curated back catalog

A stitch in time

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The time I planned to spend preparing to write a blog this week was consumed instead by small things causing big headaches, so in its place, have a sampler of time travel stories. I was surprised at first that I found so few in my history given how much I enjoy them, but then I began to realize I was overlooking some.

  • Primer: I don’t know if I’d call it the hardest sci-fi time travel story I’ve covered, but it’s easily the most intricate.
  • A Sound of Thunder: The only time I reviewed a movie less than ten years old at time of publication, and I was soundly let down by it.
  • Somewhere in Time: what if Christopher Reeve could meet the love of his life by meditating really hard? Surprisingly, not as goofy a story as it sounds.
  • Movies of my Yesterdays: Meet the Robinsons: still one of my favorite time travel stories ever and I don’t think that’s just nostalgia.
  • The Lake House: speculative romantic fiction is rarely done better.
  • Sliding Doors: okay, this one is more of time being the one to travel through the character or something. I don’t know if the blog is my best writing, but I’ll always be proud of the technical gimmick I was able to implement.

Sportsball Cinema

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A collection of recommendations this week inspired by the main reason I’m still busy outside of work. I’m actually a little surprised how many sports movies I’ve covered, as it’s generally outside my interests. But I’ve had a long time to collect them now.

  • Field of Dreams – if someone doesn’t name this as the quintessential baseball movie, it’s probably because they said A League of Their Own
  • Mr. 3000 – Bernie Mac is playing baseball, how silly!
  • Major League – Awful players are playing baseball, how silly!
  • Ed – Matt Leblanc is playing baseball, how silly! Also there’s a chimp.
  • BASEketball – You got your baseball in my basketball! You got your basketball in my baseball!

Wonder Winterland?

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Where I am, we’ve been halted by what I used to consider a pretty minor winter weather event, so this week I’m collecting some of the reel thing.

Snow Day: the post that may have jinxed my region last year.

Jack Frost: do you want to build a snowdad?

The Survivors: somebody is ready to profit on your fear of being unprepared.

Cliffhanger: Rambo in the snow, parka not included.

Titanic: Ice has never endangered any of us this much.

Your Tax Dollars At The Movies

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Despite election cycles, the world is all politics, all the time, and it is only the privileged few who can avoid that, perhaps especially during an administration mainly built on not constantly drumming up controversy. So there’s always time to consider American government through the movies.

1776: Begin at the beginning, and sit down, John. Gridlock is eternal.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: The little guy with a heart who’s chronically too rare in the machinery of government.

The Manchurian Candidate: Back when it was easier to imagine a foreign government brainwashing and grooming future American leaders than just tuning the minds of the electorate through online advertisements and fake accounts.

All the President’s Men: Somehow Watergate is when cynicism about government corruption became standard, though it’s always been with us.

Wag the Dog: When there seems little else to do about the state of affairs, why not laugh about it?

Dropping the Ball

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This year more than any other year, I’ve been finding myself with less time or energy than I need to do a full review. I’m getting busier and older, but even so, I’ve still made at least some kind of post once a week, more Yesterdays and back catalog collections than ever before. Some of them were work I felt I did some good or at least fun writing with, but mostly, I consider them filler.

In that spirit, I’m dropping the ball one more time this year by counting down my ten favorite actual reviews of the past year.

See link for full CC attribution

10: Failure To Launch: one of the better romantic comedies

9: Funny Money: theatrical chaos

8: The Creation of the Humanoids: great concept, a little flat

7: Mr. Deeds: not your average Adam Sandler vehicle

6: Camp Nowhere: the best way to learn responsibility is to have nobody to answer to

5: Mad Money: it’s not stealing if it’s trash, right?

4: Earth Girls are Easy: I misjudged this movie so badly

3: Electric Dreams: quirky SF romcom review with a side of pretty good if ill fitting social commentary

2: The First Wives Club: don’t get mad, get it back

1: Julie and Julia: hmm, I wonder what I connected with here

I hope in the new year to have less filler but also more branching out with opportunities to make social commentary though movies. Maybe only ten people read this blog regularly, but I made a commitment to myself if nobody else, and I have no intention of just fizzling on this project.

Yesterday’s Movies needs to get away

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There’s a lot of tension around here right now and we could all use a break.

Road to Bali: Ah, a couple of comedy buddies in a beautiful place, colonializing it up on very fake sets. Hm. That didn’t help.

Captain Ron: Are we sure this guy really knows what he’s doing? Maybe let’s book a cruise next time.

The Poseidon Adventure: Oh… nevermind then. Maybe a virtual vacation would be less of a nightmare.

Total Recall: …

That time again.

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It keeps happening. Does anything change, in the long run?

While going through old posts for the suggested viewing, I found even more movies about police officers acting outside the law to get the bad guys than I expected. Dirty Harry is the archetypal fairy tale of why law enforcement needs to be lawless, but we’re so accustomed to the narrative that “hero” cops bending or breaking the laws that are meant to keep us safe from the misuse of their authority are rarely visible. I recall how badly I hoped that Bad Boys might at least end with the bad guy actually imprisoned instead of executed. Because the unspoken superpower that fictional police have but real police rarely do, is that they are magically always right by being the heroes of the story being told. That doesn’t even begin to discuss the problem that modern law enforcement has with the kind of people who are attracted to the authoritarian, “I Am The Law”, consequence-free state of modern policing.

Additional viewing:

Pulgasari

First Blood

Judgment at Nuremberg

And I don’t have my own words about Do The Right Thing, but that is highly recommended as well.

https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/

Leftover Stuffing

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I don’t really have enough time for a review this week, so here’s a collection of my favorite Movies of My Yesterdays posts. One might say they’re Movies of My Yesterdays Of Yesterday, but one would be reaching dangerous amounts of meta.

In looking back on these posts, I realized that when I began, I used an introduction that I forgot about by the third entry:

Movies of my Yesterdays is an irregular series where instead of writing about a movie I’ve never seen, I choose a movie important to my past and discuss why that is.