If you’ve never seen the TV show Jonathan Creek then give it a try. It’s a light-hearted mystery/crime series where the titular character invents magic tricks for a living, but winds up using his skills with illusions to investigate “impossible” crimes on the side. The episodes invariably focus on the puzzle of how the thing was accomplished, first and foremost.
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For more lighthearted mystery fun, I would recommend Psych, though it is much further on the silly scale compared to…well, just about anything.
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If we’re into “silly but watchable episode of the week”, I’ll always recommend Leverage 
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While I’m home for the holidays, my mom and I have been rewatching the late 1950s Guy Williams Zorro series. My 10-year-old niece has started watching along and really getting into the swashbuckling adventures. She occasionally needs help to follow the most complicated plots and we have had a couple discussions in response to things that are not the norm today (such as an episode yesterday that prompted her to ask what were gypsies and why were the other people talking about them so badly). That problem aside, it is quite the testimony that the old black and white show is one of the few things that has got her to put aside her iPad without prompting.
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I kept going tonight with Godzilla Raids Again and I was pleasantly surprised. I’d never seen this before and I’d kind of understood it to be a rushed follow up.
There’s a fair bit of pretending to run a fishing company and then a prison break that work for me in the “normal for a movie stuff in a world with Godzilla” way. There are contrivances galore. There are a lot of models with unconvincing mass. But it’s a strong offering and I think worth a watch as a follow up to the original movie.
There are a lot of sections that are very quiet in terms of musical score and that worked for me. Effects wise, the scale model work on the buildings was impressive and I liked that the big monster fight was more framed as the destruction happening around the big monster fight. There were some technical filming issues that affected the speed of the motion and budget meant they just kind of left it as it was and moved on. That sped up monster motion does lend a dreamlike character to what’s happening when I’m feeling most charitable but when I’m not feeling charitable it looks cheap and undermines any sense of gravitas a gargantuan carnivorous ankylosaurus with brains in its chest might have.
Turns out 1955 was a while back folks. I think I was also really in the mood for black and white film and that helped me loosen up and enjoy this one.
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I had my family over, and we watched Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which was a flop in its time, but which is nowadays seen as the final hurrah in Preston Sturges’ fairly extraordinary series of screwball classics. I’d been wanting to do this for about a decade but, as my sister is rarely in the country, opportunities have been few and far between.
It’s a black comedy which runs the gamut from actual slapstick to sharp-witted dialogue to some genuinely ugly moments; so tonally, the film is all over the place (which may or may not explain its failure in its day), but that’s also partly why I felt it had something for everyone. It’s uneven, but also wildly inventive. Classical music plays a huge part in the film (the lead character is a conductor), and I was confident that my parents would greatly appreciate this aspect, and that my Dad would quite likely be familiar with some of the pieces featured. (Sturges supposedly came up with the initial idea while working on a different script, after realising in the process of writing one scene that the music he was hearing on the radio in the background had caused him to significantly alter what he’d had in his head to start with, subconsciously influencing his thought processes.) My brother and sister share my sense of humour, so I knew the comedy would hit for them. And my sister once played in an orchestra, so she had that middle ground.
I do think it’s a film which would have benefited from some more judicious editing of a few scenes – but then I think I’ve thought that about pretty much every Preston Sturges film I’ve seen, and I love them regardless. Highly recommended despite its flaws.
(I’ve also now found that there’s also a 1984 remake with Dudley Moore and Nastassja Kinski which looks pretty awful. One of the posters for that seems familiar though, so I’m wondering whether I’d seen it advertised at the time. I cannot imagine Moore in this role at all, but apparently it was intended for Peter Sellers who I can imagine playing it. Mind you, based on the dire trailer I just watched, no particular attempt was made to play the original character. Sadly I also have to recommend avoiding the trailer for the original film, as I think it shows several things that it shouldn’t.)
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Talking of older movies, this year I watched two on youtube and absolutely loved them:
The Dark Corner 1946 (with Lucille Ball in a crime noir!)
and
the amazing 1936 My Man Godfrey with Carole Lombard. This must have been one of the first screwball comedies, and was nominated for 6 Oscars despite being a pure comedy. Genuinely one of the best movies I saw in 2022.
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I second the My Man Godfrey recommendation – it’s a classic for sure!
Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night from the previous year, actually swept all of the major Oscars. It’s one of my favourite films, and is near enough to screwball/farce to count it in that genre. If you haven’t seen that one, I recommend adding it to your list.
