An astronaut movie with no space in it

Given this poster, you'd be surprised if you didn't get a little space in a movie called The Astronaut, wouldn't you? I mean, even just from the title, even if you didn't see the poster?

Well, no. Total bait and switch, it turns out.

I clearly had astronauts in peril on the brain after watching Sunshine on Saturday night, so on Sunday night, Easter night, I watched this 2025 film by director Jess Varley. (And no, I had not seen any previous work by her, even though that name feels familiar.)

It turns out it's actually about an astronaut's return to Earth, and what may or may not have come back with her from outer space. Which we never see. (We never see the outer space, not the thing that did or did not come back with her.)

Even in a movie like The Astronaut's Wife, a clear source of inspiration for this film even if that film is also not great, we get maybe 15 minutes of outer space stuff before the bulk of the movie takes place back on terra firma. 

Not here. No space. No ma'am.

I guess if you want to make a movie that deals with the mysteries of the extra terrestrial, and you don't have much of a budget, you can skip the outer space entirely and save a couple bucks. Then again, no film that takes place in outer space is actually filmed in outer space. It's all digital, and without spoiling The Astronaut, let's just say they did have a budget for other digital effects we're going to see here.

So maybe it was just a miscalculation by Varley?

Or maybe the mysteries of the extra terrestrial are just more mysterious if the entirety of what happened off Earth, that led to the astronaut having the shattered helmet you see above when she returned, is left to the imagination.

I suppose if The Astronaut is undone by anything, it's not the lack of outer space, but rather the kooky twist in the third act. Which I'm not going to say didn't work at all, but just ... it's a choice.

Death music

When I was fishing around for the second movie of a double feature last night on the projector in the garage -- I always try to bust out the projector on long weekends, and this is a four-day one -- I came across Danny Boyle's Sunshine, and decided that Project Hail Mary had put me in the headspace for a second viewing of a movie that I'd always considered to be a bit undone by its ending. Or was it a third viewing? (If you want to read about the disastrous circumstances of my attempted first Sunshine viewing, read here.)

(The first in the double feature? Last year's remake of The Naked Gun, now streaming for free on Stan, which I watched for the second time in the space of three months.)

Mild Sunshine spoilers ahead. 

I'm really glad I watched Sunshine again, because even though I still don't like that "serial killer ending," it does not fatally undermine all the rest of the things the film does right. Which is quite a lot, as it turns out. Including a number of what at least I come to space movies to see: scary deaths that only occur when you're on a space ship. 

What I want to talk about today, though, is the music. 

As it becomes clear that the heroic Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) of the ship Icarus, which is trying to deliver a nuclear payload to "restart" the sun, is about to expire while outside fixing the solar shield, and that his sacrifice must be celebrated through inspirational yet somber music, I heard a piece of music that I've heard in a ton of different movies. Little did I know, this was the very first instance of its usage. 

The piece of music is called "Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor)" by John Murphy, but of course you won't be able to identify it by that title, because there are no lyrics, unless you are my friend John, who is a violinist himself and knows a ton about movie scores. 

But this should probably clarify it for you:

And you'd probably be able to tell from the title that, yes, it originated in this movie.

Now, I do not know about movie scores the way John does -- my friend John, not John Murphy, but I assume he does too. But if this hasn't become the most used new piece of film music in the past 20 years, I don't know what it is.

Just check out the number of uses listed on Wikipedia. There's a special section on the Sunshine soundtrack page addressing just the widespread use of "Adagio in D Minor."

The only one I was sure I remembered from that list was Kick-Ass, when I believe it plays both at the end and possibly during Nicolas Cage's death scenes. (Oops, spoiler for Kick-Ass.)

Because when you hear this song start in a movie, it means, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a character is about to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. There's just no other possible outcome once that music kicks in. That music is basically a promise that this is serious, and there are no takesies backsies. Some other character, at some other point in the movie, might be improbably revived or saved by a deus ex machina, but not this character in this moment. This character is going down with the ship, going out in a blaze of glory, and probably saving a lot of other characters from certain doom.

I do find it remarkable that I happened to look this up during Sunshine, because I've heard this piece a dozen other times at least, including in some of those trailers mentioned on Wikipedia, and I would have had no reason to believe it would have originated in the film where I finally Shazam'd it. 

Although this is the thing I'm writing about Sunshine, my biggest takeaway is that I feel this film is rehabilitated in my opinion now, after a disastrous first viewing experience with Danny Boyle (now you want to click on that earlier link I bet) and then the eventual full theatrical viewing, which revealed the disappointing serial killer ending. Nineteen years later, I'm glad to know that this is a truly interesting addition to the genre of films where people fight great odds in space and die in horrible ways, and that it reduces Boyle's number of misfires -- an already very low number -- even further.

Remembering Rob Reiner: When Harry Met Sally ...

This is the second in one of two intertwining bi-monthly 2026 series with the same name. The movies in February, April, June, August, October and December involve revisiting my six favorite Rob Reiner films, except for my favorite, This is Spinal Tap, which I rewatched in conjunction with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues before the series started. 

When I was considering the Rob Reiner movies I'd be revisiting in 2026, I of course came to When Harry Met Sally and thought "Yeah, might as well. I've seen it fairly recently, but it's been a minute so I should see it again."

Nope. It's been more than a minute. In fact, it has been more than 20 years.

I had to double check both of the places I keep track of rewatches, on Letterboxd and in a Microsoft Word document, and true enough, I could not find it in either. I started keeping track of rewatches in July of 2006, so that means that unless I watched this in the immediate few months before I started keeping track, it's been more than 20 years since my last viewing of When Harry Met Sally.

It could not be. It simply could not be.

I feel like I definitely watched it with my wife, and we only started dating at the start of 2005. So probably in that first year together we watched it. But it clearly has not come up for viewing again since then, unless I'm derelict in my records, and I'm rarely derelict. 

I'm reminded again that certain movies are so familiar to you -- this would definitely be double digit viewings for the movie overall -- that you feel like you've seen them recently, even when you haven't. Maybe I just couldn't believe that I feel like I clearly remember my last viewing, or at least that such a viewing had taken place, and yet that was at least two decades ago now. Nor could I believe that I wouldn't have been inspired to watch it again in those two decades, just for old times sake.

Well, high time for a viewing of my #26 movie on Flickchart, which has spent a significant amount of time within my top 20. It's crazy to think that I haven't even seen When Harry Met Sally since I started using Flickchart in 2009. 

Since I've never written at length about this movie on the blog, I should tell you that I've long considered it to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time. Actually, in the couple times I've written about Reiner himself, I have expressed that opinion. So I don't need to go on at length about it now. (And each time I do express this opinion, I also mention that I understand I am excluding many of the romantic comedies from earlier golden ages of cinema. What can I say, I grew up with When Harry Met Sally -- it came out when I was 15 -- and I didn't grow up with those other movies.)

The other thing I should put on record is that it is also one of my favorite New York movies. I had already been to New York at least once, maybe exactly once, before the movie came out, but this was the movie that likely cemented my impression of Manhattan as an idealized, romantic locale. Actually living there disabused me of some of that notion, but there's still a perfect version of the city that exists within the tight 96 minutes of When Harry Met Sally. 

I don't need to spend a lot of time on why the movie works so well, but it's a mixture of the sharp dialogue, the witty performers, the funny scenarios, the keen and sometimes uncompromising wisdoms about relationships between men and women, and the mood-setting jazz piano and crooner music that serves as wallpaper.

I'm willing to bet, though, that the little detail that had the greatest impact on my affection for the movie is the interviews with the old married couples placed sporadically throughout the runtime. I doubt this was actually an innovation by Reiner or by screenwriter Nora Ephron, but it could have been, and it is certainly something that's been imitated since. If I'm connecting Reiner movies, it's a bit of a documentary touch that points back to This Is Spinal Tap, and lends an extra bit of authenticity to everything we're seeing. (And looking forward, Reiner used this tactic in the most recent Reiner movie that I've added to my favorites, The Story of Us.)

Because I know this film so well, I was worried I wouldn't have a lot of new observations on this viewing, so I forced myself to jot down some notes. And as it turned out, there were a handful of things I wanted to mention when writing this post:

1) Did you know this was shot by Barry Sonnenfeld? I did not. 

2) I noticed that this movie uses an Ella Fitzgerald song, just as another favorite New York romantic comedy, Kissing Jessica Stein, would do in what I assume was a fairly explicit attempt to remind us of its forbear. Incidentally, I have seen Kissing Jessica Stein three times since the last time I saw When Harry Met Sally. 

3) When Billy Crysal is alone, depressed, sitting on the floor in his empty apartment, he's playing a little game of tossing playing cards into a bowl that's about five feet away from him. I never remember noticing this previously, but at one point he lands about five in a row -- a pretty impressive feat.

4) I know that some of Meg Ryan's reactions to Crystal's antics are genuine, and you can really tell when they occur. When he's speaking in his funny voice ("pecan piiiieee"), she gives a real laugh at one point and utters "Oh no." Such a genuine reaction because, well, it was.

5) I really like the scene where Harry and Sally are dancing cheek to cheek on New Year's Eve, and they are spinning around. It's a very clever way for the camera to capture what they are both thinking in that moment, at a moment when they know the other person cannot see their face, and in this case it's a moment of fear about the physical contact prompting them to do something they fear they will regret. The movie is full of these little mirrored moments, such as when they both make an awkward expression during the social gathering where they play Pictionary, upon seeing the other kiss their current paramour. 

6) I noticed there's a scene where Sally puts on a pith helmet, I believe it's while they're at the Sharper Image, about to be encountered by Helen and Ira. Reiner would also use a pith helmet for Michelle Pfeiffer's character in The Story of Us.

7) Speaking of the Pictionary scene, there are a lot of great lines in that scene, including anything related to the phrase "baby fish mouth." However, I was reminded how much I love Bruno Kirby's frustrated line "Draw something resembling anything!"

8) Speaking of mirrored moments, what I will call the "duelling telephone calls" scene is a masterpiece of execution. It's when Kirby's Jess and Carrie Fisher's Marie are asleep, and for some reason each has their own distinct telephone line on their bedside tables. (Will share a house but not a phone number?) Harry calls Jess at the same time Sally calls Marie, and it's the morning after Harry and Sally slept together. The overlapping dialogue in this scene is terrific, as both conversations go forward naturally while being able to interact with each other, as Jess and Marie realize they are having the same call about the same thing, and that they both invited the other to come over for breakfast at the same time -- an invitation they are relieved to find the other has rejected. It's some real Robert Altman stuff in terms of complexity of dialogue.

9) I always remember, when thinking about moments of romantic bliss in my own life -- when you are most keenly aware of its potential opposite -- the lovely exchange afterward between Jess and Marie: "Tell me I will never have to be out there again," she says. "You will never have to be out there again," he returns. It feels especially touching when you consider that both Kirby and Fisher are now gone. 

10) Random: I noticed the telephone number on the awning where Sally struggles to buy the Christmas tree by herself, without Harry's help. It's 662-4402. Why is this notable? They almost never put phone numbers in movies that didn't begin with 555. Just another touch of this film's effortless sense of realism.

11) If I want to make a really strange connection, between the great Reiner movie I saw this month and the not-great Reiner movie I saw last month for the other bi-monthly Reiner series, it's the ending lines that are meant to serve as a form of reconciliation between characters. When I wrote last month about Being Charlie, the drug addiction movie about and written by Nick Reiner, I noted that one of the few choices I really liked was the character's decision to end by saying to his father "I don't hate you, Dad" -- the closest that character could come to saying "I love you." Well, this movie ends in a somewhat similar fashion, with Sally saying to Harry "I hate you, I really hate you." Which is also a substitute for "I love you."

12) I noticed in the credits there are songs both by Rodgers and Hart (several) and Rodgers and Hammerstein ("Surrey with the Fringe On Top," from Oklahoma!, which Harry and Sally sing in the Sharper Image). I thought that was an interesting thing to see, fresh off last year's movie that featured all three of these characters, Blue Moon. 

These were the only notes I took in the movie, but afterward, when I was looking up other times I mentioned When Harry Met Sally on this blog, I came across this post, and I need to correct the record from it. 

In case you don't want to click, it was a post about the poor realism of the way batting cages are depicted in the Pete Davidson movie Big Time Adolescence. In that post I drew a contrast to how batting cages are depicted in When Harry Met Sally, but I didn't get it completely right.

While it's true that there is nothing that occurs in WHMS that is an actual defiance of the way batting cages work, in that post I stated that the pitching machine continues to pitch balls to Jess and Harry even after they have turned to speak to each other. On this viewing, I noted that's not the case. 

However, it doesn't necessarily undermine the realism of the movie. In fact, it just means that Jess and Harry took the opportunity of no longer being pitched to to turn and talk to each other. These guys are not cheapskates, but they do value a quarter, and they need to keep shovelling them in to get more pitches. (As Harry says to the young kid when they argue about whose turn it is.) They'd hardly let a bunch of pitches go by just to talk face to face about that time Harry made a woman meow.

Okay, if there could ever be enough When Harry Met Sally, we've reached that point for today. 

Next up in this bi-monthly series in June is the current #132 on my Flickchart, Stand by Me -- and it's been a lot more like 30 or even 35 years since I've seen this one. 

When the deaf girl isn't wise or special

When you've watched enough movies, you come to expect certain character types to be portrayed in certain ways.

Characters with any sort of disability fall into this category. While the disability is outwardly a challenge for them, usually there's something about this unique way of interacting with the world that helps them solve a problem the other characters can't solve.

I would say this is particularly the case with characters who are missing one of their senses. Blind characters would top the list, as they will always have a form of "second sight" that makes them a sort of chosen one, instrumental to overcoming a key challenge in the narrative. But deaf characters, specifically deaf girls, are not far behind.

Why specifically deaf girls? If I'm already making generalizations, I'll say that making the character a girl tends to emphasize the sense of vulnerability you are already attributing to the character by making them deaf. A deaf girl is, broadly speaking, even more fragile than a deaf boy.

Fortunately, this is a good thing in most stories. The deaf girl is sure to be there at the exact right moment to accomplish some goal that would have otherwise eluded our protagonists. 

Well, not the deaf girl in the new Amazon Prime movie Pretty Lethal. 

That deaf girl is a dumbass.

I'll need to get into spoiler territory for us to continue, so SPOILER ALERT for Pretty Lethal.

So Vicky Jewson's movie deals with five American ballerinas who are traveling through Hungary toward a competition when their bus breaks down in a remote location. There's the tough street one (Maddie Zeigler), the princess (Lana Condor), the goofy devout one (Avantika), the nervous one (Iris Apatow) and the deaf one (Millicent Simmonds). 

Now, Simmonds is actually deaf. If you recognize her, it will be either from the Quiet Place movies or from Wonderstruck, though I didn't see the latter so it was only the former for me. And we all know her character had a special sort of advantage by being deaf in the Quiet Place movies. 

Not here. In fact, her deafness does not actually factor into the plot in any way, except apparently for making her totally oblivious to things she should have picked up on, perhaps especially because she's deaf.

Now I don't want to make any assumptions about the deaf, but I would suspect they spend a lot of their time on high alert. They don't get the audio cues of danger that the rest of us get. So especially when they're in an unfamiliar place, I would assume, they remain very attuned to the environmental details they can observe, needing other indications of when there might be some sort of shift in the dynamics that might put them in harm's way.

But let's consider what happens with Chloe, the deaf girl in Pretty Lethal, when her four fellow ballerinas and their instructor come across a mysterious Hungarian mansion where they need to shelter from the rain and wait for help to arrive. The place is a sort of hotel/bar, and is peopled with seedy Eurotrash types who have been looking at them with a blend of lust and menace since they've arrived -- which should be enough, by itself, to raise her defenses.

So she and the instructor go upstairs to the bathroom, and while Chloe is in the bathroom, her instructor walks off down the corridor, snooping a bit in an attempt to figure out what she might need to protect her girls from. Turns out it's a lot: There's someone getting tortured in one of the rooms. 

The instructor abandons her charge -- we must assume this is some sort of flight instinct -- to run back downstairs and try to gather up the girls so they can leave. It's not necessary to get into what happens down there.

Upstairs? Chloe gets out of the bathroom and sees a cute boy, at whom she immediately starts throwing herself. Hey, no one's saying the deaf girl can't be sex positive, but the deaf girl should, you would think, default to prudence in a situation like this. Instead, she doesn't seem to have any interest in where the woman who was just accompanying her has gone, and pretty soon she's making out with the cute boy. 

The story sort of abandons her for a while as the girls downstairs are dealing with a different problem. This alone is pretty much of a disconnect. Due to the urgency of their situation, they sort of forget her. Less explicably, she sort of forgets them, unaware that any of this is going on downstairs. 

Chloe might have eventually returned to her group, but she gets waylaid by some more Hungarians and taken off to stay in a room upstairs. I can't recall if this is by force or not, but let's just say Chloe is still going with it. She isn't concerned about what happened to Miss Davenport, her instructor, nor why she is being taken off to this other room rather than being reunited with her fellow ballerinas. 

Instead she watches TV in this other room, which is where the other ballerinas find her, after quite a lot more has transpired for them downstairs, leaving them spattered with blood, little of it theirs.

I'm not saying that Chloe is blind in addition to being deaf, but she also doesn't seem to notice that the other dancers are caked in blood. When they first find her, she is resistant to leave because she is waiting for the cute boy to return to give her a tattoo. Huh? It's befuddling enough that the hearing ballerinas ask what they should do, and ultimately decide it's the problem of Apatow's character because she's Chloe's sister.

I guess in the confusion, they have not told the girl what happened to Miss Davenport (spoiler alert, she's dead), and when they finally do tell her, she doesn't believe them. Even though they are caked in blood, freaked out, and in a strange remote location in the backwoods of Hungary, with men who have been looking at them sideways and one woman (Uma Thurman) who doesn't really seem to be a sympathetic host. 

At some point, Chloe does get on board and falls in line with the rest of the ballerinas, but she doesn't really contribute anything in terms of an especially high amount of courage, or any unique abilities, for the remainder of the narrative.

Although I've spent quite a few words here going off on these narrative choices, I should stipulate two things:

1) I liked Pretty Lethal. I see just about all of these genre movies, and this one stacks up favorably with them. It's not as good as the last movie like this I saw, They Will Kill You, only a week ago, but that it's even in the same discussion is pretty impressive.

2) Maybe Millicent Simmonds is tired of being the "special deaf girl" with supernatural wisdom or skills that belie her apparent limitations.

If you are a deaf actress, you know that you are going to be cast in a certain type of role, and that role will almost always reflect positively on you. It feels downright mean to take a deaf character and make her a dumbass. (And to be fair, I might be exaggerating Chloe's shortcomings just a little bit.)

But as thankful as you are to have an opportunity in this industry, you probably don't want to be typecast for the thing that makes you different. Just as Peter Dinklage no longer wants to play roles where the character is envisioned as short, maybe Simmonds doesn't always want to play a saint. She'll always have to play deaf -- that is, assuming she's appearing in any film grounded in realism -- but she doesn't always have to be a magical deaf girl who will save the day in the end.

Maybe sometimes, she just wants to play a dumbass. 

A little on the nose

I used to do lots of different things on April Fool's Day. I used to punk friends, family members and co-workers. I used to write (easily disproven) posts on this blog, one time pretending I had developed a serious head injury, another time saying I was turning this into a poetry blog. I used to really get into it.

It's been a good five years since I've done anything like that, and 2026 was no exception. However, I did decide, at a bare minimum, to recognize the first of April with a themed movie.

I considered Pierrot le Fou, a probable classic that I haven't seen yet, which would also continue my Godard education on the heels of Nouvelle Vague. But I recalled that the film isn't really translated as "Pierre the Fool," but rather, "Crazy Pete" -- which is how I have seen this title listed in at least one place. I thought I actually wrote about that silly translation on this blog, but I couldn't find it just now when looking for it.

Besides, this particular Wednesday was sort of like a Thursday night, since we are on the cusp of a four-day Easter weekend here in Australia. Thursday through Saturday nights, even when they are honorary Thursdays, are for less challenging fare, or at least nothing in a foreign language.

So I made the pretty on-the-nose choice of watching a movie called April Fool's Day.

It actually struck me as notable that I have reached the age of nearly 52 and a half years and I have not yet seen a movie with the title April Fool's Day. I had two to choose from on Amazon Prime, with plenty of other exact title matches on IMDB. I opted for the 2008 one over the 1986 one.

I thought it was pretty funny that the poster above, actually a DVD cover, advertises this as an "unrated" version. This would be the ultimate example of "unrated" being a literal designation of not having gone before a ratings board, the suggestion of extra titillation a total red herring. The rated version, which is what I presumably saw, contained neither much gore at all, nor any nudity. Does the unrated version have one random tit in it? Possibly, but doubtful.

Anyway, this wasn't good, but it ended up being less bad than I initially thought.

It's basically your run-of-the-mill horror (though comedy is also a listed genre) in which a group of friends get steadily picked off. I had hoped the April Fool's Day theme would be a bit more firmly established or fleshed out than it is, but what are you going to do. 

There's a "twist" of sorts in this film, and I did guess it about ten minutes before it happened. If you really care about not having an 18-year-old movie starring nobody you've ever heard of (more on that in a moment), I'll issue a perfunctory SPOILER ALERT before continuing.

It turns out that the deaths of most of these characters are an elaborate ruse used to fool one of them into confessing her role in the (accidental, and real) death of one of their friends on the previous April Fool's Day. There's even a bit of a twist beyond that, though I don't have to reveal that one. I was kind of hoping the friend who died a year earlier would also emerge as actually not dead, but that didn't happen. Anyway, even though I guessed it, it made it a bit more interesting than it had been.

I also enjoyed that the film was at least aware of its own modest means. One of the characters in the film is an actress, and another character speaks dismissively about the film she's appearing in: "Is there even anyone famous in that movie?" Of course, there's no one famous in April Fool's Day either -- and the film knows this, to its credit. I kept looking for some familiar face, maybe a person just starting out who turned into at least a familiar character actor, but I came up empty. (I did look it up later because there was one name from the cast that I recognized, even though I didn't know where I knew her from. Turns out Scout Taylor-Compton played Laurie Strode in both of Rob Zombie's Halloween movies, though I certainly did not make that connection when I was watching.) 

So not a terrible way to spend April Fool's Day -- but I still wish I had the energy to punk someone, like I used to, instead. 

Jasmine Spyer, take a hike

A fellow film blogger I've "known" since I first started blogging, who is a great writer and whose blog I should read more often, recently explained to me why he turned off commenting on his blog.

"I couldn't deal with all the spam," he said.

I thought he was showing a fairly low threshold for this annoyance. Yes I would sometimes get weird random spam comments, most of which were harmless, some of which were in languages I could not read, and a small number of which were actually alarming. (In the latter category, I have twice gotten a spam comment where the person just wrote I WANT TO DIE and repeated it about a hundred times.)

In the past month, though, I have started to understand why someone might do this.

About every 12 hours, I get about a dozen notifications in my email about comments left on my post by someone who goes by the blogger name Jasmine Spyer. (And what a handle for a person who is, in a manner of speaking, spying on you.) 

They are usually something like this:

"Google is now paying $300 to $500 per hour for doing work online work from home. Last paycheck of me said that $20537 from this easy and simple job. Its amazing and earns are awesome. No boss, full time freedom and earnings are in front of you. This job is just awesome. Every person can makes income online with google easily…."

In fact, they may all be exactly that. I don't read them because I know they will be nothing I care about.

The thing that's annoying me is that I am not just some random name this person has come across once, left some garbage and then moved on. No, I am being specifically targeted by this albeit harmless messaging, though I'm sure I am not the only one. (If I were the only one, well, I guess that would either be creepy, or make me wonder what it is about my little movie blog that has attracted this person's attention.)

For a while I was deleting them, but then I stopped. I can't be bothered. 

I shouldn't give this person the time of day by writing a blog post about them, but I'm doing so for the following reasons:

1) To see if this person notices that the post they are commenting on is actually about them. 

2) To see if this decreases the spam this person puts on my blog (unlikely).

3) To see if this increases the spam this person puts on my blog (a lot more likely).

I suppose I have turning off comments available to me as a nuclear option, but I don't really want to use that option. Yes the majority of the comments I receive are spam. But even since the last spate of Jasmine Spyer comments I got last night, I got one bit of genuine engagement with a post I wrote way back in 2015. It's this sort of thing that reminds me that all my writing, all 3,650 posts, are still out there on the internet, for anyone to find any comment on, any number of years later. When they do find it, I want them to be able to make those comments.

So in the short run, I'll wage this war with Jasmine Spyer and see where it goes. 

We have collectively forgiven Michael Jackson

I got in a cheeky movie yesterday in a break between action at the baseball tournament. If the meaning of "cheeky" isn't obvious in this context, Australians use it to suggest doing something when you really shouldn't be doing something. In this case, it wasn't actually cheeky as I have had plenty of time to socialize with the dozen guys staying in our Air BnB, and had plenty more after the movie, and will continue to have plenty over the remainder of the weekend. 

At the cinema in Ballarat, where I saw (and enjoyed) Kirill Sokolov's They Will Kill You, I was reminded by a poster that there is a Michael Jackson biopic coming out next month called Michael. This on top of the hit musical MJ the Musical that recently had a long and successful run in Melbourne. 

Now I'm wondering: Are we -- not me, but the collective we -- more inclined to forgive pedophiles?

Despite Trump's MAGA base trying to get the Epstein files disclosed, likely because they thought the files would disproportionately damn Democrats, when it actually comes to it, many of them don't seem interested in holding Trump to account for his own apparent pedophilia. Being a pedophile is bad if it helps advance your political goals, not so much of it goes against them. 

I had kind of figured that Michael Jackson was cancelled. Any time Jackson comes up for any sort of discussion, I can see my wife stiffening. There's a music podcast I listen to that essentially issues a trigger warning every time they have to talk about him, and they basically won't play his music, even though song snippets are the bread and butter of this podcast's production values. 

But if looking only at Michael and MJ the Musical, I'd have to say that commercially, he is not cancelled. In fact, anything but.

There may just be some people who are such a part of the fabric of our culture that we refuse to give them up. Michael Jackson may be one of those. Also, I think we are able to somewhat reasonably question exactly how much he "did" with the children who stayed with him at the Neverland Ranch. I haven't pored through that particular set of files, but I don't recall how definitive any of it was, or how graphic. 

Then there's the fact that he's dead. Will we show slightly more generosity toward other cancelled figures, like Bill Cosby, once they're gone?

I don't know, but I do sometimes wonder about it. It was especially the case when I'd receive these promotional emails about MJ -- "final weeks!" I was thinking "Um, no thank you, why would I go see a musical that celebrates a pedophile?"

But I myself am unwilling to cancel Jackson in terms of his music. When a Michael Jackson song comes on the radio, I turn it up rather than turning it off. When my younger son had a Michael Jackson phase a few years I go, I felt charmed by it, by any interest in music before his era. Obviously neither my wife nor I dreamed of bringing up the subject of Jackson's disgrace with a kid who was ten at the time -- just the sort of cute kid who would have interested Jackson. 

I can, however, see myself skipping this movie. I don't take a huge amount of stands in the movies I watch. I may even watch the Melanie documentary eventually, if only to (hopefully) send it to the bottom of my rankings for the year. But a biopic, already one of the least good genres of movies, about a person who doesn't meet the minimum standards of morality for the sort of film that will likely lionize him at least a little bit? Yeah, I might just skip that.

And then if people tell me it's good ... well, I do really like the music. 

Ringing in the season with a previously unknown baseball movie

I'm starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of baseball movies I can watch to psych myself up for the season, assuming I'm not keen on repeating myself too much. (Speaking of which, it may now be time for another Major League viewing, as my last one was in 2021.) It's a tradition for the night before the baseball season begins, dating back at least a decade and possibly longer. 

I was supposed to watch a movie from just after my childhood, when I was in college, which I wouldn't have watched at the time because I didn't get to nearly as many movies in the early 1990s as I would after graduating. Or maybe I just thought always Angels in the Outfield (1994) looked a little babyish. 

I had it all tee'd up, to use a tee-ball if not a baseball term, having done my due diligence a few days earlier and seen it was playing on AppleTV. The Play button was active, which is usually only the case when there is no obstruction or rental necessary to start watching a movie.

But when I clicked on that Play button on Wednesday night at nearly 10:40, it just took me to a Disney+ search area. And searching Angels in the Outfield on Disney+ was no use, as it was something I'd already done when I did my initial search of all my streaming services.

What I think happened is that my AppleTV is integrated enough with my other streaming services enough to know which other services I have and whether a movie might be playing on them, but not integrated enough to realize that I straddle two different countries in my streaming services. So while AITO is likely streaming on Disney+ in the U.S., it isn't here in Australia. And there was no option to rent it either. 

Quick pivot. 

In my previous fruitless searches for the movie on my other services, I'd seen a movie called You Gotta Believe offered up as something with similar subject matter. I could tell from the picture that Ty Roberts' 2024 film featured Luke Wilson and Greg Kinnear, both actors I like. And I certainly suspect I was lured in by the title, which was a slogan for one of my Red Sox' four world championship runs since 2004, though to be honest I can't remember which one. Not that having to believe is unique to any particular sports team in any particular championship run. 

It being under 100 minutes helped, since it was now closing in on 11 p.m. 

I didn't finish until nearly 3 a.m. after a nearly two-hour nap, but don't worry, I'm not working today. (Off to a four-day baseball tournament in Ballarat, so likely no posts from me in the next few days.) 

You Gotta Believe is based on a true story of a Texas Little League team that in 2002 made it to the Little League World Series. The exceptional detail that made it worth turning into a movie is that one of the coaches, the one played by Wilson, had terminal cancer, and watching his son play baseball was one of the few things that gave him joy as his body went through its process toward the inevitable. (I thought that "believing" enough might cure his cancer, but it's probably a good thing, from a narrative perspective, that that wasn't the case.) 

If I had known the movie was about this heavy subject matter, I might not have selected it. Like, I probably wouldn't watch Pride of the Yankees, about the first person with Lou Gehrig's disease (that being Lou Gehrig), to get psyched up for the season.

But there's enough good baseball stuff in here, and just enough filmmaking skill, to make me glad I watched it. 

There are some bits of clunker technique, for sure. These kids often speak more like screenwriters than like children, and they rarely seem to have the appropriate emotional reaction to the cancer of their coach. I mean, there are an array of possible emotional reactions to death for a teenage boy, but that's not what I'm talking about. Their reactions often didn't seem to fit anywhere in that array.

I was also sometimes baffled about the true details of how far this team made it, considering that they are initially portrayed as sort of a Bad News Bears type team, hopeless and hapless on the field. There may have been some artistic license taken there. 

But this is a pretty good inspirational sports movie, and it doesn't end the way you think it would. I suppose when I say something like that, in trying to be vague, I'm telegraphing the fact that the team doesn't win. So I'll just say it: the team doesn't win. Which is not a huge spoiler because a) it's in the historical record, and b) I doubt you are racing out to see this anyway.

When I'm watching a baseball movie prior to the season starting, what I'm really looking for is seeing baseball players run around the bases and catch balls, and You Gotta Believe certainly has that. I might prefer major leaguers, as I would have gotten with Angels in the Outfield, but any port in a storm.

And that means I have a year to try to properly source Angels before 2027 opening day -- if there is one. (There's a potential work stoppage in baseball looming after this season.) It also allows me to consider watching the original, which came out in 1951, and then saving the remake for another year.

As I type these words, we are about two hours from the first pitch of the 2026 baseball season. And after that, there will be baseball on nearly every day for seven months, including the playoffs.

Hallelujah, and play ball! 

Helpful AI

I've only just seen a dozen films that have been released in 2026, and you wouldn't be surprised to learn that a quarter of them deal directly with AI.

I feel like this is the next Big Thing that movies will be about. Everywhere we look, we will be seeing either overt or metaphorical grappling with the coming threat of artificial intelligence.

The coming threat ... and opportunity?

You see, once you start seeing a lot of a certain something at the movies, someone needs to come along and upend that so it doesn't get stale.

And so before we get too much further into this piece, I better issue a SPOILER ALERT for both Timur Bekmambetov's Mercy and Andrew Stanton's In the Blink of an Eye. 

Like, pretty big spoilers, so if you don't want to have anything more ruined than the subject of this post, and the fact that these two movies require a spoiler alert related to that subject, don't read on.

So the first of the two movies I watched was Stanton's latest, which I think came with some bad word of mouth. It's got a respectable 6.1 rating on IMDB, so I can't say I remember for sure where the bad word of mouth came from. Let's just say that any time you divide a story between three timelines, and one of them features cavepeople, you're in trouble. 

Yes this gave me Cloud Atlas vibes a bit, but hey, I liked Cloud Atlas.

The pertinent storyline is not among the cavepeople -- no, this isn't some alternate universe where they imagine that AI existed among cavepeople -- but about a ship hurtling toward a distant planet in the distant future, which it will reach in something like a hundred years. The only human on board is the character played by Kate McKinnon. You'd think this is going to be one of those situations where Kate has to die and teach her offspring to run the ship, because it will take so many generations to get there that she will be long since dead by the time it arrives. But no, Kate has had her aging slowed down so that she's basically immortal -- a thing that became possible on Earth before we destroyed it, requiring a new home for the human race.

Well, not much of the human race. Actually only just her and a bunch of fetuses that are in suspended animation, waiting to be awoken at strategic intervals so there will be plenty of young humans still around when they get to the new planet. 

She does have a companion, though: the ship. Or an AI on the ship. They may be one in the same.

A different sort of movie would take this in a different direction, and the AI would be some sort of HAL 9000 with sinister designs on this paltry quantity of remaining humans. Not this AI, though.

There comes a point on the journey when the plants are damaged and they are not producing sufficient oxygen to get the human cargo to its destination. There's a way to produce more oxygen, but it involves stealing so many resources from the AI that it will die. 

And this AI, in a pleasant female voice, puts up its hand and volunteers for the suicide mission. 

Kate has developed such a bond with this AI that it's a real death, and almost certainly presages the inevitable failure of the whole mission. I don't need to tell you if that's the outcome or not to make my point.

The point is, this AI does not, for a second, consider its own self-preservation in this scenario, even though it is quite clearly sophisticated and capable of what we would call emotion. In fact, that's clearest in its final request, having prepared for its unplugging in a way that is matter-of-fact yet also has an air of human deliberation to it. Before it goes, it says "Take care of the children for me," and you just want to cry. (I didn't, but it was an effective moment.)

Imagine my surprise when only nine days later I saw another movie about an AI in which the AI is actually the good guy.

For sure, the AI judge played by Rebecca Ferguson in Mercy is set up as an adversary of the character played by Chris Pratt, a detective strapped in a chair, where he must plead in his innocence in the murder of his wife or be executed in 90 minutes. It's quite the dystopian setup, but the evidence seems to suggest that the AI makes an effective judge. In this version of society, so much is surveiled, so much evidence is captured on film, and so much of this is instantly accessible to the AI that compiles it all, that basically this system is never wrong in determining the guilt of the suspect. It's in the same territory as the precogs in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, which is the movie that this will obviously make everyone think of first and foremost.

As cold and detached as Ferguson's very good performance is -- I actually liked Pratt in this too -- it's clear that she's not a malevolent AI. In fact, it's clear that as the movie goes, she learns that maybe she can be wrong, and even seems to break protocol to help the man on trial -- which you'd think an AI would never do. In fact, you might say that without the AI judge's help, this man would have certainly gone to an early grave.

When artificial intelligence learns how to be "more human," we never hear about them becoming empathetic. We only learn about them developing megalomania or an outsized survival instinct. In most visions of an AI future, these are the traits they acquire from humans, not their capacity for good.

In the space of ten days, I saw two films that imagined a more three-dimensional AI than the many boogeymen who have come before them.

Having said that, the third AI movie I've watched this year -- in which the AI is not very good -- is Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, which is easily my favorite of the three. So maybe our fears of AI are still better developed than our potential nascent trust of them.

Remembering Chuck Norris via his memes

Chuck Norris isn't the type of person I usually memorialize on my blog.

Although he was certainly an action movie icon in the 1980s, the difference between him and guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis was that I didn't see almost any of his movies. Or rather, I probably saw lots of individual bits of them on cable in my friend's basement, but they were so interchangeable, with such forgettable plots, that I never bothered to make note of the names of the movies we were watching. 

In fact, the only movie I'm sure I watched from that period was Missing in Action, and this one sticks with me because of one particular scene. Norris' character is held captive by the Viet Cong, and at one point they hang him upside down and put an angry/hungry/rabid rat in a burlap bag that's just bigger than his head, then put it around his head and draw the strings tight. We hear lots of sounds of struggle and angry conflict and we can only imagine what this angry/hungry/rabid rat is doing to poor Chuck's face. But then the big reveal is that he managed to grab the rat in his teeth and crush it to death in his jaws.

That is sort of the perfect Chuck Norris moment, even though it does not involve any roundhouse kicks, and it leads perfectly into what I want to talk about today.

Although I did enjoy watching snippets of forbidden Norris on cable, I'd say the moment I dug Norris the most came some 15 years after that. (Missing in Action came out in 1985.) And in this case it doesn't have anything to do with any actual accomplishment by the actor, but only hypothetical, hyperbolic accomplishments that made him one of my very first experiences with the concept of the meme.

Sometime around 2002 or 2003 -- I remember it was around then because I remember the office I worked in at the time -- I became aware of a list of things Chuck Norris has supposedly done, which are so epic that they have to do with punching God in the fact and everything you can possible imagine at about that same level of impossible. You are probably also aware of this list, depending on what age person you are.

I really wish I could find the original list that was going around at the time. I can find a lot of the same jokes on the internet as part of other lists, but my list, the one I got in an email on my old AOL or Hotmail account, was definitely the best list. (I should pause to say that I can't be 100% sure that this was when I first encountered this list, or whether it might have been when the list came back on my radar for some reason. In any case, it was a good quarter century ago and possibly longer.)

Somewhere along the way it was decided that Chuck Norris was so badass that he could defy the laws of physics, travel through time, be recognized as himself during his own birth, punch God in the face, what have you.

So instead of trying to describe what these "Chuck Norris facts" were like, I've gone through what I can find online and included a dozen of my favorites from that time -- ones that I specifically remember as being part of my original list. Some of the other ones are good, but they aren't my Chuck Norris jokes. 

I think the old man, who died this weekend at age 86, would appreciate them:

1) Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried. 

2) Time waits for no man. Unless that man is Chuck Norris.

3) Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked somebody so hard that his foot broke the speed of light. 

4) Since 1940, the year Chuck Norris was born, roundhouse kick related deaths have increased 13,000 percent.

5) Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits. 

6) There is no chin behind Chuck Norris' beard. There is only another fist. 

7) Chuck Norris has never blinked in his entire life. Never. 

8) Chuck Norris counted to infinity ... twice.

9) Chuck Norris once punched a man in the soul. 

10) When Chuck Norris goes swimming, he doesn't get wet -- the water gets Chuck Norris.

11) Chuck Norris can divide by zero. 

12) There is no such thing as evolution, only a list of species Chuck Norris has allowed to live. 

There was another one I can't find though I can sort of remember, so hopefully I'll do it justice. It's sort of my favorite because of the notion that Chuck Norris was famous before he was even born:

"When Chuck Norris was born, the nurse said 'Holy shit, that's Chuck Norris!' And then he had sex with her."

Wikipedia suggests that Norris was bemused by these "Chuck Norris facts" but had weirdly earnest responses to some of them. Like apparently the one about evolution caused him to clarify that he's a creationist.

Norris was not simpatico to me politically, and he was not much of an actor. But we need our larger than life icons, and the phrase "larger than life" is the very sort of phrase that was designed for someone like Chuck Norris, that prompted him to be lovingly memed. You might say "Life is big, but Chuck Norris is even bigger."

Was. Rest in peace. 

The cinematic equivalent of having a Black friend

For my March monthly viewing in Flickcharters Friends Favorites Fiesta, I was assigned Dan O'Bannon's 1985 The Return of the Living Dead, which I did not particularly love. When I wrote up my little blurb in our Facebook group, I felt like I needed to prove that I liked other campy gore effects movies, dropping the names of both Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Dead Alive. To be honest, I don't really remember how gory KKFOS may or may not be.

After the fact, I pondered why I felt like I had to list my bonafides, in order to prove that I wasn't just opposed to this sort of movie.

Surely no one cares whether I do or don't like campy zombie movies. The stakes of this opinion are not very high. Even if there's someone out there who thinks I "didn't get" that it was deliberately bad in some respects, well, so what. I can't usually control what other people think, especially in a group where I've met none of these people in real life.

However, I did continue to have to sort of defend myself by saying things like "it was lacking a certain something" and "it didn't hit my sweet spot." Making sure they knew that I had a sweet spot, and that under the right circumstances this sweet spot could be satisfied by campy zombie movies. 

It made me think a little bit better of people who protest they aren't racist, and to prove it they mention that they have a Black friend. 

Of course, if they are actually racist, well, I don't think better of them on that score. But I do think better of the instinct to prove you like something by talking about a similar kind of thing you like.

Maybe it would be easier to talk about this in terms of movies, while still keeping the racial component. 

Sinners has been an interesting movie to have in the zeitgeist. Because it is so clearly defined as a Black movie, liking it or not liking it could appear to speak volumes about the rest of your preferences, and indeed, about you as a person who either prejudges or does not prejudge people. 

You can be in one of two camps:

1) Liking Sinners, which proves you might like other Black movies and are, in theory, not a racist;

2) Not liking Sinners, which means someone could think you don't like Black people.

I'm in the former category, as you would know from the fact that I ranked Sinners as my #2 movie of 2025. And I do, on some level, feel like that opinion relieves me of the need to defend some of my other choices. My lowest ranked movie of the year, the Ice Cube version of War of the Worlds, obviously stars a Black guy, as well as some of the rest of his Black family members, though the rest of the cast is multi-racial. I thought the director, Rich Lee, was also Black, but I just looked it up and discovered that he is not. In any case, I didn't have to defend myself against hypothetical accusations of racism for hating War of the Worlds because Sinners was propping me up, at least this year.

I've got some other friends here in Australia who are in the other camp, who have lots of things they nitpick about the movie -- which I do acknowledge has some pretty significant pacing problems in its second half. They seem to feel less guilty about potentially being thought of as racist, or rather more secure in their own progressive core, because these guys don't worry too much about talking about all the other Black movies they love. However, I have an American friend who sends out his rankings to a group of people in an email, and this year he said, regarding his middling ranking of Sinners:

"And in 2025 the biggest question that I will get is “What is your goddamn beef with Sinners?  Are you a goddamn racist?”  I assure you that I am not a racist.  I just don’t really like it when actors play more than one role in a film…specifically, I REALLY don’t like it when the same actor play twins (except for The Krays and Dead Ringers)."

In starting off with a discussion of a 40-year-old zombie movie, I've worked myself around to something a bit more interesting here. Why do we worry so much about being misconstrued here? Do we worry that it's actually true?

No I don't think that's it. But it's more like a couple lines of dialogue I always think of from Glengarry Glen Ross, where Ed Harris and Alan Arkin are discussing the fact that Arkin's character, who proclaims his innocence, gets nervous talking to the police. Harris assures him it's not because he's guilty of anything or has anything to hide, in fact, just the opposite: "You know who doesn't get nervous talking to the police?" Harris' Dave Moss asks. "Criminals."

So an actual racist would never talk about his possibly fictitious Black friend, and an actual person who doesn't like campy zombie movies would never pretended he liked them. (Though, I suppose, if the Black friend were actually fictitious, that might say something ... usually in this situation, the person is just exaggerating the closeness of their relationship with some Black guy they know.)

Okay that's about enough of that. 

MCU refresher course

Whenever I think about rewatching entire series of movies than run longer than just a trilogy, I think of things like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter ... and yes, the MCU, though that would now be more of an undertaking than rewatching all of the James Bond movies.

So this year, sort of by accident, I'm just rewatching some of them. 

You'd say it was in preparation for Avengers: Doomsday later this year, and perhaps it is -- but not because I feel I need to rewatch the MCU to prepare for it. No, this is all about my 12-year-old son.

He's long been a fan of Spider-Man, having watched the last of those movies at the time it came out (and getting excited about the new one in a couple months). But he was previously prevented by his parents from seeing most of the MCU, since much of it was considered just a tad too intense for younger viewers. I believe we watched Captain Marvel and Ant-Man & the Wasp with him, but we stayed away from the slightly more bruising entries. You may recall from this post and this post that I consider Avengers: Infinity War to be one of those. (It's all about the strangulation of that one character, no need to spoil it in case you haven't seen it.)

But my son is 12 now. He's in high school, which starts in year 7 here in Australia. Even if he doesn't personally have one yet, most of his friends have phones. (He's making do with a watch he can text from.) Any previous restrictions on MCU content have now been lifted.  

And so, sort of informally, we agreed earlier this year to run through a number of these movies he hadn't seen -- as many as he wanted, really. 

And he's wanted to run through a lot of them.

Since the start of the year we've watched Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and just this past weekend, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. And just for good measure, one movie that features Spider-Man but is not part of the MCU, Sam Raimi's original 2002 Spider-Man for Sony. 

Clearly our syllabus has been informed mostly by trying to get to the Spider-Man movies he hasn't seen, though Tom Holland's character has only been in one of those movies. I encouraged him he should watch the first two Captain Americas before getting to Spider-Man in Civil War, and he seems to have been happy enough with that decision. 

So to clarify, these aren't the first MCU movies he's seen other than the two I mentioned earlier. On his own he had seen the original Iron Man and the original Avengers, plus all the Spider-Man movies. As the instructor of this course, so to speak, I told him he could skip the last two Iron Man movies, the first two Thor movies, The Incredible Hulk, and anything else I might be forgetting about now. (I think he did see the original Ant-Man also, and oh yeah, he definitely saw the third Ant-Man and last year's most recent Captain America movie.) 

Anyway, I've encouraged him to go more or less in chronological order, especially after we realized we didn't have the full context for some of the things discussed in Civil War because we hadn't watched Age of Ultron yet. (Well I did, back in 2016.) This means we're about to get to the really good ones: Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. These were the films that turned me from an occasional appreciator of the MCU, and a fan of all the Captain America movies, to fully on board with the entire MCU. (Though of course the returns have diminished since then.)

I'm not here to present you some grand unifying theory of the middle MCU, though I did think it was worth giving you one short impression I gleaned from each of my viewings. I'll stick to the MCU, though, and leave the original Spider-Man out of it. 

Captain America: The First Avenger
Watched: January 23, 2026
New thoughts: This is actually my third viewing of this film, the only of these five films that I'd already rewatched. And it has probably dropped just a little in my estimation with each watch, though I clearly retain the memory of how surprised I was by this back in 2011. It occurred to me, as I was watching, how it might be tough to make this film like this today, given how it's set in the distant past -- distant, at least, by the standards of today's young people. I think it's the only MCU film in which the vast majority of the film cannot be thought of as taking place in "present day." (Most of Captain Marvel takes place in the 1990s, but that movie at least has aliens.) It's a bit like the MCU's Wonder Woman, though of course this came first. I could tell my son was liking it well enough and was being polite in his appreciation, but he also made little comments clarifying that the next Captain America movies were set in modern times. While I think older viewers can appreciate the design details that went into recreating the 1940s -- and I think that was one of the main reasons I liked it so much initially -- a younger viewer is more eager to get to the modern-day team-ups with other superheroes. 

Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Watched: February 6, 2026
New thoughts: This one I also saw through my son's eyes, and though it gets Cap to "present day," I was really noticing how much talking there is in this movie. It's the Marvel movie that is most like a spy thriller, so that shouldn't be a surprise, but I sensed some impatience on his part to get through this one as well. I can't remember if it was this movie or the next, because both of them feature Scarlett Johannson's Black Widow, but I thought it was funny how my son failed to identify the character from one scene to the next. He frequently confused her with Emily Van Camp's character, which I guess just goes to show you that not everyone is as mesmerized by ScarJo as everyone else. (I was especially mesmerized by her in this movie.) When the action does come, I was reminded that it's pretty top notch. 

Captain America: Civil War
Watched: February 7, 2026
New thoughts: Before these rewatches, if you'd asked me to rate the Captain America movies, I would have told you they were all 4/5 star movies, but I would have put The Winter Soldier at the top. Well I guess I'm more of a new school MCU fan than I thought, because this is easily the most entertaining in the series, whether or not it's the best. You just can't beat the team-up of all these superheroes, which was maybe the biggest MCU team-up to date since we hadn't had Avengers: Infinity War yet. And while it feels sort of shallow to prize that entertainment value over a movie that is sort of constructed as a 70s paranoia film, the fact of the matter remains: I had a much better time watching Civil War than I did The Winter Soldier (or The First Avenger, for that matter, which is an implausibly low third out of the three movies). Maybe part of it was knowing that, on the other side of the couch, my son was enjoying this much more, finally getting his Tom Holland fix, and enjoying the presence of the others as well. He also enjoyed seeing some of the Scarlet Witch and Vision, knowing them from having watched Wandavision a few years back. (He also watched the Loki series, I should say, since I'm trying to cover all the bases here.) 

Avengers: Age of Ultron
Watched: February 21, 2026
New thoughts: So I said earlier that I was not fully on board with the MCU during its early stages, even after the Captain America movies had brought me further on board. Avengers: Age of Ultron was Exhibit A of that phenomenon. Not only did I not like this movie when I saw it in January of 2016, having missed it in the theater, but I felt superior to it, and scoffed at it. Watching it now, I really have no idea what offended me so much about it. It is probably the least good of the Avengers movies, but it's still a good movie. The only real problem I have with it is the motivations of the villain, Ultron, who goes from coming into existence, to deciding the world needs to be cleansed of human beings, in basically no time flat, for no reason that I can find sensibly articulated in the dialogue. But if the worst problem a superhero movie has is that the villain doesn't make sense, then that's certainly not something unique to that particular superhero movie. I think what Ragnarok and the most recent two Avengers movies did for me is that they made me realize that yes, there's a reason why watching a bunch of superheroes teaming up is fun: you get a little sampling of all the personality types, instead of being stuck for a whole movie with one you might not like that much. Age of Ultron is a pretty good version of this, and I appreciated it a lot more once I realized that's something I wanted from these movies. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Watched: March 15, 2026
New thoughts: I knew at the time I watched this, also on video rather than in the theater, that I liked it more than the original Guardians of the Galaxy, which I was famously not a fan of. What I didn't remember, until this viewing, was just how goddamn funny it is. I tend to think of all the stuff that makes me laugh about Dave Bautista's Drax the Destroyer is in Infinity War or possibly Endgame, but he's frikking hilarious in this movie. Both my son and I were laughing quite a bit, and there's no guarantee we would both find the same things funny. We're still quoting Drax lines to each other a few days later. Although this is not the best movie featuring Guardians of the Galaxy characters, it's the best Guardians movie and I don't think it's particularly close. Only in the climax do I think it loses a little steam, but before that it's great, it's colorful, it's staged well, and it makes me LOL like a dozen times. And again, complaining about the overblown climax of a superhero movie is just about as fruitless as complaining about the confused motivations of a superhero movie villain.

I may have more to say about the movies we're getting next, which will probably also include Black Panther, since I think it makes sense to watch everything forward now until the end of Phase 3. (That's Endgame, if you don't have your Marvel phases memorized.) I guess that would also mean a viewing of Doctor Strange, although did we already watch that? (I keep remembering other MCU movies my son has seen, which include Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.) In terms of their essential role in the Infinity Saga, as well as my personal opinions of them, I could let both Black Panther and Doctor Strange pass, and I've already seen both of them twice so I don't really need a third viewing of either.

But given the way I am overall enjoying this reacquaintance with these movies, I'm happy to let my son take it in whatever direction he wants. I just might have to think twice about continuing this for the movies that have come since 2020.