Sometime around the start of the pandemic— I think actually a little before, though I don’t remember exactly— we instituted a “Movie Night” with the kids. This is usually just me and SteelyKid and The Pip watching… something. Sometimes it’s a new release, sometimes a classic flick I think they’d like, sometimes part of an obsession one or the other of the kids has developed. It’s generally fun, and gets them watching something more substantial than YouTube videos of other people playing video games. And it stops me from doomscrolling on weekend evenings.
This has evolved into the plural— movies with one or both kids on both Friday and Saturday nights— and also sometimes movies just for me, when both of them refuse the offer, and I take over the TV. It’s been a nice addition to our routine, and a good opportunity to think a bit more about pop culture stuff.
And since it’s a pretty regular part of the routine in Chateau Steelypips, it ought to be somewhat reliable as a source of weekend blog fodder: writing up whatever we watched this week. So, here’s the first installment of that, kicking things off with a rare three-movie week.
No Sudden Move: Kate and I both ended up having the day off on Monday thanks to the July 4th holiday (she got it officially, I took it off because I can do that), but the day camp the kids go to was still open, so we had time to watch an actual adult movie. And by chance, there was a brand new Steven Soderbergh crime movie on HBO Max, so a big win.
A lot of the reviews I’ve seen of this call it a “heist movie,” but I’d call it more of a noir, as “heist” to me involves a large elaborate robbery with a team put together by choice. This is a series of smaller crimes done by someone trying to stay ahead of a situation they don’t control. In this specific case, two someones, a couple of small-time hoods in 1950’s Detroit, played by Don Cheadle and Benicio del Toro, who are offered a suspiciously large sum to “babysit” the family of an office worker who’s being tasked with retrieving some document from his boss’s safe. This being a Soderbergh crime movie, of course, things don’t go exactly according to plan.
This has pretty much everything you expect of late-period Soderbergh: the cast is pretty stacked (David Harbour, Amy Seimetz, Kieran Culkin, Jon Hamm, Ray Liotta, Bill Duke…), there’s snappy dialogue, and it moves along briskly. There’s a bit of a Villain Speech toward the end that was maybe a tad on the nose, but otherwise it was very satisfying, plot-wise.
The one element to watch out for is that for whatever reason, Soderbergh chose to use a lot of lenses with a fisheye effect (I don’t know if he’s still shooting things on iPhones or what). It struck me as mildly odd, but made Kate very motion-sick, so if you’re prone to that sort of thing, be warned.
Black Widow: SteelyKid has gone on a big MCU kick recently, after I started watching Loki and The Pip joined in. So it was a no-brainer as to what to watch Friday night…
This is a pretty odd movie in terms of the MCU continuity— a too-late stand-alone movie about a character whose ultimate fate is already known— but if you ignore that and treat it just as spectacle, it’s perfectly fine. Scarlett Johansson does what she’s been doing in the MCU all along, Florence Pugh has fun doing those same things and also making fun of them, and David Harbour appears to be having a grand time doing a really hammy fake Russian accent as the lunkheaded Red Guardian. The villain (Ray Winstone) and his plan are straight out of the lower tier of Roger Moore-era James Bond movies (the movie itself is not unaware of this, as there are some clips from Moonraker shown at one point), but the fights and explosions get the job done.
The kids greatly enjoyed this, and the stinger scene evidently meant something to SteelyKid (I was confused, but don’t really care). It feels kind of inessential even by the standards of Marvel movies, but was fun enough after several beers.
Independence Day: SteelyKid declined a movie on Saturday night, so The Pip and I watched a seasonally appropriate classic. Largely because I had been reminded of it by an episode of the Rewatchables podcast and said “Hey, that might work for the kids…”
This holds up reasonably well. I mean, it’s obviously not the transcendent experience watching it streaming in the living room in 2021 that it was in the balcony of the Uptown in DC in 1996, but it’s a very well done movie with a strong cast and crew who hit all the beats they need to. Will Smith is near his peak, Jeff Goldblum hasn’t completely slid into self-parody (though Judd Hirsch is beaming in from a different movie), Bill Pullman is great, Robert Loggia and James Rebhorn fulfill their obligations as “Hey, it’s That Guy!” I could do without Brent Spiner’s wacky scientist stereotype, but, you know, that’s my cross to bear.
I was very slightly worried that The Pip (who’s 9) might get a bit freaked out by the destruction and the creepy aliens, but there wasn’t anything too bad in it. I don’t know that The Pip came away thinking this was an absolute classic, as he did for some other movies (we’ve watched Midnight Run and The Blues Brothers twice each, and he was lobbying for a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off rewatch at the end of the school year). He laughed in the right places (both intentionally and unintentionally funny bits), and low-key cheered the ending, so all in all it was a success.
And that’s This Week in Movie Nights (even though one was watched in midafternoon). This one I will commit to trying to make a recurring feature; if you think you’d like to see this regularly via email (along with the other stuff I write), here’s a great big button: