit more of a rake and nihilist - find that WWI has broken out. One brother volunteers for the Royal Flying Corps, and the other is voluntold he's in the RFC. Meanwhile, their German pal Karl is drafted into the Zeppelin corps.

The rule-follower brother has a girlfriend in Jean Harlow who the other brother rightly pegs as messing with his brother and pretending to be a good girl when she is anything but. Hughes, of course, was unsubtle in his appreciation/ male-gazey display of women in his films. And, because we keep it real at The Signal Watch, I never really got the Jean Harlow thing before. I absolutely get it now - stills don't really capture her energy. And I'll watch Red Dust because I think she'd be terribly interesting to see with Clark Gable.

The melodrama is fine - and it's very pre-Code, so it feels positively naughty compared to movies you'd see by the 1940's. But we're here for aerial combat, and, holy shit, does this movie deliver.

In between the big set pieces, we watch the two brothers grapple with exactly who Jean Harlow's character is and how it impacts them on the ground. The steadfast brother is going up on missions nightly while his less scrupulous brother is maybe more clear headed about how mad all of this is - but he's behaving erratically, the madness of their job taking its toll.

Remember the part where I said "a few people died making the movie" a few paragraphs above? I can absolutely see how that happened. This movie is *stunning* and if you know anything about World War 1 aircraft, safety, and explosions - something bad was bound to happen here. I am unclear on the number of dead pilots and crew this movie racked up, nor the elements that led to those deaths, but I think it's safe to say more than zero deaths is a lot.

One surprise is that, unlike The Dawn Patrol - released the same year, there's not multiple sequences of combat - just two, really, but both are lengthy and stressful to watch.

The first is a Zeppelin attack on London which goes... poorly for a number of reasons, and ends with a bang. The second is a daring bombing raid in a stolen German bomber, followed by the bomber falling prey to The Red Baron's "Flying Circus" and an English squadron entering the fray. It is *a lot*.

As near as I can tell, Hughes really blew up some structures either as scaled miniatures that look great or... and I would not be shocked if true... they built structures to blow them the hell up. It looks incredible.

But as good as that looks - it's the dog fights that are breathtaking. And, really, may have given us the language for how we see these things in movies today, including Top Gun flicks and Star Wars.

What I wasn't anticipating - and again, I'd seen Dawn Patrol - is the sense of doom that pervades the second half of the movie. It's not that movies about foot soldiers or the trenches aren't about the relentless grind of being tossed against one another in waves of bullets and blood. It's something about being asked to take to the skies day after day when you have a massively high chance of not coming back, and your death will likely be from your plane bursting into flames and you'll have some time to think about it - if you aren't ripped apart by the enemy's gunfire. And so the pilots almost treat it like "ha, fair enough, you got me" as they get picked off.

And maybe that's just part of narratives about WWI. There's just a nihilism that came out of the Great War that we get told about in school reading All Quiet on the Western Front and maybe reading some Hemingway on our own time, that - if nothing else, Hollywood managed to turn into stars and stripes forever during WWII as part of the propaganda machine.

I am unsure Howard Hughes would have thought of this movie as "anti-war", but it sure does take a look at how bad things were for pilots in WWI. And if you know the stats, it bears out. Something like 20-25% of pilots were KIA. It really was batshit to be taking planes made of wood and fabric up into the air and then shoot at each other or absorb flack from groundfire. And it leads to certain conclusions by the 2/3rds point - that even as he's seen as a ranting coward, maybe Monte is right and all of this is fucking crazy.

But that ending? Would never have survived the Hayes office.

I haven't gotten into the use of color, etc... anyway - I think it's worth a watch some time. It's interesting that this movie was largely seen as a spectacle amounting to not much by contemporary critics. Maybe there was snobbishness about Hughes, maybe there was a flood of WW1 material. And they seem almost dismissive of the spectacle of the thing, which seems mind-boggling. But here we are 90 years later enjoying a restoration re-release.

By the way - it's also in Public Domain at this time, so it should be widely available. I happened to watch it hosted by TMC's terrific film historian Alicia Malone.

Happy Birthday, Rachel Brosnahan

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:20:58 +0000

Happy birthday to Rachel Brosnahan, our current Lois Lane, upon whom we can all agree is a pretty good idea.

We've been so lucky with our string of Lois Lanes over the past twenty years, and I love what Brosnahan did with the role, making it her own.

Here's hoping she has a great year ahead of her.

Capra Watch: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:43:30 +0000

Watched: 07/11/2026

Format: Library DVD

Viewing: 2nd or 3rd

Director: Frank Capra

Back in high school, this 6'4" jock/nerd quit playing on the school's JV basketball team, feeling his career in organized sports was, in fact, kind of un-fun and pointless. And without getting into a long story, I quit the team mid-season to go audition for a play. I wound up as an understudy, and the next fall, was in two plays.

The second play was You Can't Take It With You, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. I am sure the performances were mediocre and our staging bad. But it did mean I was very familiar with the play at one point in my life. I've also seen video-recorded versions since, one starring Jason Robards. It is, in fact, a really good show when I am not in it.

The play must have been a huge hit when it was staged in 1936 as it was almost immediately turned into a film. In 1938, You Can't Take It With You would go on to become an Oscar-winning film, directed by Frank Capra (you know, the guy behind It's a Wonderful Life). It received 7 nominations and won 2, for Best Picture and Best Director.

The film is not exactly a direct translation of the play. As it's a movie, they have different locales and scenes, and different roles are emphasized and others reduced. The couple at the center of the play are really a plot point to force two very different families to spend time together - one a conservative, New York old-money family, and one a wacky set of eccentrics chasing their bliss. In the film, the young romantic couple are elevated to the main characters - played by a very young Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur.

It's a comedy of clashing ideals - summed up with the belief of the Sycamore family that there's no reason to spend a life toiling for money and fame if you can't take it with you, natch.

Lionel Barrymore plays "Grandpa", the heart of the show. Ann Miller was, like, 14 when she lied about her age and was signed to RKO who lent her to Columbia where she, now 15, played a 20-something married woman who spends the movie mostly on-point. Yes, she seems older than her real age. "That Guy"actor Dub Taylor plays her goofy husband who plays the xylophone and likes to use a printing press. The whole cast is solid, but those are the players I'm most familiar.

I think what I'd say is that the movie definitely feels like it's had Frank Capra's hands all over it. While the themes don't fundamentally change, the stakes are much higher, the notion of the needs of the many trumping the needs of the few is woven throughout, and as the Depression is wearing on, social commentary is added in. The Kirby's are bankers, and much is made about the mindset of the wealthy, and while history doesn't repeat itself, a lot of what we're hearing again these days sure rhymes with the words out of Kirby's mouth.

And it's kind of remarkable how few movies can or are willing to be just go ahead and say the quiet part out loud about the wealthy and the imbalance and the impact on everyone else. This isn't really a concern at all in the play, by the way - it's more a comedy of manners.

Anyway - I enjoyed the movie a great deal. It could stand a remake today.

For the record - I played the small part of the Dad, "Paul Sycamore", in the play, didn't have many lines, and was supposed to set off fireworks live on stage, but the lighting guys were assholes and missed their cue and I couldn't see the wick in the dark. We had words after that show.

Bonnie Tyler Merges With The Infinite

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:52:33 +0000

Singer Bonnie Tyler has passed at the age of 75.

From NPR.

Tyler was a major force in the 1980's with some hits written by Jim Steinman.

Jamie has probably heard more Bonnie Tyler than she thought she was signing up for thanks to living with me. I've always liked her biggest hits, and spent some time looking into some of her music that didn't sit at the top of the charts.

But here's three of Tyler's biggest songs. Maybe give her a listen and celebrate some Bonnie.

Japan Watch: Rental Family (2025)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:28:31 +0000

Watched: 07/05/2026

Format: Hulu

Viewing: First

Director: Hikari

I initially said "no" when Jamie wanted to watch this movie.

During COVID, I'd watched a lot of travel videos, and one thing I'd seen was Americans learning that, in Japan, you can rent people to role-play out scenarios. This is an over simplification, but I can rent someone to act as if they were my grandfather - not my specific real life grandfather - but *a* grandfather who is generally nice to me. A lot of people, of course, rent "girlfriends" - someone to go have dinner with them and ask them about their day. That sort of thing.

I am choosing not to pass judgment. A whole country has normalized this, and while I want to say "hey... Japan? You okay, buddy?" I also think maybe there's a market for this here. Better than getting denied on dating apps.

From the title Rental Family (2025) and shots of an American in Japan - especially one featuring a 6'3" Brendan Fraser - I assumed this was about a sad American man in Japan who combats his loneliness by renting a full family. I figured the movie would just be an indie feature about people being sad once Fraser finds out his rental family are just on a job and they all have to deal with reality. Writes itself. But if I could guess that - I just wasn't that interested.

But, ha ha, that is NOT what the movie is about. Instead, the movie inverts the premise I assumed as Fraser is an American actor in Japan who can't get ahead when he's hired by a company that provides rental people. Of course it feels strange when he first tries it out. When as an actor, no one else is acting, and after a faulty surprise gig, his first real job is as the groom in a wedding.

And, yes, it is about a sad man in Japan who needs to make human contact - his only other contact really that with a prostitute. And he makes contact with the people he works with. Ie: It is sort of a movie about a guy who is not at all cut out for the job he's taken.

He has co-workers. Takehiro Hira (you will know from Godzilla Minus One) is the boss who recruits him. His ~~foxy~~ other coworker is Mari Yamamoto (you will know from Monarch) who gives Fraser good advice.

We see Fraser on a few jobs, but the two the movie focuses on are as a reporter interviewing an aging actor - his daughter wanting him to feel he will be well remembered (the aging actor was in Shin Godzilla). The other is as the white father of a child raised by a single mother, basically to fool school officials at a new school.

What's odd about this is that this is not how I understand the business to work in Japan. It is not intended to pull one over on people - aside from, say, uninterested waitresses who don't know that isn't your girlfriend having dinner with you. And it seems... deeply unethical to do so?

Why does the daughter hire a fake writer instead of just hiring a real writer? Does she not want her father remembered? How is this better?

What would the school do if they found out they'd been lied to about their student's parentage by an actor? How does it help if the girl gets older and does track down her real dad to find out she's been lied to? You're not bouncing back from that, mom.

And, honestly, while Tokyo is a city of 14 million - how many 6'3" gaijin are running around? It just feels like a numbers game before Fraser is spotted again if the agency keeps sending him out on jobs where he *lies* about who he is. And then trying to remember the context?

Anyway - this movie is a fairy tale. It's about what it's about, and we kind of have to accept that. But it reminds me of a 90's studio movie trying to play in the sandbox of the character-first indie movie market. Like, we will have a happy ending here. And we'll bend sanity and logic to get there.

I make it sound like I didn't like the movie, but I was more *confused* by it than anything. I think there's an interesting idea there for sure, and Fraser is busily reminding us he's a compelling actor even with less-than-perfect material.

The movie sort of lost me completely in the third act as Fraser decides to liberate the older gentleman, who he knows has memory problems, removing him from his home to take him to his birth home *in the woods* without telling the man's family where he is. This is a *job*. He has a boss, and his boss has a client in the man's daughter. But he never *speaks* with the daughter as a client to even pitch taking the father to the old house. He just steals the guy.

I guess in the end, I just didn't think this movie made much sense/ was very well written. It's very invested in the idea of people making real connections with customers, and seeing how the work makes people happy. But it's not being paid to hang out act like you care about someone's Pokemon cards. You're pretending to be their missing brother who happens to want to see your Pokemon cards, and they have no idea you're acting.

And so I didn't really get what the happy ending actually meant. Were they planning to just keep lying about who they were to people?

Maybe the sad version is the version I would have better understood or not felt was so contrived. Maybe there's even more about Japan I don't understand than I already know I don't get. Maybe there are people lying non-stop playing parents, cousins, boyfriends, etc... as a paid service. I literally don't know.

There's a good story buried in this idea. You can do people getting too attached and making mistakes. But the movie has to earn those mistakes as something the audience relates to. And Fraser is so believable as a very lonely man with a good heart, you want to buy it.

One last thing - it seems like Fraser was seeing a prostitute, and the movie was making a point about the connection she may have with Fraser (or not have). And then it just forgets her half-way through, and it feels like we lost a whole storyline in the editing room, one that might have given the movie more texture.

Noir Watch: The Man I Love (1946)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:48:52 +0000

Watched: 07/06/2026

Format: Noir Alley on TCM

Viewing: Second

Director: Raoul Walsh

Why lie? I watched The Man I Love (1946) again to watch Ida Lupino in terrific dresses and with great hair.

The unintentionally funny thing to me about this movie is that her character, Petey Brown, says "honey" to everyone in the exactly the way my grandmother from Perth Amboy, New Jersey did. It feels honest.

I don't mind a good melodrama, and while this is certainly at least noir-adjacent, if not full-noir, it's a melodrama at heart.

I think I did a pretty good write-up of this movie in 2022, so no reason to re-do all that work. Almost every thought I had watching the movie this time that would go in a fresh post, I covered there, including not at all being subtle about my big movie crush on Lupino.

But this is also a family with genetics that made sisters out of Lupino, Andrea King and Martha Vickers. That's some good DNA.

Anyway - fun to rewatch. AND - apparently this is the *extended* cut. There's a whole scene I don't believe I recalled where Lupino sings "My Bill" - which had been lost. And it's a terrific sequence.

Mer-Watch: Splash (1984)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 04:12:50 +0000

Watched: 07/05/2026

Format: Disney+

Viewing: third at most, likely second

Director: Ron Howard

I have no memory of re-watching Splash (1984) after seeing it in the theater back in 1984. So, this may be the second time I've ever seen it all the way through.

My only real memory of the movie was that the effects were neat, the movie was very sweet and John Candy was funny. Check, check and check. All still true.

I was honestly pleasantly surprised re-watching this movie for the first time in adulthood. It plays like a very old-school comedy concept - I can see Cary Grant declaring, "But, Madison - you're a mehr-maid! And I can't even swim..." - livened up with some grade-A 1980's comedy talent.

While I am aware that I have long been partial to John Candy, he's hysterical in this as Tom Hanks' philandering, irresponsible brother. Eugene Levy plays a Warner Bros. cartoon villain. And back in this era, Tom Hanks' comedy sensibilities were weirdly organic and tone perfect. And there's a million bits that supporting characters get to do. That secretary is just... that's comedy gold.

I realized quickly - I really don't think I've seen many Darryl Hannah movies, but as Madison, the Mermaid, she's absolutely game for anything and while funny things kind of happen around her or because of her, she gives a terrific, physical performance.

Honestly - I think the movie is probably ripe for a re-view. A lot of stuff from 1984 is in the canon, and I'm not sure most folks think much about Splash.

Yeah, if you came here looking to see me drag Splash, I kind of won't. It's made to be a pop crowd pleaser, and in 1984, it was. It's occasionally a tad raunchy, it has some adult humor, but the lines were a lot blurrier in 1984 when I saw this aged 9.

It's not perfect, sure. What is? I'm just surprised by how game Ron Howard was at this point in his early directing career for some straight up zaniness. He always seems like that in *other* people's work, but in his own? It's been a minute.

And not for nothing - but Splash is weirdly close in themes and even scenes to Shape of Water, which gave me a wee chuckle.

Texas Watch: Paris, Texas (1984)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:52:39 +0000

Watched: 07/04/2026

Format: Criterion

Viewing: First

Director: Wim Wenders

As a forewarning, I really don't have anything new or novel to say about this movie. It won Cannes in 1984 and is one of those movies that gets discussed *a lot*, I guess. But I've avoided those discussions because I'd never seen the movie and was fundamentally avoiding spoilers.

I haven't seen that many Wim Wenders movies, but of what I've seen - I've been a fan. Paris, Texas (1984) should have been a slam-dunk for me, but I just never got to it until after our mid-day Fourth of July activities ended and before we put on fireworks from New York. A couple of years ago, I'd watched the beginning - just the first 45 minutes of a lengthy runtime as Wenders movies tend to go, and had no idea where it was going. Which - fair.

Starring Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell and Natassja Kinski - it's a movie that reminds you that a deeply compelling movie doesn't need FX, a cut every two seconds, a needle-drop every ten minutes or fifteen subplots. That's not to say Paris, Texas is representative of movies in 1984 - one of the years that defined the modern movie. I'm not really sure it points to much more than what was happening in independent film in the 1980's that would inform indie movies for the next fifteen or twenty years. Character driven, mood driven, and trying to show something about the human condition.

Maybe the thing I found most interesting about the movie was that, while Harry Dean Stanton is the central figure, the movie shifts to who the movie is about a few times within the small cast. It leaves a lot of questions on the table and moves on. We learn *something* about Stanton's character in each section by how the others react to him.

Stanton plays Travis, a man who appears on the Texas/ Mexico border in the town of Terlingua, a dot on the map outside of Big Bend and maybe most famous by having a hamburger named after it at Chili's. He is mute, and seems to have no memory. But there's a name and phone number in his wallet, and the doctor living at the edge of the world calls his brother (Dean Stockwell) to come get him.

In simple terms, it's Will (Dean Stockwell( trying to sort out where his brother has been for four years and what is wrong with him. But he takes Travis back to Los Angeles. Along the way, Travis begins to speak and to remember - beginning with a memory of his childhood and stories of his parents, and how he believes he was conceived.

It seems he disappeared four years ago, and doesn't know where is wife is, or that his brother has his son, Hunter.

In LA, Travis is welcomed in, and Hunter is informed that Travis is his father. Anne (Aurore Clement), Will's wife, both becomes concerned what it means that Travis is back and what that means for the boy staying with them - but she's also clearly remembering something passed between Travis and herself. That they are otherwise childless begs some questions.

Travis learns from Anne where his wife, Jane (Kinski), is, and heads to Houston to go find her - taking Hunter with him. And here the story passes to Hunter. And, eventually, in Houston, to Jane.

