Isn’t Something Wild a road trip caper?
There are two women working in the store. One is David Byrne’s mother. The other is Jonathan Demme’s mother.
Only if you count traveling around New York City and its suburbs a road trip.
They go down to Pennsylvania…
You’re right. I haven’t seen the movie for a long time and I misread the Wikipedia entry about it. Still, it’s not typical of road trip movies (sometimes called just read movies). Most such movies travel a longer journey than Something Wild. Look at the list in the Wikipedia for Road movie:
I mean, wikipedia also says…
In the film, uptight investment banker Charles Driggs (Daniels) goes on an impromptu road trip with a mysterious, care-free woman (Griffith) but they face trouble when her ex-convict husband (Liotta) turns up.
I don’t care that much, but it definitely has a car trip far afield.
One Battle After Another (2025) has already been commented on quite a bit here but I just saw it and will throw in my 2¢.
I’m aware that it has won critical acclaim and there’s probably more to come, notably at the Oscars. But personally I have mixed feelings. I think the weakest aspect is the plot, which is pretty wild and disjointed for more than the first half, although it does come together nicely at the end. But otherwise it exudes competence in every respect, with fine performances by Leonardo di Caprio, Sean Penn, and Benicio del Toro, and a pretty good one by Chase Infiniti who plays Willa. Just generally very competent film making across the board.
On balance I’d give it a “recommended” rating but inasmuch as it didn’t strongly resonate with me I’d consider it critically somewhat overrated.
As an aside, OMG Sean Penn is looking old! The guy is only 65 – what has he been doing with himself? When he first appears as Col. Steven Lockjaw, I didn’t even recognize him!
Wicked: For Good
I wanted to like this one, but the longer it went on the less I did, and by the end I was a little confused by what had happened.
I was enjoying this well enough (although still not as much as the first film) up until the point the house crashes down and Dorothy arrives, then it all seemed to turn a little incoherent and I felt like we’d skipped a chapter or a major scene was deleted. It would be baffling for anyone who hasn’t seen The Wizard of Oz (before any mockery… new people will be being introduced to that film all the time, so it’s perfectly possible). I have seen that many times and yet even for me it just didn’t work (I’m aware the 1939 film was based on a book [series]).
I felt no emotional connection with Elphaba and Galinda’s relationship either during the second half, because Galinda’s mood and attitude seemed to flip flop all over the place. One minute she seemed to like Elphaba, the next she was on the Wizard’s side. A confusing mess.
Thanks for the recommendation. As a big fan of PG Wodehouse stories, Downton Abbey*, “You Rang, M’Lord”, and other such stuff about the comical aspects of the English upper class, I’m looking forward to seeing this!
* Not that “Downtown Abbey” is comical – but the other ones are! DA is more like an elegantly produced soap opera, written by someone who, like Wodehouse, well understood the culture of English aristocracy.
We saw this over the weekend. I hadn’t seen the stage play, although we’ve listened to the recordings ad nauseum. And I read Maguire’s book (which is arguably no help in understanding the plot).
Gorgeous production, and very skilled actors and singers.
(But I have to complain about Jeff Goldblum. It’s obvious that he can’t sing, so he’s speaking his parts a la Rex Harrison. It makes me long for Joel Grey or one of the other Broadway Wizards. You appreciate the very clever lyrics more if they’re sung. This feels like the movie of Man of la Mancha where they went with a famous cast rather than one that could actually sing the parts.)
The whole thing feels uncomfortably padded, which is because it is. They added a lot of scenes and a couple of songs not in the original second half of the stage musical. It’s good that Glinda/Galinda gets her own song about her story (as Kristin Chenowith reportedly wanted), but not at this cost. Two and a half hours is too long.
I have to add that it’s a little bothering to me that not only Maguire and Wicked make up a lot of the backstory of the characters (as did the Disney-made movie Oz..The Great and Powerful) when L. Frank Baum (and later Ruth Plumly Thompson) already did all this. There’s a considerable amount of information about how the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion got the way they did. These recent shows and movies feel like the “rough and gritty” trend in comic books that took familiar characters like Batman and Superman and made them darker and more “adult” Just Cause.
In honor of the season, I watched the Alastair Sim A Christmas Carol. After seeing countless parodies, it’s anticlimactic seeing one of the better true to the book versions. It seems more like a cliche. “OK, I know where we are going, can we get there?” That’s not fair to the film, which is pretty good. (Except for Scrooge giddily bouncing around like he’s a hummingbird on uppers. That’s a bit much.)
Yeah, the Wicked movies, particularly this recent one, really gave me an increased appreciation of L. Frank Baum’s original stories. (I can still take or leave the 1939 movie version, but I definitely wasn’t thirsting for any “darker” reimagining of it, and have not been curious enough to the book or stage versions of Wicked.)
