Another week of cultural consumption in Chateau Steelypips, with two family movie nights and a bonus movie because my real bike wasn’t fixed until Thursday.
Highlander
This is on the short list of movies I’ve seen a double-digit number of times, because we used to re-watch a VHS tape of it when we got bored back in college. I re-watched it a few months back, when Sean Connery died, and it still holds up as well as it ever did. When we were scrolling through recommendations on Prime Friday night, it came up and I offered it to the kids as “Extremely 80’s movie about immortal guys chopping each others heads off with swords.” They said “Maybe…” and I added “Queen did the soundtrack,” and that put it over the top.
They’re streaming the European cut of the movie on Prime, so there are a few more flashback scenes than in the version I can close my eyes and visualize frame by frame, but it’s still good. The kids enjoyed it, though they were less taken with Clancy Brown’s performance as the Kurgan than I was— they’re too nice to really thrill to the exploits of over-the-top bad guys.
Free Guy:
This is the brand-new movie in which Ryan Reynolds is a character in a video game who becomes self-aware. SteelyKid has been excited about this for two months, possibly because it has brief cameos from a bunch of YouTubers in it, but was extremely disappointed to discover that it was not, in fact, going immediately to streaming. And we’re just not comfortable yet going to a movie in an indoor theater, particularly because The Pip isn’t vaccinate-able yet.
SteelyKid has kept up a steady stream of complaints about not being able to see this, though, and Sunday afternoon, Kate remembered that drive-in theaters still exist. So we moved Movie Night to an outdoor setting, up at the Malta drive-in.
If you’ve seen any of the trillion or so ads for this that have been running all over the media universe, it’s pretty much exactly what you would expect: Lots of fairly broad jokes about games and gaming, and Ryan Reynolds doing his usual thing. There’s a real-world plot about noble indie game creators (Jodie Comer and Joe Keery) fighting back against the corporatization of the industry represented by the shooter game that Reynolds’s character inhabits, but it’s pretty forgettable until Taika Waititi shows up as the evil corporate overlord and leaves teeth marks in all the scenery.
SteelyKid loved it, The Pip enjoyed it, and I thought it was fine for what it is. There were some logistical issues with the drive-in setting, but it basically worked, and if we have to do it again, we’ll know how to address them.
Moneyball:
When I was grumbling about prestige TV a week or so ago, I said I might try watching a movie in chunks while riding the stationary bike in the basement, and I actually followed through with that. I picked Moneyball because it keeps getting brought up on podcasts that I listen to for being a great sports movie and a great Brad Pitt performance.
I didn’t see this when it came out, because my immediate reaction was “How is that a movie?” I’m still not entirely sure I know— there’s not a lot of actual drama here: Pitt as Billy Beane decides early on to buy into the new analytics-based approach to baseball, and never wavers from that. It doesn’t work at first because the manager resists, but once he’s forced to play the way Beane wants him to, things turn around and the team goes on a historic run before losing in the playoffs.
There’s some fun stuff in this, and Pitt is oddly compelling playing a regular-ish guy, but it’s all kind of low stakes. And I kept thinking it felt a bit like the usual knock on Bob Woodward books— it’s a very good telling of the story that the people who talked to him want to have out in the world.
It did, however, do exactly what I needed it to, in that it was engaging enough to distract me while biking to nowhere, but not so captivating as to make it hard to stop in the middle when I reached the end of a workout (the approximate break point is shown in the image above; about an hour of racking up fake miles). I may do more of this as we move into crappier weather in the fall and winter.
And that’s the week in pop culture. Here are some buttons:
And if you want to make the obvious “There can be only one” joke about the Highlander sequels, the comments will be open.