It's an interesting way to break things up - the continuity of Travis and his journey, and his relationships with the other characters. I can't even say "main" characters, because of the slim casting of the film. Each person shows something more about Travis in how they relate to him, and how Travis emerges from his near catatonia of the opening sequences to full on monologuing in the film's last 25 minutes. And it works.

As I say, the movie also leaves questions unanswered - leaving the viewer in the dark as all we get is the throughline of Travis fixing an error from long ago. What *was* the relationship between Will and Travis - and why does Will seem okay with letting Hunter go, including just giving him what sounds like a lot of money to go? Was Anne in love with Travis at some point? Did something happen with them in the past? What does Hunter see in Travis that makes him run with him?

To say the obvious - there's a world of difference between a movie that is trying for narrative simplicity and *fails* to make the necessary story/ narrative connections to hold the plot and arcs together and a story that *intentionally* leaves gaps. You're allowed to/ supposed to poke at those holes - make some intuitive leaps, but you aren't getting any answers. But I kind of feel the need to plainly make the distinction given the discussion about movies I feel I see here in 2026 AD.

On a personal note, the movie was shot in Houston during a period in which I lived there as a kid and teenager (81-84 and again in 1990-1993). This is very much a Houston I remember from both when I was a kid and then as a teenager and going into town. It was a strange city to navigate, the downtown could be really lovely, and the sunsets were - thanks to the petroleum plants leaking waste into the air - oddly beautiful.

And while the movie takes place in West Texas, Los Angeles, on what I assume is the I-10 West to East route to Houston and then in Houston itself, in some ways not the most photogenic of places, that outsider's eye finds the beauty in Houston's skyscrapers and geometry - as well as the rundown storefront bars in small towns. And even the view of airports and burnt out emptiness of West Texas east of the mountains.

I was not surprised at how well the ending worked - just based on the movie's reputation. But it feels like it shouldn't have worked. But there it is. Kinski is given something other to do than be beautiful and Stanton is given more to do than be interesting to look at. Set dressing, lighting, sound - it all comes together to make a long, drawn out scene we didn't know we were waiting for - work.

Anyway - I liked it.

Curious what my Houston people think of it.

"Big Trouble In Little China" at 40

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Just listen to the ol' "Porkchop Express" and take his advice on a dark and stormy night, alright? When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, looks you crooked in the eye, and asks you if you paid your dues; you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have you paid your dues, Jack?" "Yes, sir, the check is in the mail."

Apparently this week marks 40 years since the release of one of the greatest films ever made, Big Trouble In Little China.

From the previews, I'd been mildly interested in what I saw, and then saw the flick featured in a movie-FX magazine I leafed through in B. Dalton at the mall (did I buy the magazine? I did not). Probably they were discussing the big red ape monster and the eyeball guy, and maybe some lightning FX, and that was enough of a sale for me.

So, within a week or so of the film's release, Steanso and I hit the Showplace 6 in North Austin and watched the movie.

I was also a kid who thought Buckaroo Banzai (also seen in the theater) was a perfectly reasonable movie for a kid to love.* I saw They Live in the theaters twice. So apparently a certain kind of movie that would become a cult film was unironically on my radar. But I was also happy to go see *everything* for a long, long time.

I knew the movie was breaking movie rules in that it *felt* weird. But that disconnect made me laugh. Our muscle-bound action hero was incompetent, our villain was kind of goofy and pissy, and the sidekick was clearly actually the hero. I very much understood Gracie Law as a Lois Lane-type that the movie showed a certain self-awareness with that I found very funny.

At the time, the name John Carpenter meant nothing to me. That would come when JAL showed me Halloween when I was 14 or 15. And I suspect this movie is where the whole Kim Cattrall thing originated, because I doubt it was from Police Academy, which I saw way, waaaayyy too young. And I'd not see Mannequin til the last decade. But you can't convince me Gracie Law is anything less than an ideal romantic interest.

The supporting/ co-lead in Dennis Dun's Wang Chi was straight up cool, if a little dorky about love (which circles back and becomes cool). He was clear the cool-headed leader, and paired with weirdo mystic Egg Shen (80's movie staple Victor Wong) made for an en excellent guide for Kurt Russel's Jack Burton as he enters a world us big, dumb guys were not prepared for (but we are happy to help a pal in a pinch).

Of course James Hong - one of Hollywood's most versatile talents - killed it as David Lo Pan, in both modes.

I loved Jack Burton as a kid, but REALLY appreciate him as an adult. I don't know that I had properly seen a movie where the lead was so out of their depth before, and where it was played for laughs.

I'm not saying I've been everywhere, and I've done everything. But I do know this is a pretty amazing planet we live on here. And a man would have to be some kind of fool to think we're all alone in this universe.

The movie has magic, and martial arts, its own mythology, monsters, iffy FX, and was, to me, plenty funny. What's not to dig? And it's just this side of being what you expect it keeps your attention. I remember friends complaining Jack knocked himself out in the final fight, and I was just like "yeah... that's... that's the joke, man." But it was also a real bellwether of whether people grokked the movie.

There were a number of years between when I'd watched it over and over on VHS and then someone in college bringing it up, and me saying to Jamie "you've never seen it?" and making her watch it. Not sure she's ever taken to the movie in the same way.

I am well past the point of being objective about Big Trouble in Little China. If the movie is *good* or *bad* is purely a matter of taste and probably when you first watched the flick. I've seen it an alarming number of times, and it's one of those movies that if I put it on cable, I'm in through the end.

But, by gum, it gave me the hero I needed.

*I was in college doing research for a film school class before I found out how horribly that movie had done at the box office.

Franken-Watch: The Bride! (2026)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 05:20:25 +0000

Watched: 07/01/2026

Format: HBOmax

Viewing; First

Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Before release, I was really looking forward to the release of The Bride! (2026).

As many know, one of my favorite movies is The Bride of Frankenstein. This ranking is followed immediately by Frankenstein, and I tend to think of them as a two-part movie as much as a pair of individual movies. I still re-read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from time-to-time. In 2018, I celebrated the 200th anniversary of the book's publication by visiting a sort of display at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

The Bride! was released with what I'd consider a serious marketing push - a rarity these days. And then the reviews hit and word was not good. And then people I know saw it and were unenthused, and so I decided to wait for streaming.

I am sad to report that this was the right call.

Here's what I think.

Maggie Gyllenhaal not only directed The Bride!, she also wrote the movie and produced it. Ie: this was pure Gyllenhaal. And maybe this movie should have been workshopped a lot more before it went before the lens. Maybe try it on as a play or give it a polish with additional writers. Workshop it.

We tend to get very precious about our thoughts and ideas, and this feels *extremely* precious about those things.

The movie is less a story than a series of *ideas* that become increasingly less coherent over the movie's runtime. It is a series of cinematically conceived sequences that are stitched together - Frankenstein'd, if you will - into a single movie.

The film takes place in the 1930's, but a 1930's that's whatever Gyllenhaal wants it to be (and that is fine). One part post-prohibition Chicago, one part Americana fantasy. Mary Shelley exists as a narrator and possessing spirit. The monster is played by Christian Bale, who is having a ball. Seriously, he's doing good stuff here. Our star is Jessie Buckley, who is very famous and I've never seen her in anything. She's asked to swing wildly between personalities, and does great. She and Tatiana Maslaney should hang out and compare notes.

What Gyllenhaal feels to be artful in its bombastic approach instead lands as awkward and a bit silly. I should not openly cringe at lines like "here comes the motherfucking bride!" but, boy, did I. And when you open on a clunker like that, it feels like you just tripped on your grand entrance.

Put down as a list of things that happen, I don't think we have what's essentially a bad plot or a story that shouldn't have occurred. There's just a sort of feeling that Gyllenhaal's reach has exceeded her grasp. The message is clearly going to be "women live in a bad world and bringing them back from the dead to be someone's partner will illustrate that". That is, after all, the message of The Bride of Frankenstein, where the idea is teased and then pulled out as essentially a punchline at the end of the movie (spoilers). As it was the 1985 film The Bride. And, most recently, DC Comics and now DC's animated series of Creature Commandos that features The Bride as a lead.

All of which make the same points as this movie, but without a highlighter and Powerpoint deck of a series of events.

There's a love of cinema in the movie, especially of classic cinema. Movies are pitched as how Frankenstein, who has been alive for over 100 years and is from Switzerland, experiences humanity. And he has a taste for Fred Astaire-like musicals starring an actor played distractingly by Gyllenhaal's brother, Jake.

But, man, combining Frankenstein and "Puttin' on the Ritz" in a movie in 2026 seems like absolute madness - especially in such an uninspired and pointless scene. I could not begin to fathom why Gyllenhaal (a) put this sequence in the film at all and (b) why she insisted on taking "Puttin' on the Ritz" back from Mel Brooks.

I guess - stop reminding me of other movies that make me think about other things? Why show me White Zombie if you don't want me to think about White Zombie and whether it was ever in 3D?

Gyllenhaal has, for reasons that defy logic, named one main character Myrna Malloy - I assume after Myrna Loy, who was a huge star in the 1930's. Which complicates the fact the big-boss sleazy villain is named "Lupino", which makes me think of Ida Lupino, who was not a comic book villain mobster and was, instead, a producer and director in an era where that practice for women was all but extinct.

Clearly Gyllenhaal had done some reading about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (nee Godwin) - which is a *fascinating* topic all unto itself. The Godwin family is a gothic story all unto itself, and is a prismatic look into what was happening on the fringes of British society of the era - that not all views were in line with the rank and file.

More importantly, Mary Shelley's mother, who died just after Mary was born, had been a dedicated women's rights advocate in the 18th century. Her father was a politico himself - and an anarchist, and basically raised Mary as a feral intellectual. One assumes Mary Shelley was just stewing in some interesting philosophy from her youngest days before she ran off with Percy Shelley when she was about 16. Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the two men Shelley spent time with in Europe, were famed raconteurs and at least Byron was a bit of a rake.

All of which the movies assumes as some sort of pre-knowledge, and does nothing to highlight that for the audience. The radical feminism of Mary Shelley's mother and father is imagined to have been imbued in their daughter, who - from beyond the grave, spins a story of how The Bride inspires women to become bad-asses - a storyline that goes nowhere. Just as the storyline about the big mob boss goes absolutely nowhere and could be entirely cut from the film to probably greater effect.

The film has aspirations of the film itself as a sort of living thing. Our characters appear on screens at the movies they attend, acting out their scenes like movie-heroes instead of as the wretches they are, breaking walls down.

How meta is this story? I do not know. In real life, - Mary Shelley is an author who wrote a fictional book, but in this story Shelley seems to have written a book she knows is fictional But then, our events take place in a world where Dr. Frankenstein created a man and people know about what he did.

So did Mary write a non-fiction story? Or is this story hers in the afterlife where she literally puts words in mouths? Is she deathbed hallucinating? I don't know. I *think* we're to understand that the shadow Mary sitting in the dark (played by Jessie Buckley, who also plays The Bride) is real and speaking to us, the audience. And maybe the story we're watching is not real - it's her latest narrative where she breaks in and her voice emerges through The Bride. If true, it's Gyllenhaal speaking through Shelley speaking through The Bride.

I suppose I don't need clarity exactly, but it would be nice to know and/ or care.

So the movie becomes about the possession of a young woman by Mary Shelley so that she can tell the story she dared not tell with her original novel - in which Victor Frankenstein refuses his creation a mate, and instead scatters her bits.

I guess... I just felt this movie was trying to be too many things. It steps on its own ideas and messages. It exists in a world that's a cartoon 1930's version of America, and relies on the audience knowing a little about a lot of things - but if you know too much, it starts to kind of fall apart.

Even during the mad science scenes of the film's first third, it feels more like a college play production of someone doing something based on having seen stills of Frankenstein or Bride of Frankenstein rather than someone who replicated those sequences out of deep knowledge. So it never feels *mad*. It never feels like they truly went there - they just used some props that felt they were in the basic spirit of a Frankenstein movie. And that's kind of how the whole movie feels. Kinda/sorta there - and you can see what they're going for - but it feels like a Dunning Kruger version of those things.

If you're going to borrow from some of the most famous books, movies, etc... maybe make sure you're saying something *new*, or at least not just repeating what has come before but far less eloquently and economically. If you're going for the crown of Bride of Frankenstein, better not miss. And this one ricocheted and hit the shooter in the butt.

For a movie I think felt free to let its freak flag fly but actually worked: Poor Things.

Ann Blyth Merges With The Infinite

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Somehow I missed this last week, but - Ann Blyth, who had one of the top 5 smiles to ever hit the silver screen, has passed at the age of 98.

I became aware of Blyth at the same time I became aware of the sheer magnificence that is Joan Crawford as an actor rather than a punchline when I watched Mildred Pierce back in college. In what is her most enduring role, the lovely Blyth played the absolute worst person as Crawford's b of a daughter. She is *stellar* in this movie.

The only other movies she starred in I think I've seen are Brute Force (great prison movie. Check it out.) and Kismet, which is worth seeing some time just for the visuals.*

But, once you've seen Blyth's Colgate smile, you do not forget it.

Blyth was very generous with TCM and was interviewed by Robert Osbourne. Here's a tribute TCM released.

*and by visuals I mean Blyth and Dolores Gray

Happy Birthday Terri Nunn

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:33:00 +0000

Hey! Today is singer Terri Nunn's birthday! That's fun.

Saw her sing with Berlin in like 2018 or 19, and she was *amazing*.*

*amazingly hot

TLDR Super Watch: Supergirl (2026)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Watched: 06/25/2026

Format: Regal

Viewing: First

Director: Craig Gillespie

It is probably worth noting that while a great IP to slap on thermoses and t-shirts, Supergirl is maybe the least consistently written mainstream character in comics. So there is no "right way" to write Kara Zor-El.

I've read my fair share of comic books starring Supergirl over the past few decades. I've read Silver-Age, Bronze and Copper-Era stories. I read 90's-00's Not-Kara Supergirl by Peter David. And was one of people who was flipping out when they brought Kara back in the mid-00's. Aside from giving New 52 Supergirl a pass, I have pretty complete runs of pretty much everything since the 2005 reboot. I heartily recommend the current series by Sophie Campbell as one of the best comics I've read in a while. I own a copy of Action Comics 252.

I've seen the 1980's Supergirl movie at least three times - including on VHS as a kid. I watched the entire run of the CW TV show. Am familiar with various incarnations in live action and animation. (I have an affection for almost all of those takes.)

I am not a Supergirl PhD, but I feel pretty well oriented. So, there's my bona fides.

Most importantly, I've read Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King on script and Bilquis Evely on art. That comic ran as an 8-issue series during 2021-2022. Considered one of the best comics put out by DC Comics in the past decade, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow pushes the modern take on Kara, really leaning into the notion that she is a young woman who has seen too much and done too much as a survivor of Krypton. And, perhaps more importantly, of Argo City.

The idea is that Superman is a refugee who arrived on Earth as an infant and was raised by the Kents, but Kara Zor-El is a refugee who left her homeworld as a teenager, knowing she was leaving everyone behind to die. She saw the face of her father as her capsule closed. She remembers it.

Oddly, the graphic novel shamelessly is structured much like the novel of True Grit, narrated not by the gunslinger, but the girl who has employed him - a girl of mannerisms and propriety. Both adapted versions of the book are good movies, but the Coen Bros. version rings truer to the book.

When it was announced that Woman of Tomorrow was the basis for the coming film, I did raise my eyebrows. It is structured as a multi-part, 8-issue episodic story, not a 90ish-minute film. It relied on deep Supergirl lore (see: Comet the Superhorse) and is as far from the plucky teen bursting from a rocket in Action Comics 252 as you're likely to see.

And it raised, in my mind, the question of "who will this movie be for?"

There are many audiences for Supergirl (2026). I suspect much of the audience for this movie, who do not read comics, who have not watched the CW show, who are not aware of the many, many, many version of Kara we've seen over the years - who understand Superman has a cousin who is a girl with blonde hair - will find this movie baffling.

It seems *unlikely* that many of those same people will not have already seen Superman from 2025. And if they found that Kara off-putting, I have terrible news. (I don't think people did dislike her, but it certainly starts as more-of-same.)

As a movie - without worrying too much about all those comics and shows and movies - Supergirl (2026) is a mess.

It's about 90 minutes of slogging through sci-fi environs as we peel back the layers of Kara's trauma while dealing with deeply generic villains and which doesn't seem clear about who or what Supergirl's powers are and how they work - something that Superman spent no small amount of time highlighting in ways delightful and clear. It boasts a power-pop-punk soundtrack that is there to grab young adults by the collar and scream "we made this for you!" It has a lot of neat make-up and masks (ie: practical FX) to fill out the oddly bland sci-fi environs that it never lets us linger on or see.

I've heard some people say the movie is too dark or murky - and that literally may be a projection problem at your theater, because I didn't think that was an issue (and there are some well known issues movie theaters deal with when it comes to projection). Even if I thought the imagery was oddly lifeless, the palette unnecessarily dull, and the art design lacked inspiration. the art by Bilquis Evely of the comic is tossed aside for lifeless, generic sci-fi templates like someone hit "Sci-Fi dystopia" in the AI backgrounds machine. Eat it, wonders of art.

It may also be one of the worst-edited movies I've seen in years. Ie: I was *thinking* about the editing during the movie and how confusing it was, sometimes breaking basic editing rules - which is a weird, weird thing to pay attention to during a movie. And it ruins things from really the first scene.

You may have also heard Milly Alcock is great as Kara, and she is. Just as I thought Eve Ridley's Ruthye was well acted. And Corenswet as Superman is really, really giving Reeve a run for his money between these two movies. Momoa is predictably good as Lobo, because in real life, Jason Momoa seems very much like Lobo. All they had to do was the make-up job.

The problem is that the movie wants for Kara and Ruthye's traumas to be parallel, and they are not. Ruthye saw her family cut down before her, and Kara saw the slow death of her bubble city as Kryptonite poisoning took hold. Kara lost her family through happenstance, Ruthye lost hers to cruelty - lessons about revenge being bad are motivation-free. If Kara wants revenge, as I said to Stuart - she needs to take it up with plate tectonics.

Our villain is a generic baddie, and why you're seeing comparisons to Mad Max. He is a mustache twirling Immortan Joe-type who simply revels in cruelty because he's a motivation-free bad guy. He and his buddies are so bad that for good measure they keep a character-free passel of female priosners around as breeding stock for their "culture". (This is a baffling choice by the movie - is it actually hard to find people who are willing to join a roving army of thugs and bandits? The movie tells you this is their *culture* as roving space pirates, keeping unwilling women who all stand around in a cage like county lock-up, and it makes absolutely zero sense even if you ignore the optics for what should be a family film).

The movie is defined more by what it does not want to be compared to than what it wishes it could be. It is not Superman, first and foremost - this Kryptonian has an edge, people! She's not all "gosh" and "gee" like Superman! Which... just makes her like every other generic superhero of the 21st Century and why Superman in Superman felt like such a breath of fresh air - and continues to feel that way in this movie.

It does not want to be Guardians of the Galaxy with its interplanetary travel and cosmic candy-colored landscapes and space pirates, but... y'all.. that's the fun of space movies. And so we get a weirdly monochrome palette where the color that pops most is *beige*. And it is a movie about chasing down space pirates - even if you try to say they are something else and borrow from a wildly popular Mad Max movie.

It is terrified of being True Grit for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, and it guts the meaning of the overall story while also knocking all the interesting stuff off of Ruthye, her motivations and her drive, while also repositioning Kara in ways that wind up muddying the narrative.

It does not want to even be a superhero movie - it is telling an origin story of how Kara decides to be a helper - and so it tries to keep superhero-ing to a minimum in favor of bar brawls (two!) and refuses to let Kara use her powers for reasons that I started to think were budget driven.

SPOILERS

As someone who *did* see Superman last year, I have a level-set on what a Kryptonian's powers are and what Kara should be capable of. And even with the handicap of "well, she isn't a practiced superhero" - the whole movie feels like it should have been over in like 20 minutes. Things don't make sense. You can't really poison Superman. So how does Kara get poisoned? Because the movie says so. But also - how does Kara not hear the sneaky people scheming? Does she not have super-hearing? We know she does. So why isn't she on alert? It's not like those people know she has super hearing and would speak freely two rooms over. When she's sneaking downstairs to listen in on them, why doesn't she float down the stairs?

How does anyone know she's Kryptonian? How would they know about Kryptonite? How would they get it and why would they have it if they knew it impacted Clark? He's not running around in this part of the galaxy. It's putting a hat-on-a-hat. We already know how this fight is going to go.

Speaking of - why is there even a fight? We watched Superman eye-laser 100 Iron Mans in the last movie in the space of 20 seconds. Why isn't Kara doing that? We know she has eye-lasers. And the movie suggests each of these Brigands/ space-pirates can at least *try* to go hand-to-hand with a yellow-sun-infused Kryptonian, so why are they all living like pigs on a freighter when each of them could be sitting like a king of at least *part* of a planet? Clark was picking up skyscrapers and having them collapse on him and shrugged it off. Surely Kara is close to that? And if she is - then... the Brigands...

And the final fight? It's one of the worst choreographed I've seen since parts of The Flash (a movie it seems to have partially borrowed it's aesthetic from in the dust storm). Just a mess that seems ridiculous when your lead character's whole thing is that she flies and has lasers.

Marvel has a lot of flaws, but one thing they've done wonderfully since the first few movies is make sure we have minimal room to consider these sorts of questions as a movie unfolds. They clearly run their script and pre-production past a panel of nerds to make sure those questions get answered before anything goes in front of a camera.

Supergirl does no such thing. It's a massive step backward for this sort of movie as it seems to do the 1990's thing of shrugging and saying "it's a superhero movie. You're thinking about it too much, nerd." And, yes, I absolutely am thinking about it. You've left huge plot holes in your film that make you look like a lazy filmmaker and prevent me from remaining caught up in your story. And once I've ticked the third or fourth thing, I am now just looking for those plot holes.

You are not making a stand-alone movie with Supergirl, you are making an adjunct to the movie Superman, and I have seen that movie. Y'all need to coordinate.

Oddly, the only writer listed is a person with no prior writing experience - an Ana Noguiera. Do I think Warner Bros. and DC let some random person write their would-be summer blockbuster? I absolutely do not. These screenplays pass through a dozen writers and it's impossible to know who actually had their hands on the movie. But someone has to take the fall, so why not Noguiera?

A positive is that the movie has taken the male gaze and chucked it out the window. This will drive much of the YouTube Incel-verse insane - what even is a woman in a movie if not framed as sex object? Supergirl of the comics arrived as a 1950's good-girl, and has gone through a variety of iterations, including the controversial 2005-ish relaunch edited by famed sex pest Eddie Berganza. DC has to go back regularly and push back on comic creators to remind them that Kara is not there to be drawn in a microskirt pouting.

Two last quick complaints - it is also a movie that thinks they're singing "Girl from Ipanema" in a bar on an alien world (do aliens not have Spotify and speakers?) and Kryptonians wear librarian glasses. The glasses absolutely floored me.

Adaptation

As an adaptation of the comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, this is one of the worst adaptations of a book I've seen in quite some time. I know it's just using the body for materials, but still.

I never expected that Supergirl would stick to the comic's format of episodes, but I did think it would understand the point of the book and why that was a story worth telling. Like Snyder's Watchmen, the movie seems to grok some aesthetics and bad-assery, but makes changes along the way and in the finale that undercut what came before. In this case, it's to meet expectations of what bad-assery means while failing to understand what makes the El family truly super.

The Kara of the comic book is a world-weary hero who has all that trauma behind her and has already long-ago chosen to fight on the side of the angels, just doing it her way - and her way is different from Superman's decision to become a symbol. The Kara of Woman of Tomorrow is a person who takes action and knows she's making the barest dent in the universe, but she can help what's right in front of her.

This leads to Ruthye learning about grace through the stoic heroism of a flawed hero like Kara Zor-El.

But, the movie Supergirl... doesn't seem to understand that's the point of the comic. Which is weird, because Ruthye basically states the theme of the work in the final chapter, very specifically. That they changed the end how they did makes me wonder why adapt it at all?

What the comic understands is the grace of mercy. Ruthye decides not to kill our baddie because she's seen what killing is and does as she's crossed the galaxy. She has no taste for it and sees how it helps nothing. And just spawns more killing.

Does the movie need to do this? Absolutely not. But it also just goes for movie-friendly platitudes and movie-friendly cool stuff that are the empty calories of adventure films. Maybe coated in the right flavoring to make it seem like there's something there.

The movie tosses the notion of the grace of mercy aside and instead states that Kara will take a life. To be clear, this is an option!, but the story itself does nothing to build to that decision while also denying Ruthye of that which she's wanted.

Our movie Ruthye is told "revenge is wrong" - but not why - just that it's something she'll have to live with forever. Which is, frankly a wobbly argument at best when the killer has killed so many and will kill again and again given the chance - that seems like something that will stick with you and you will feel you did nothing to stop them.

And then - for reasons that will no doubt be a plot point in some other movie - Kara kills our baddie, undercutting everything she said. Keep in mind - this guy did not kill her family, he killed Ruthye's family - and if revenge is okay, all she did was take away Ruthye's blood debt. All Kara did was show us John Wick is right. If she's willing to absorb someone else's sin, killing an incapacitated man is a sharp right turn and feels driven by external forces for future stories and audiences craving blood from baddies.

In the comic, by the way, Kara puts Krem in the Phantom Zone for 200 years and then releases him after he's had time to really think about what he did and how he ended up there. The comic is aware that this may be worse than actual swift death.

I'd also point out - in the comic, Krem is just a guy. He's not even a Brigand at the start. He's just a shitty guy in the mode of a Sergio Leone villain who picks on farmers because he can. He kills Ruthye's father just because Krem is a shitheel and he felt like killing. He joins the Brigands when he finds out Supergirl is on to him. He is not winning any physical fight with Kara, and his final fight is with Ruthye, which works better on about ten different levels.

All of this makes me wonder: When next we meet Kara, who will she be? I have no idea, which is a very weird way to end a movie.

Stolen Punk Valor

Punk is a curious thing.

It's far more inextricably linked to fashion than anyone really wants to talk about, with bands like Sex Pistols and the Go-Go's basically forming from people shopping in certain shops and hanging out or working there. But these were not big chain stores in your local mall.

But punk was also a reaction to social standards and propriety - maybe sometimes boneheaded in its approach, but a rejection of both the square life and whatever the hippies had been up to. It pointed out flaws and reveled in them. It was, in theory, looking into the void and deciding to choose to live a certain way.

In the 21st Century, I now see toddlers in Ramones shirts, elementary school kids given hair dye and hair cuts that were reserved for a certain subset in the 90's, and "punk" essentially treated as a fashion object, kind of bringing it all back full circle while gutting the ethos for suburban cool-parent fashion.

Meanwhile, Debbie Harry of NY-based punk group Blondie has been a global fashion icon for going on fifty years.

By the way - I don't care if you dress your kids like Iggy Pop. It's just an observation. I never claimed any punk roots of my own. I was more into Buddy Holly than Johnny Rotten.

But Superman had some interesting statements on what *punk* is in the context of Gunn's DCU. If pushing back against norms and expectations and narrative and going one's own way, then we agree that, in Clark's case, "punk" means choosing every day to see the best in everyone and operate from that standpoint.

So it was curious that Supergirl decided to market itself with the admittedly cringey "Truth. Justice. Whatever." tag line, which reads more pouty 15 year old than anti-authority. It was a sign of where the movie's heart would be - a sort of weak-ass middle-finger to... your mom when she asks you to take out the garbage (that is not punk, that's just being shitty).

Kara of this movie has rejected Superman's optimism. She is, reasonably, dealing with depression and survivor's guilt through self-medication and running away from the only family she has, and someone who wants to love her. Compelling!

The movie really sold itself with 80's new wave/ punk which I found interesting, especially as they used the theme song from American Gigolo, "Call Me" in the trailers. And Blondie was a break out of the scene at CBGB's, starting as a punk band before becoming more mainstream and new wave ("Call Me" was not written by them, by the way. It's a Giorgio Moroder song if you want to know why it slaps as hard as it does. And I love Blondie.). By using Blondie, you're signaling a cool, sexy, punk aesthetic. By using "Call Me" you're telling me you can't use Google. The right choice here was "Atomic".

What Supergirl's marketing team was trying to position the movie as was anti-authority punkiness - but that never really happens in the movie. Getting drunk all the time and avoiding your upbeat cousin who just wants to go ride jet skis with you is not punk. And to set up Clark, who we just spent a whole-ass movie explaining why HE is in fact very punk, as the social norm? It feels very off.

So it's a weird thing. While I don't expect for Kara to rock through the cosmos blasting The Descendants, what the movie did instead is provide, like, covers of middling 00's-era pop punk acts. It is wiiiiiild. And distracting.

I don't blame Alcock or even Gillespie, but I think there's just not a lot there to grab hold onto for the marketing, for why a 17 year old would want to see this movie. So, they went with "she's edgy!" After all, she wears a Debbie Harry shirt through 85% of the movie, only donning the Super-togs at the end.

Why Debbie? We're never told. But she must love Blondie? Right? Well, no Blondie music ever made it into the movie. Which... what the fuck, guys...?

Anyway, it comes off as poseurish. Real Hot Topic/ "I bought this shirt at Target and don't know who the band actually is" stuff.

And we had a chance for Kara to show her own flavor of punk-ness. It just never happens. She just goes on a journey where she kills a guy because he's bad while dragging Ruthye with her and putting her in unnecessary jeopardy.

In conclusion...

I dunno. I can't even say it was fine or that I liked it. It felt like a movie rushed into production that grabbed the wrong source material and then didn't quite understand it.

I remain enthused about Alcock who is a genuine talent. Momoa is fine if Lobo is your thing (he's not and has never been mine, but this is far less stupid than Momoa as Aquaman). But I am concerned about what else is brewing in the DC Studios Universe is this is the bar for non-Gunn managed productions. It's a step up from Snyder's basement-boy take on superheroes, but it's hard to get excited if this is the bar.