Even the rather nutty and free-associating Baum original stories, with all the limitations in their worldview reflecting various systemic bigotries of the time, feel more coherent than this plot. (Like, if you’re an extremely powerful sorceress running a major institution in the Land of Oz and you’ve got an Oz-specific beef with two Oz-based witches, why tf does your preferred assassination method involve importing a random flying house from Kansas USA via an extreme weather event? The involvement of Dorothy and Toto in these Oz happenings is now bewilderingly pointless instead of serendipitously accidental.)
Just a PSA for anybody seeking a new holiday staple movie: back in 2023 I enthused about the 2021 Aardman Animation movie Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas, and I continue to recommend it for all Nick Park fans.
There is a new Christmas Shaun the Sheep episode, Fleece Navidad, being broadcast on Christmas Day in the UK (I’m not sure if/when in the US and elsewhere).
I wouldn’t call it anticlimactic; in my view, it’s by far the best Christmas Carol ever made and watching it every Christmas is as much of a tradition around here as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation! 
I think you mean second best. The Muppet Christmas Carol is still the best.
While baking cookies, I put on Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Not the 1964 stop-motion TV special, but the original 1948 cartoon. It’s not seen often, and is interesting for lots of reasons. It’s directed by Max Fleischer, but it’s not a Fleischer studios cartoon, since the studio folded in 1942. Nor was it made by its successor, Famous Studios. It was made by the Jam Handy Organization, founded and named by an Olympic athlete, and devoted to the making of industrial education films. Fans of MST3K will know the Handy film Hired! Max was working with a crew completely different from the animators he’d worked with years before, which probably explains the different “feel” of the cartoon.
The Wikipedia article suggests that the film was made to show to kids waiting in line to see Santa Claus at Montgomery Ward, which owned Rudolph. That would explain the association with the Handy organization. It’s also an interesting cultural landmark – I’ve seen such mini-entertainment venues at places like the Disney parks, where they do things to entertain the public waiting to get into attractions. I didn’t know the idea went back so far.
The story is based on the original 1939 Robert May book and poem (for which he receives credit). One is at first surprised that the song Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer doesn’t play over the opening credits, but that’s because the cartoon predates Johnny Marks song by a year. (Apparently prints of the film released in 1951 have the song added to the credits).
The story is significantly different from the 1964 TV special, and the Marks song, for that matter. Rudolph lives in a world where talking animals live in very human-like houses and communities. Rudolph lives in one such, a town populated by reindeer, which has nothing to do with Santa Claus or the North Pole. Rudolph is not part of a family or community that serves the Clauses, but acts like an ordinary American town. But Rudolph, of course, still has that nose, and is teased by the other reindeer.
Santa looks out his window and is daunted by the fog and cold when getting ready to go out for Christmas. But he goes anyway, launching his sled and reindeer through a mechanized, gear-filled chute that looks kind of like the thing the villains use in the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoon The Bulleteers. Soon Santa is in trouble, taking a long time to hunt his way through the world. Until, that is, he gets to Rudolph’s house, where he sees That Nose and Santa gets the bright idea of using Rudolph’s nose as a guide. Rudolph, like a kid asked to come up on stage and take the place of the unavailable drummer in a rock band, is delighted. He leaves a note for his parents, and goes off with Santa to Save Christmas. Their first stop is “Bunnyville”, populated by cute talking rabbits.
This version of the story notably avoids some of the moral ambiguity of the later version. Here Rudolph isn’t part of a potential herd of reindeer designated to pull Santa’s sleigh who has been sidelined by his deformity and ridiculed because of it, until Santa somewhat hypocritically sees that it’s valuable to him. He’s an unfortunate whose value is seen by the troubled Santa and is plucked from obscurity and the taunts of his (not connected with the Santa herd) group to win glory for his uniqueness. Left unexplained is how the hell Rudolph can fly. Santa magic, I guess.
The 1964 TV special was based on the song by Johnny Marks, and featured a slew of new songs by Marks. As far as I know, May had no connection with that project.
Oh, cool. Spurred by your report, I found this history…it has a link to the video at the bottom.
When I was a kid we had the original 1940s book with those illustrations in my kindergarten.
Eega
Recommended.
No, not Eegah, MST3K movie.
This one is Eega, which means “house fly” in Telugu. A man is killed by villains and, I guess, his love for a girl is strong enough that he comes back as a fly. Now that he is a fly, he tries to communicate with the girl and get revenge on the bad guy who killed him.
It’s crazier and funnier than it sounds.
I laughed and cheered throughout. It was quite the silly movie.
Oh, from the director of RRR, if you care.
Is there a dance sequence with the fly? Of course there is! You gotta see it!