Welsh Watch: How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Watched:  02/07/2026

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  John Ford

Pondering how many Maureen O'Hara movies I'd actually seen, I noted I'd never seen How Green Was My Valley (1941), a massive Academy Award winner than got Best Picture the year Citizen Kane was nominated.  It's funny as not much changes with the Academy - a deeply sentimental movie with some good social points and dripping with nostalgia beat out a technical and narrative achievement that trades weepy for chilling.  

Based on a popular 1939 novel, the movie retains the approach, like a memoir detailing the various incidents and threads that shape the decline of a mining community in Southern Wales presumably in the late 19th Century.  In addition to O'Hara as the sister in a family with five brothers, the movie's focal point and narrator is a very young Roddy McDowall, who slowly loses his innocence and idyllic youth.  We also have Walter Pidgeon as a pastor at the church, Donald Crisp as the father navigating the changes - sometimes well, sometimes less well.  And there's an army of people you'll recognize from The Quiet Man, part of Ford's company of players.  

First Watch: The Parent Trap (1961)

Watched:  02/05/2026

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  David Swift

So, The Parent Trap (1961) is one of those movies that gets so heavily referenced, I figured I was good skipping it.  Twins (Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills) are separated at birth, one goes with Mom (a radiant Maureen O'Hara) and one goes with Dad (Brian Keith) - and neither is supposed to know the other exists.  For reasons.

Kids meet at camp, figure out they're sisters, and swap places for a bit til it's time to reveal who they are and force their parents back together.  Wackiness ensues.  

After we finished The Muppet Show special on Disney+, the menu offered up this movie, and I mentioned I'd never seen it, and Jamie insisted.  I mean, it was not exactly a hard sell.  I'll watch Maureen O'Hara read the dictionary.

Anyhoo, my impression of the plot was largely right.  What I wasn't prepared for is the kind of dark sense of humor the movie has, and that it's even a little bawdy at times - for a live-action Disney movie from 1961.  It's really funny.

Yeah, I really liked The Parent Trap.  Who knew?

Up All Night Watch: Assault of the Party Nerds (1989) & Assault of the Party Nerds 2 (1995)

Watched:  01/17 and 02/04/2026

Format:  YouTube - Up All Night

Viewing:  First/ First

Director:  Richard Gabai

Rhonda Shear is back with an all-new version of her 90's show Up All Night, now playing on YouTube.  

Look, I'm not going to discuss these two movies.  They're B movies from jump, and proud of it.  One is a Revenge of the Nerds knock-off, and one is a movie about our lead/ director as now a private detective.

Of note - Linnea Quigley appears in both movies.  Troy Donahue appears in the first.  Burt Ward, Rhonda Shear appear in the second.

While both movies are exactly the stunning material you're used to from Up All Night, the Rhonda-starring Up All Night bumpers are the highlight.  Richard Gambai appears with both movies, but he and Rhonda do a bit of a retrospective and talk about their 90's glory days.  It's kind of interesting to hear about working in the fringes during that period.  

If the show seems like it's trying to figure itself out - in all fairness, Up All Night was also reinventing itself constantly over its 8 year run.  So it's just kind of whatever it needs to be at any given time.

The Muppet Show is back. Sort of. Maybe.

Mind blowing.  

We've all seen so many reboots or relaunches as they try to recapture the magic - including with The Muppet Show which has had Muppets Tonight, that weird ABC thing, and other specials and attempts - and if anything out there gets even partially close, we all cheer.

But, holy cats, is the new episode of The Muppet Show on Disney+ like a very real continuation of the original series.  Was happy to see all my old Muppet friends in their natural environs.  

Anyway, my social media is ablaze with people celebrating the mighty return of the show, which means you've likely seen it, or will.  And maybe Disney will let them keep doing this?  

Kudos to Sabrina Carpenter for being the ideal Muppet Show guest.  And Maya Rudolph for being Maya Rudolph.  

Loved it.  Will watch if Disney greenlights more episodes.  

Happy Birthday, Ida Lupino

Happy birthday, Ida Lupino, born this day in 1918.

She's actually British born, but fine, Google robot.

Western Watch: How The West Was Won (1962)

Watched:  02/02/2026

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Directors:  John Ford - Henry Hathaway - George Marshall

The word that leaps to mind watching How The West Was Won (1962) is "spectacle".  Really, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything else quite like it.  

It's a movie with an overture and intermission and exit music.  Its runtime is almost three hours.  There are three big directors!

It was shot for Cinerama - one of two movies ever shot in the format.  It's intended to be a nigh-immersive experience, with three sync'd 35mm projectors running in unison against a curved screen that surrounds you at about 140 degrees.  

Raimi Watch: Send Help (2026)

Watched:  02/02/2026

Format:  Alamo

Viewing:  First

Director:  Sam Raimi

So, two things before we get started.

1.  Back in college, my movie buddy was CB.  We went to film school together back in the day and saw lots and lots of movies together.  Turns out, CB now lives very close to me, and for the first time in decades we were taking in a genre movie like it was the mid-90's all over again.  (I saw Dead Alive with CB, for example).  Shout out to CB!

2.  I have Rachel McAdams face blindness.  It's a serious condition.  Jamie thinks it's a funny game to ask me occasionally who that person is on TV or in an ad or whatever, and I never know who she is.  I have no idea why.  She's a perfectly lovely woman, but if I was the witness when she committed a crime, she'd get off scot free.  Sure, I'll recognize her here, but when she's in her next movie trailer, Jamie will ask me again who that actress is, and I will have no idea.

This is also the third movie I've seen inside of a month that was about getting marooned on an island.  January 4th, we watched a Hallmark movie, Lost in Paradise and last week we watched A Game of Death.  Love an unintentional theme.  

If you've seen the trailer, you know what this movie is about.

Amazon Watch: The Wrecking Crew (2026)

Watched:  01/31/2026

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Angel Manuel Soto

So, I was a fan of The Expanse, and I saw Frankie Adams - who played Martian Gunnery Sergeant Roberta Draper on the show - was in a new action movie with Jason Mamoa and Dave Bautista.  So, despite some negative stuff I'd seen online, I put on The Wrecking Crew (2026).  

Positives:  

• it does have Frankie Adams
• there's some bits about Hawaiian culture I didn't know
• you get to see Hawaii

Negatives:  

• this movie is terrible

80's Regret Sci-Fi Watch: Millennium (1989)

this is a movie about Cheryl Ladd's hair

Watched:  01/30/2026

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Michael Anderson

So, in 1989, I was 14 and just started high school.  During the summer, at B. Dalton I'd picked up some Starlog-type magazine that had gone all-in on how we should all go see Millennium (1989) upon its release.  I knew who Kris Kristofferson was (I'm from Texas, he's from Brownsville), but not Cheryl Ladd, who was coming off a run of TV shows, etc... that I didn't watch.  She was a thing, but not so much of a thing to those of us exiting middle-school.

The magazine pitched the movie as a dystopian sci-fi epic with a robot, and, hey...  I was sold.  

flight attendant hair

Also, in high school one meets new people, and free from the shackles of knowing me in middle school, a lovely girl and I met, and decided to go on "a date".  What I now get in 2026 that I did not get in 1989:  I guess this girl really wanted to go out with me, because there was no way in hell she wanted to see this dumb-ass movie.*

Catherine O'Hara Merges With The Infinite

I don't know what it says about me that of the famous people whose passing I regularly note, this is maybe the third that genuinely upset me.  Like, tears, and whatnot.  

Doesn't everyone love Catherine O'Hara?

Part of that SCTV crew who went on to do some of the most meaningful work in media of the last fifty years, O'Hara has been everywhere, from Home Alone to Beetlejuice to, most recently, The Studio, to her masterful, beautiful turn as Moira Rose in eighty episodes of Schitt's Creek.  And, of course, all of her roles in the ensemble of Christopher Guest's movies, like A Mighty Wind and Waiting for Guffman.  

Absolutely one of my favorite performers, I am shocked and saddened that she's gone.

Anyway, the other two were David Bowie and Stan Lee.