Starting the year off right with zero movies literally about Columbian hippos

but, metaphorically, maybe ALL of them are?

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Hard to believe this is all one month. Back at the beginning of January the whole family was home and some movies got watched that probably wouldn’t’ve without the influence of the oldest. Then The Testament of Ann Lee proved a fulcrum of some point. Since seeing it, I’ve listened to the soundtrack who knows how many times. It has infiltrated every hour my mind is awake. (I cannot speak with confidence of the sleeping hours.)

I’ve also spent the month writing (mostly in my head) a best-of-2025 post. But now January is over and I still have not done so. Is it to late?

Anyway, you can tell the month’s end caught me offguard as I’ve already posted something today.

Watch out for January, friends. It’s got the tricks.

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something college students know

Help! (1965)

Our dvd problems continue. This time, the Help! dvd (and apparently onlythe Help! dvd) caused VLC to utterly freeze up. I’ve never seen something so peculiar.

Anyway, so we pirated it. (Is it pirating if you own the dvd? We’ve watched it many times but it’s still in perfect condition

Not a lot of intact comic groups anymore. Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers—all long, long ago. The Beatles (the greatest rock group in the history of the world, but as if that weren’t distinction enough, the Beatles were the greatest comedians in the history of rock) and Monty Python are also long ago, now. There’ve been a few nearlies over the years, but I wonder if the Beatles are the proper model. A Barenaked Ladies movie circa 2000 might have worked?

I think a group that could pull this off is rarer than rare, but it might have a better chance of working than anything else. Is anyone looking?

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Prime Video

The Naked Gun (2025)

No doubt this would reward rewatching. I caught at most half of the background jokes? at most three-quarters of the in-credits jokes?

Anyway, it was funny but no doubt would have been waaaaaay funnier in a packed theater.

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Prime Video

Eephus (2024)

This is . . . like if Terrence Malick made a baseball movie. Only with better jokes and also it’s sometimes a horror movie and the monster is middle-age.

It was very good but I don’t know just what it will become as it settles into memory.

The Big O—the only person who watched it with me—says he won’t know until we watch it again next year.

But he enjoyed it. Sometimes twenty-two is old enough to feel the malaise of age.

ELSEWHERE
Tubi

In Search of the Last Action Heroes (2019)

Don’t know if the book I read big pieces of at the library once is related (they’re quite different, for all their similarities), but that’s what got me to click on it. ||| UPDATE: the final

The movie’s about the sort of action movie that came out of the ‘80s (think Stallone, Schwarzenegger) and has interviews with writers, composers, actors, etc. It takes them from the appearance of the genre, through theaters and video shelves, until movies like Last Action Hero showed the time was coming to an end and movies like Speed (actors taking over for overbuilt monsters), Jurassic Park (effects taking over in-camera), The Bourne Identity (shakycam taking over visibility) gradually ending the era.

It’s long but easy to watch in parts while doing other things. Even though I haven’t seen most of thost movies, I liked it!

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dunno

A Town Called Panic (2009)

Lady Steed and I got back just as the kids had ten minutes left in this movie but I wanted to count it anyway just so I could tell you, in case no one ever has before, how delightfully mad this movie is. You could compare it to Looney Tunes or the Marx Bros. but honestly, A Town Called Panic genuinely might outdo them both. It’s as mad as Wonderland but so much funnier.

Anyway, it’s brilliant and I love it and I bet you would too.

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our dvd

Guys and Dolls (1955)

Okay. I’m about to come off a big square.

Yes, the end of this movie pastes on a nice all-god’s-critters-got-a-place-in-the-choir moral—and I’m all for that moral—but that ending’s a lie, a cheap facade, because the entire rest of the runtime celebrates misogyny and ugliness. It’s a pure embrace of sin (by which I mean both evil and foolishness) and all the fun bits and entertaining spots don’t hide the fact that, in the end, no one in this movie is treated well by the story’s creators. The women in particular are straightout abused and turned into nothing more than coin. The moments that are supposed to show otherwise do not. And then men aren’t much better though instead of being abused by others they are abused by their fallen state and shallow writing.

They says women deserve respect and they have inner lives. But all they do is display breasts and hip/waist ratio in endless variety. They claim men may be saved. But they make gambling the only time they dance—and only the silly fat man puts on the red uniform. The show the most noble of the men as noble simply because he doesn’t take advantage (”“) of the woman he already got drunk. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s been a while since I was so appalled by such a well made movie.

I guess now I’ve opened myself up for everyone who loves it to explain to me why I’m wrong.

Bring it on.

THEATER
Century Cinemark Hilltop 16

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (2025)

I’ve now seen three of the four SpongeBob theatrical movies. While I laughed a good amount, this was easily the least of the three.* Honestly, I was kinda bored through most of it. And whatever the lesson was supposed to be, I doubt I learned it.

* Or so I thought. But I went back and read the extant reviews and it appears maybe I had a similar reaction to one and two as well.

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library dvd

The Holdovers (2023)

Watched with wife and sontwo, both of whom liked it much more than me. I kinda thought it was typical holiday heartwarming stuff. Not too cliche or anything, but not really remarkable either.

Perhaps this is a commentary on me.

I won’t be surprised if, now that we’ve finally see it, there’s a desire to return to it on a following Christmas. Will I come around??

Incidentally, recognizably Mormon character and a carol by the Salt Lake Children’s Choir directed by Kurt Bestor. Clearly this is a Mormon film.

THEATER
AMC Bay Street 16

The Testament of Ann Lee, or, The Woman Clothed by the Sun (2025)

It’s 11:33 and I don’t have to get copy to my editor to make the morning paper, so let’s just admit I’m going to let this one sit.

Perhaps ironic to go see this the day it didn’t get any Oscar nominations, but the heck. Sound deserved attention. The music. The acting. The camera work is terrific. All I can say is F1 had better be the greatest car movie ever made to get a Best Picture nod over Ann Lee.

A lot has been made of Amanda Seyfried’s performance and rightly so. I think part of what impresses people is how she’s very willing to appear human. She looks her age, for instance. It’s not a glamour role. The bits of nudity are not Hollywoodized. But I’d also like to shoutout Thomasin McKenzie who, did she not have a recognizable voice and had I not knows she was in it, may have been unrecognizable. I’m used to her always appearing like a cute ninetten, yet here she looks like a person who’s been through and going through it. Even when her character was young, she was plain and ordinary.

But the ordinariness of these people helps make their spiritual prowess the stuff of real life. I don’t particularly want to be a Shaker after seeing this, but I’m filled with respect for Ann Lee, her accomplishments, and her people. Next time D&C rolls around, the jokey way Ann Lee often gets discussed WILL NOT STAND.

But speaking of random Mormon connections, Alan Sparhawk’s one of the credited singers and, I must tell you, after I post this to Letterboxd, I’m going shopping for the soundtrack/score.

Anyway, it’s an incredible movie. It felt a bit long in the watching but I will never question the worthiness of having spent all that time in this world.

THEATER
The Roxie

OBEX (2025)

I like Albert Birney. Watched Sylvio thanks to a single-paragraph review I read somewhere; loved it; haveprobably shown it to 300 high schoolers over the years. Strawberry Mansion sounded cool and was the same team so I made it an option for the dystopian unit; one class chose it; we had incredible conversation.

OBEX may be the weirdest of the three and I don’t see how it could tie into anything class-related, but it’s one heck of an experience and—bonus—the first seen in theaters! But even the Roxie’s audience was perplexed. I wish you could have been there with us as we, as a group, negotiated whether or not we were going to clap for this thing.

I like the Eraserhead-meets-Zelda description IndieWire put out (what first captured my attention, before I knew who made it), but I think a better comparison might be the very different Hundreds of Beavers. Although that’s an uproarious comedy (OBEX is merely funny), Beavers isn’t just another videogame-influenced b&w film—it too is filled with existential dread and inhuman forces looking to destroy.

I guess b&w existential comedies with videogame trappings and sweet/cheap effects are having a moment.

I’m for it.

THEATER
Century Cinemark Hilltop 16

Hamnet (2025)

Holy smokes but are kid actors great these days!

Talk about the book led me to think I would find it an insufferable mess of manipulative, historically sketchy melodrama.

Talk about the movie led me to think that it was pretty good but got manipulative toward the end and you’ll be crying the last half nonstop whether you’re willing or not.

My actual experience included the following:

1) The film is beautiful.

2) While I dug the romantic relationship once it was established, I found its genesis perplexing.

3) The acting was excellent, up and down.

4) While I found the historical explanations of Shakespeare’s career to be unlikely, hey, it’s a movie, I got over it.

5) The play-within-the-play at the end fascinates me. It seems to demand some knowledge of Hamlet but also either to have forgotten some (or perhaps to have that knowledge based entirely on Mel Gibson’s version?) or willing to forget some. I did love how it worked and so, again, I got over it.

6) This is quite the year for realism in birth scenes!

Anyway, I liked it quite a lot. It didn’t make me want to read the novel, but it did make me want to read Stepehn Greenblatt’s initiating essay.

And it made me want to know more about Jessie Buckley. Who is she and what’s she been up to?

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library dvd

Born Yesterday (1950)

I decided I had to watch this movie when it appeared on Variety‘s top-100-comedies-of-all-time list, last year. I don’t know about that but it was utterly charming and shockingly patriotic. It’s a real movie for 2026 and I’m all for everyone giving a shot, whatever brings them to it.

William Holden sometimes looks surprisingly like Tom Hanks, but it’s Judy Holliday I got the questions about.

But first, she created this role on Broadway and got rave reviews, but the studio head said no because she wasn’t in movies. The director got her into Adam’s Rib and etc etc she finally got the role and she was great, winning the first ever Golden Globe Award for Best Actress (musical/comedy), and then, wing the Oscar over—get this—Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard) and both Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (All About Eve). Maybe it was a matter of great roles cancelling each other out, but that is one of the most stacked years of all time. Incredible.

Anyway, she plays sort of a gangster’s-moll character, a former chorus girl, ignorant and unworried about her. Her fiance takes her to D.C. where he’s trying to get some shady legislation passed. Her dumbness embarrasses him so he hires a guy to make her smart. But here’s the thing: she takes to it.

And she’s taking to it in D.C.—the seat of American democracy. And she starts getting ideas about what democracy means and how it should function. And she calls her bigshot fiance a fascist because she sees in his form of capitalism the same sort of selfishness.

And all along it’s a comedy. In a different movie, maybe she ends up in a box. Who knows. But she’s brave and getting braver in tandem with reading and getting readier.

So my question is this: Is she the model for Lina Lamont? Although the movie comes out only two years earlier than Singin’ in the Rain, it takes place twenty years later. But they have exeedingly similar hair and dress and movement and, my word, that voice!

BREAKING

A bit of searching and I learn this:

To create the role of Lina Lamont, the silent star with the disastrous voice, Comden and Green thought of Judy Holliday, their old sketch comedy partner, and even revived some bits of business from their old act. But after Holliday won the Oscar for 1950’s “Born Yesterday,” they realized they’d need someone else. They turned to Jean Hagen, who’d been Holliday’s understudy in the Broadway version of “Born Yesterday.” For her audition, Hagen did a drop-dead impression of Holliday and won the role.

So yes. I wasn’t crazy.

But it’s not just the stylings. There are even echos in specific lines. But while Singin’ in the Rain‘s version is villainous and egotistical—selfish—fascist?, Born Yesterday‘s version is hopeful and shows growth and curiosity and learns to care about everyone. Quite the opposite really.

(I’m almost afraid that watching this movie to often might even sour me a tad on Singin’ in the Rain which would be a freaking tragedy.)

To conclude, when I started writing this I wasn’t sure the movie belonged on a top-100 anything, but the more I type the more I am persuaded in the beauty of embracing comedy in the most classic sense. Not because it is funny but, because it ends in a marriage.

And, as a better writer than me once pled: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Because, while love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove—and while it may be an everfixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken and is the right star for every wanderer, love is not time’s fool. That’s one thing Born Yesterday did that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. Our romantic leads kiss almost immediately but then they don’t proceed. She even assumes the moment is gone. See, love doesn’t alter as the hours and weeks pass but, instead, bears out even to the edge of doom. So whatever love is, when it’s right, change only makes it stronger.

If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor ever loved.

But check out Born Yesterday. It’s not just a normal romcom, for you and your lover. It’s also a romcom for you and America. And you need that right now.

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library dvd

Cruella (2021)

I don’t like splitting my attention when watching a movie, any movie, but I had some behind-the-curtain crises at Irreantum for the new issue and so split my attention was, for a least two thirds of the movie. And although there are complaints to be made about this movie, one thing it has in spades is freaking coolness. It is such a pleasure to look at this movie. The camera knows its seeing cool stuff and it makes sure we see it as it needs to be seen. And the music. Holy cow the music! It’s so great. And so while I have complaints about some of the cgi and some of the heist magic and a couple anachromisms, and, really, it’s a shave too long, overall, I was carried along on its wave of cool. When the dvd ended and we were on the loop with just, what, thirty seconds of music on repeat? I never wanted to turn it off.

I’m trying to hold back—don’t want this to become a habit—but this might become #3.

But let’s talk inflences. Obviously, it knows we know Disney’s 101 Dalmations. It’s manages to be more true to the facts of that classic than I expected given the first half hour, but it’s also willing to ignore that movie as needed. Which is the right choice. You have to have a certain measure of freedom or the whole thing will never work.

It’s clearly thinking about The Devil Wears Prada: Emma Thompson (who is, naturally, excellent) is Meryl Streep; Emma Stone (who slays) is Anne Hathaway; Mark Strong is Stanley Tucci. Not perfect parallels, of course, but obviously, obviously intentional. But since I hate that movie (ask me sometime), the Cruella cast cannot suffer in comparison. No worries.

Also pretty sure it’s leaning rather heavily on Velvet Goldmine.

Although the film’s Horace and Jasper and likeable blokes and played their roles admirably, in the end, this is a two-hander: Emma vs Emma. They both brought their A games and it is delightful to watch them tear apart the scenery and everyone around them. Two killer performances.

In short, even only partially engaged, I was utterly engaged. Exquisite entertainment.

UPDATE: Soundtrack hardly looks worth the bother. If it would take three cds, TAKE THREE CDS.