In case you missed it, my wife and I released a new episode of our podcast The Newbery Chronicles. This time, we're discussing The Witch of Blackbird Pond! Listen to it here if you're interested.
Movies
Not without its pleasures (principally, Danny DeVito and the croc-filled climax), but it's weirdly inert for an African Queen riff with a blood transfusion from Indiana Jones (though about as racist as that combo suggests). And it's especially inert for a Robert Zemeckis feature from this era. The ironic sleazeball tendencies of early Zemeckis just feel straightforwardly sleazeball here, probably not helped by the co-leading Michael Douglas (the sleazeballest of sleazeball screen presences from this era; truly baffling how much of an A-list star he was, given how consistently off-putting he is in his movies—'twas a different time, I suppose). Kathleen Turner is good, though, and much more keyed into the African Queen vibes than Douglas is. Grade: B-
I keep having to remind myself that I watched this movie, because it just keeps sliding off my brain. Ty Hickson and Amari Cheatom are both very good in their respective roles, and all of writer/director Joel Potrykus's proclivities for mixing bleak horror with the mundane ephemeral of male and geek culture are on full display (including one particularly striking scene involving cat food that feels like a dry run for the disgusting challenges of Relaxer). But I dunno, this feels minor compared to Buzzard and Relaxer, and I think there's just too much micro-indie "futzing around in the woods because we don't have sets otherwise" stuff for it to be as memorable as those other movies. Grade: C+
A lot less ineffable and a lot more music-video-y than the previous Mind's Eye films, but still pretty cool. There's a distinctly PS1-prerendered-cutscene vibe to these ones in particular that is fitting of the era. Also, the version I watched on YouTube was a LaserDisc rip, so there were a couple of load screens, which is a nice period detail. Grade: B
Easily my least-favorite Studio Ghibli movie I've seen that isn't Earwig and the Witch. I'm not against high school melodrama, and it's theoretically interesting to see Ghibli operating on that gear. But this movie is sooooo narratively inert. I have no idea why I'm supposed to care about anything that happens here, not because it's stupid and low-stakes (not necessarily a deal-breaker with high school melodrama) but because none of the emotions experienced by the characters are convincingly evoked by the movie. It's not even visually engaging; the animation is warm and competent, but it's thoroughly anonymous. This was kind of by design: the whole point of the project was for Ghibli to allow its younger animators to practice making a movie on the cheap, and I guess you get what you pay for. Grade: C
Starts out as a fairly cool idea for a '70s paranoid thriller (what if the government didn't fake the moon landing but they faked a Mars landing to save face after the real mission ran into technical difficulties amid public-private corruption at the twilight of Watergate and the dawn of neoliberal creep?) that is just a bit too dumb to mine all the promise from that premise—the kind of dumb that thinks that you have to get on a plane to travel from Houston to Galveston, or that you should have a pivotal emotional scene involve a mother breaking down into sobs as she reads Fox in Socks to her kid (though as a parent, I can honestly say: same). Somewhere along the line, though, probably right around the 2/3 mark, when Elliott Gould becomes the protagonist (always a good move for a movie to make), this shifts gears into something a lot more openly goofy and thus makes what were intellectual and tonal liabilities in the front half of the movie actual virtues of the second half, and by the end, this has righted the ship into a dumb-fun blast. Gould is extremely good as a down-on-his-luck journalist who gets into increasingly absurd situations as a result of being two degrees of separation from the conspiracy, and the way his plot slowly drifts into full-on screwball comedy is really entertaining. The helicopter/crop-duster chase at the climax is legit great, too. What a weird movie. Grade: B
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