I’m not familiar with The Dark Corner but I’ll happily take your recommendation on that. I love a good noir, and Lucille Ball is great. I last saw her in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) which was what happened when Dorothy Arzner, one of the only women directing films in the Hollywood studio system of the time, got the opportunity to take over and rework a musical about showgirls, producing “a landmark in the history of feminist cinema” (quoting a 2020 review by Pamela Hutchinson). It was a film society screening, so I saw it on the big screen – lovely. (In fact, I got to see My Man Godfrey in the same manner a few years earlier – if anyone reading has a local film society, I’d urge you to check it out… I get to see so many great films on the big screen that way, as they were meant to be seen, and I absolutely love it.)
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Finally watched Hawkeye, couldn’t remember where I was up to, so restarted and binge-watched the whole thing (only six episodes). And it was pretty good fun.
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I actually just finished re-watching Hawkeye the other day. Such a fun show, and good for the holidays. Shame to hear about Jeremy Renner’s accident, but it sounds like he’s going to be okay.
We’re working our way through She-Hulk right now, should finish this week.
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I watched the 1963 US release of King Kong vs. Godzilla which Criterion included in this Showa era collection presumably because of limited access to the 1962 Japanese release.
Friends, I like to like things and I didn’t go into this expecting a “good” movie, per se. However I did expect it to be more fun. The US release framing narrative saps a lot of energy I think was observed in the underlying film based on Criterion’s notes on this film.
There are some genuinely impressive model shots in a couple of places but otherwise this one fails for me on most every other level. Having a broad comic publicity minded corporate executive in the middle of this didn’t work for me, the island scene is cringe inducing, and worst of all there’s precious little fun.
Criterion says that the more comedic and human monster traits “irked the director, (Ishiro Honda of 1954’s Godzilla) who still favored Godzilla’s more serious symbolic resonances.” It feels indulgent to look for artistic disagreements that affect this blatant cash grab of a movie, but this is trying to go in 3 directions at once.
I say give this one a pass, particularly with the joy crushing US framing device from “the UN news room”.
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Just seen The Menu. It was good fun, not as good as it thinks it is but I have to say its a tour de force from Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy
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3/4 of the way though The Witcher prequel: Blood Origin. It’s amusing if only to watch Michelle Yeoh do what Michelle Yeoh does. All the characters, except for the token dwarf, are elves, but there is nothing “elven” about them. If you take away the prosthetic ears, everything would be the same and nothing would feel off. It’s no big deal, but I find it oddly distracting.
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Isn’t that a part of the Witcher setting? The elves aren’t really all that different from humans, the dwarves either. Especially the ones that gave up old customs and ways of life.
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From what I remember from the books, the rebel elves are trying to go back to be a bit more singular and back to their origins, but the city elves are very much just like humans with pointy ears. The dwarves are depicted in such a way that sounds to me very much like any other common depiction of dwarves in epic fantasy. If anything, there is hardly any action underground with them, that’s the main difference I see in the Witcher series (although I have just read up to Baptism of Fire).
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This is about the elves before the humans came. There is no indication of what “old customs and ways of life” might be. Everything about the culture portrayed on screen looks human already, from big cities to tiny villages.
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Gotcha. Either I made up the idea that they lived significantly differently in any way, or that’s lazy design by the producers.
I don’t remember reading about any perspectives from pre-human societies.
I saw Fran Mills, who plays the Dwarf, in Two Noble Kinsmen at the Globe a few years back, and she’s always brilliant. Thought she was hilarious and tragic in Blood Origin.
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We’ve been watching the anime Monster on Netflix. It’s good. Like, really good! It’s almost 20 years old at this point, and while I had heard of it, I didn’t know anything about it. It is a crime it is not considered one of those classic anime that everyone should see.
We just finished the last episode on Netflix tonight…just to learn that episode 30 is not even the halfway point of the series and there are 44 more episodes that aren’t available right now! Argh!
So highly recommend the show, but maybe wait until the rest is released.
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I initially liked the manga, but fell out with it. I suppose I’d be interested to hear if you do the same with the anime, but I don’t know if you already passed my threshold, or how faithful the anime is.
minor and very generalised SPOILER but still a SPOILER for those that have read/seen a good chunk of the series:
I just got so frustrated with the whole “oh, but we can’t kill him, because then we would become the monsters. I suppose we’ll have to let him escape, again, so he can kill dozens more people.” It felt forced, artificial, and only used to drag out the series.
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