So Many Movie Nights...

Three months worth of media with the kids

Also caught in the “work was a grind” thing was the quasi-tradition of posting recaps of family Movie Nights here. That actually went even longer than not recapping blogging— the last Movie Night post in my archive is from early April, so it’s basically three months’ worth of movie-watching backlog. It’s less bad than it might seem, though, because baseball: The Pip’s travel team had Friday night games, which meant we ended up watching about half as many movies as usual.

Groundhog Day:

I don’t have the usual photo-of-the-tv shot of this because we watched it in Florida, while visiting the in-laws. The kids went through Grammy and Grampy’s DVD collection, and this was one of the only points of overlap. It’s sort of interesting to see their attitudes toward the story; SteelyKid didn’t really believe Bill Murray’s character deserved a shot at redemption, but for me, it holds up pretty well.

Creed 2

Creed 3

We banged these out in one weekend; Creed 3 via video on demand. They’re pretty good; 2 is probably slightly better than 3, on the whole, but Jonathan Majors is very compelling. Pity he’s a jackass. The way the fights play out doesn’t really make all that much sense, but that’s very much in the Rocky tradition, so…

This led to a couple of weeks of The Pip randomly throwing punches at me, which has thankfully mostly passed.

The In-Laws:

The “Serpentine” scene from this was all over my Twitter feed the last couple of days, in tribute to the passing of the great Alan Arkin. The movie as a whole is a bit less zany than I remembered it, and thus a little slow for the kids, but on the whole it’s very good.

The Bourne Identity:

The start of a great action franchise. Holds up really well, and Matt Damon is weirdly plausible as that level of badass.

Point Break:

The movie podcast I listen to did a Keanu Reeves Hall of Fame, and talked about this as an unimpeachable classic of 90s cinema. Weirdly, I remember renting it when we I was in college in the actual 90s, and finding it pretty silly; I’m not sure we even finished it. Anyway, I fired it up with The Pip and… it’s pretty silly.

Face/Off:

Speaking of “pretty silly”…

Grosse Point Blank:

And speaking of the late, great Alan Arkin… I’d been pushing for this one for a while, and The Pip finally caved. He’s growing resigned to movies having romance plots.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves:

We rented this on-demand the weekend The Pip was hobbled by an inflamed growth plate in his heel (you can see the icepack in the photo), and it was just what we needed. Very silly movie, but everybody involved is aware of that, and having great fun.

John Wick Chapter 4:

In the unlikely event that you remember the last Movie Night recap post here, you might be thinking “Wait, didn’t you already see this? Why are you watching it again?” We did, in fact, see it in the theater, but we rented it once it hit streaming for two reasons: 1) SteelyKid didn’t come to the theater with us, and 2) this movie fucking rules.

The Hunger Games:

One of the kids specifically requested this; I forget which. Kate and I saw this in the theater during its original run, and I thought it was well-made but fundamentally pretty stupid in the way most YA dystopian fiction is. Re-watching didn’t change my opinion.

The Super Mario Brothers Movie:

This was during The Pip’s 14-day stretch on Injured Reserve, so I agreed to watch this despite having no real interest in it. It’s not bad, for what it is. He played all the Mario games in existence during the pandemic, so spent a lot of the movie doing the Chris Evans “I recognize that reference!” meme.

Extraction:

Netflix was pushing Extraction 2 pretty hard when we logged on for Movie Night, so I said to The Pip “Well, do you want to watch Chris Hemsworth shoot five hundred dudes in the head?” and he said “OK, I guess.” This is a little darker than I remembered from when I watched it one of the nights neither kid wanted a movie, but it does very effectively present Chris Hemsworth shooting dudes.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse:

We went to the theater as a family to see this one, which is another in the category of “Very well-done example of what it is, but fundamentally hampered by the stupidity that comes with the genre in which it is situated.” The animation is great, particularly the style shifts, but if I try to think about the setting and plot for more than about ten seconds, I just get irritated.

Bull Durham:

We established last year that on or near my birthday, I get to force the kids to watch one movie of my choosing, so I picked this, which The Pip had been unwilling to watch because I told him there was a romance plot. He was wavering, so I fired up the trailer that they had with it on HBO, thinking some of the baseball clips would sell him on it… and the trailer was exclusively the romance scenes. I think the closest they came to an actual baseball clip was a shot from Nuke’s nightmare where he’s pitching naked except for the garter. No “Hit the mascot,” no “When you speak of me, speak well,” no “You’re a bunch of lollygaggers”— nothing. The movie is full of absolutely iconic sports scenes, and not a single goddamn one of them was in the trailer. It’s fucking criminal.

Happily, The Pip agreed to watch in spite of that, and agreed that the baseball scenes in this rule, and that the romantic stuff was not nearly as prominent as the trailer suggested.

(This did remind me that back in the 80’s there was an ad for this that featured a line better than what’s in the actual movie. Crash is out at the mound after a homer, and says “Hey, a lot of parks, that wouldn’t’ve gone out.” Nuke: “Name one.” Crash: Yellowstone.”)

Conan the Barbarian:

We were scrolling through the Amazon Prime recommendations, and saw a Conan movie in the list, so I pitched that (primed by the thread going around where somebody notes the “Just another snake cult…” line as a piece of worldbuilding). It turned out to be the 2011 remake with Jason Momoa, but I caught on when Morgan Freeman was reading the opening narration, and we paid $4 to rent the 1982 version instead, where the voiceover is by Uncle Iroh.

This is much slower and moodier than I had remembered, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s also impressive what lengths they go to to avoid having Schwarzenegger speak. Impeccable vibes, though, and really kind of set the visual template for a ton of later movies.

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So, yeah, that’s a bunch of flicks. There were at least two weekends in there when I was unavailable; I don’t recall if Kate watched anything with them or not. Anyway, here’s a button:

And if you want to disagree with any of my brief takes, or quote great baseball jokes, the comments will be open: