Many Movie Nights

Idiot detectives, idiot racists, and dinosaurs, oh my...

Another multi-week stretch of no Movie Night posts, though not because movie nights didn’t happen. Well, OK, two of them didn’t happen— I had a Trustees event one Friday, and another Saturday we opted to play a card game instead— but it’s mostly just tha tI haven’t had time to write them up.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang:

The last movie night wrap-up ended with Shane Black’s The Nice Guys, and The Pip really enjoyed the bumbling detectives/ snappy dialogue formula, so I fired this up for him, because it’s Black at his very best. It’s a little less antic and more conversational, so he wasn’t quite as into it, but did enjoy the banter. And now I can use the line about looking up “idiot” in the dictionary and he recognizes the reference…

Blazing Saddles:

I dimly remembered something being plugged on a movie podcast that was streaming on hulu, so we checked that service, where I failed to recognize whatever it was. They were, however, promoting this, which is the canonical “You could never make that today…” comedy. So I gave it a shot.

SteelyKid “Nope!”-ed out in the first five minutes, where Taggart sends Bart and his friend into quicksand in a flurry of racist language. The Pip stuck it out, though, and his summary review was “It was funny, but very stupid.” Which, fair…

The Big Lebowski:

Bumbling detectives having been a hit in previous weeks, I finally got The Pip to agree to watch The Big Lebowski, which I’ve been suggesting off and on for a while. His half-serious final rating was 5/10, because it didn’t show the bowling tournament match between Jesus and The Dude. “Would’ve been a 9/10 if they had showed the semifinals.”

Jurassic Park:

We checked out the recommendations from HBO Max, which were chock full of superhero movies because of our recent Batman binge, but also included this. The Pip debated briefly whether to ask for the recent reboot instead, but I told him this one is the best of the lot, so we watched the 1993 original.

I had kind of forgotten just how annoying Jeff Goldblum’s character is in this. It’s not as mind-blowing as a visual spectacle on a big TV in 2022 as it was in a theater in 1993, but it still holds up pretty well, because Spielberg.

Bonus Streaming-Show Content:

Watching Blazing Saddles on Hulu reminded me that I had been watching the second season of Only Murders in the Building, but stopped two episodes before the finale because that’s as far as they had gotten back in August, and I haven’t watched much of anything since, because work. So I banged those last two episodes out last week.

The second season is pretty much on par with the first: the interplay between Steven Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez is terrific, and the supporting cast is likewise very strong. It’s a little shaggy— there are a couple of minor plot threads that just kind of get dropped, but that shagginess is part of the charm.

I also watched the bonus 11th episode of The Sandman on Netflix, which is a composite of two early stories from the run: “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope.” I didn’t really like either of these very much in comic form— I’m just completely over cats as a subject in fantasy— so seeing them on screen wasn’t a huge draw for me, and it met my low expectations.

I think I heard that they’ve been picked up for a second season, which should mean they’d be doing Season of Mists, one of my favorite stories from the books, so that’s cool, anyway.

I did watch a few episodes of That Elf Show on Amazon, so as to be up-to-date on the #Discourse, but it wasn’t that great, and I doubt I’ll finish it.

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And that’s a bunch of stuff. If you want to see where we go from here with family movie-watching (Burn After Reading maybe? Jurassic reboots?), here’s a button:

And if you have complaints or suggestions, the comments will be open: