Catch-Up Watch: Polite Society (2023)

Watched:  09/11/2026

Format:  Peacock 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Nida Manzoor

I'd seen a trailer for Polite Society (2023) when it was coming out, but theatrical windows are short, and I missed it.  Since then, I believe it was Stuart who rec'd it, and I'd had it loosely in the back of my head to watch, meanwhile forgetting why I wanted to see it or what it was about.

Well, whatever I thought it was about, the movie kind of defies genre or expectations at multiple points, and I mean that in the best way.  It's like someone took good ideas and stitched them together into exactly the movie they wanted to make (no, I don't know who Nida Manzoor is exactly, but she also did the series We Are Lady Parts in England, which got good notices).  

It's a movie about a young woman still in high school, a bit of a nerd, who wants to be a stuntwoman, and so practices martial arts and stunts.  Her sister is home, having quit art school, and clearly suffering depression, or at least a deep melancholy, when she meets a handsome young guy whose mother is setting him up to meet a young woman for marriage.  

Our hero, Ria (Priya Kansara), does not like this guy and the notion her sister will never return to art and decides she's gotta fix this.

I realize I forgot to mention: the movie takes place within the British-Pakistani community in London, therefore there's certainly some cultural stuff in the film that I think is easy enough to understand even if it's not your run-of-the-mill white people nonsense.  

Anyway - I am not spoiling this movie.  It's a rare treat to have no idea where a movie is headed when you think you have it pegged.  I had absolutely no clue where things were going, scene-to-scene.  

The talent in the movie is terrific.  The aforementioned Priya Kansara is *fantastic*.  Absolutely a firecracker on screen - and I just read she was ship's voice on Project Hail Mary.  Go figure!  The sister, Lena, is Ritu Arya who has also appeared in Barbie (as a Barbie), The Umbrella Academy, and plenty of other stuff. 

Anyway - it's more or less family friendly if your family can handle PG-13, so get out there and find it. 

Pirate Watch: The Sea Hawk (1940)

Watched:  09/10/2026

Format:  TCM on DVR

Viewing:  First

Director:  Michael Curtiz

Look, names of directors get forgotten, but Michael Curtiz was one of the best to get behind a lens, making some of my very favorite films - and they may be your favorites, too.  Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Adventures of Robin Hood, White Christmas, Flamingo Road, and another Errol Flynn pirate movie - Captain Blood.  

And, man, I still am unclear how they filmed these things, with their huge ships, falling masts, flashing sabers and swashing buckles.  The Sea Hawk (1940) merges the scale of Captain Blood and Robin Hood - two prior Curtiz/ Flynn productions with palace sets, huge galleons and more.  

Pat Boone Noir Watch: The Yellow Canary (1963)

Watched:  09/08/2026

Format:  TCM Noir Alley

Viewing:  First

Director:  Buzz Kulik

All I knew was that The Yellow Canary (1963) starred Pat Boone and Barbara Eden, two people I could not imagine paired, let alone in a noir film.

From the intro and outro, my takeaway was that Eddie Muller had gotten involved with preserving this movie because it seemed so unlikely.  Famously squeaky-clean singer and sometimes actor Pat Boone had agreed to play a philandering, jack-ass pop star (a Bizarro-world version of himself) who is married to Barbara Eden and somehow (against all imaginable odds, and my basic understanding of the world) finds that boring.  

Shark/Jet Watch: West Side Story (2021)

Watched:  09/07/2026

Format:  FX Movies on basic cable

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Steven Somebody

I was performing repetitive manual tasks (dealing with comic books.  Where my fellow nerds at?) which means I need something to occupy my brain, but not something *new*, as I might get up to perform part of a task, move around, etc...  And then I saw the 2021 version of West Side Story was on cable, and, sure, why not?

I first saw the play in about 5th or 6th grade with our own Matt A. at the former Capital City Playhouse in Austin.  I then saw the 1961 film in about 1992, and so ask me about bearing witness to Rita Moreno as Anita in her lavender dress.*

But this was the 2021 version, which *also* features Moreno, but doing fewer high kicks.

I really dig this version, too.  I feel like Spielberg did it right, bringing his sense of visuals, character and narrative tension which he built his career on to the material and made it feel both fresh and deeply rooted in the time and place from whence it sprang, managing to make it speak to the now.  

It also fills in some narrative gaps and does some info-dumps to clarify the situation in New York which the general population would have known by osmosis in 1961, but which has shifted and shifted and shifted in the decades since.  The actual politics, economics and on-the-street situation in the film is made abundantly clear in a way it just wasn't previously.

I'm just checking in on this one.  No real notes.  And will say, I'm really glad DeBose and Ziegler are both doing great on the other side of this film.  The guy who played Riff is slated to be in the new East of Eden movie.  

I recall people being a little weird about this when it came out, and a lot of the commentary came down to skill issues and that even dummies can have internet access.  And people oddly offended that a play, done in every town in America, which was a movie, should get remade when the first movie had some really odd weaknesses (like making all the Puerto Ricans wear matching full-body make-up).

So, yeah.  I dig it.   

*Great googly moogly

 

Windsor Watch: Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

Watched:  09/06/2026

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Charles Lamont

Confession time:  I haven't really enjoyed Bud & Lou since I was a kid.  I remember we'd check out 8mm projectors and film from the library and watch their movies and have a good laugh.  I was six.

Subsequent attempts to watch the classic comedy duo have gone less well.  

But, of the main ingrendients, I do like two other things:  classic movie monsters and Marie Windsor.  And, I figure - two out of three things in this movie?  That ain't bad.

Our plot:  Bud & Lou are semi-stranded in Egypt and get involved with a cult, an ancient mummy, a murder and shady characters looking to make some money.  

I dunno.

Dolly Watch: Straight Talk (1992)

Watched:  09/06/2026

Format:  Amazon?

Viewing:  First

Director:  Barnet Kellman

I kind of remember a spate of these sorts of sweet, fluffy, cotton candy movies coming out for a minute.  I think a lot of this sort of thing has made its way to TV or streaming, and that's cool.  

The draw of Straight Talk in 1992 was "want to see Dolly Parton be nice for 90 minutes?" and in 1992, if it didn't have a robot, Wesley Snipes, a serial killer or an alien in it, no, I did not want to see your movie all that bad.  High school me didn't think about Dolly Parton one way or another, so high-school me took a pass.  And that's too bad.  My mom would love this movie, and we never agreed of movies then or now.  I think I'll call and recommend it to her later today.

Signal Watch Reads: Children of Time

Pal Howard recommended this one.  He's a prolific sci-fi reader and eager-beaver movie watcher, and a trusted source.  He also attends ArmadilloCon each year, a convention for hardcore sci-fi literati, and we tend to get together when he's in town for that event.

A while back I asked him to recommend a favorite sci-fi book as I don't actually *read* much science-fiction.  I kind of sputtered out after Bradbury and Asimov as a kid. And I still like Asimov, Bradbury, and Dick.  I liked Solaris and Rendezvous with Rama.  But the sci-fi section of your local Barnes & Noble is not where I'm usually found.  But I figured - Howard is not going to recommend trash.  And he did not.

Children of Time is more or less what I consider hard science-fiction.  There are no wizards, no deities intervening, no space dragons.  Instead, it's all concepts with logic behind them, even if the science is speculative (at best, at times).  We're thousands of the years in the future when the book begins, and thousands more by the time the book ends.  The science injected is *possibly true* and mercifully focused in only a few areas.  One not be a polymath to follow along.

Pitt Watch: Countess Dracula (1971)

Watched:  09/03/2026

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Peter Sasdy

We watched this a few years ago, and at the time I remember being disappointed it wasn't basically just a redux of The Vampire Lovers, though I didn't exactly put it that way.  I think I appreciated it a bit more on this go-round as I engaged with movie on its own terms.

I had no plans to watch it, but noted it was free on YouTube, and here we are.

Rather than a Dracula movie, Countess Dracula (1971) is a deeply fictionalized version of the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian countess who may have tortured and killed hundreds of girls.  What Bathory *actually* did is up for debate, and like a lot of sensationalistic history could have been entirely fabricated to discredit and humiliate her, as well as stick her in a dungeon (see: The Tower of London for endless trumped up charges and nobles who met unfortunate ends).  

Scorsese Watch: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Watched:  09/02/2026

Format:  Started on Hulu on August 30th, they dropped it and Apple+ picked it up

Viewing:  Second

Director;  Scorsese

I saw The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) once before in the theater, and wanted to watch it again, but it's three hours.  And I figured Jamie would want to see it eventually, and at three hours, I was limiting how often I'd invest in watching the flick.  

Plus, when I remember particularly liking a movie, I am not a person who watches it over and over - if the movie gave me something to chew on.  I save those for occasional viewings when I can really take them in.  I did not mean to give it 13 years between viewings.  Whoops.  But here we are.

These days, Wolf of Wall Street is mostly known as the source of a wide range of GIFs and memes.  Star Leonardo DiCaprio plays the real-life role of former stock hustler Jordan Belfort full-tilt, and screen grabs of some of his scenes are just plastered everywhere. If it's DiCaprio and he's not Gatsby, this is probably the movie that GIF came from.

This is one of those movies where I can see how it might have made some people unhappy.  But overall, the critical consensus was strong and I guess this did get some Oscar noms (or so Jamie told me).  It's a movie that is very loud about what it's saying, and still manages to never say it directly, and in that, I recall at the time of the movie's release people were being willfully obtuse, clutching pearls at the content of the film.

Colonialism Watch: Outpost in Morocco (1949)

Watched:  08/30/2026

Format:  TCM on DVR from Marie Windsor day

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Florey

Outpost in Morocco (1949) was part of Marie Windsor day on TCM's Summer Under the Stars.  She's not the lead, that's George Raft, but she plays a Moroccan princess for all intents and purposes.  

Look, I'm utterly ignorant when it comes to Morocco aside from being able to find it on a map (I double-checked, and I was right!  Thanks, Casablanca for leaving that tidbit in my head!).  I don't know its history, and I don't know the culture.   

I am aware of the French Foreign Legion, its kind of wild history and reputation for taking in folks at the end of their rope.  In this story, Raft plays a Captain who is supposedly awesome at his job when he isn't out romancing the ladies.  He's sent to an outpost to deliver Windsor to her father, who is a regional leader.  Windsor goes to France every year for six months and has been summoned home early.