80's Watch: Band of the Hand (1986)

Watched:  06/12/2026

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Paul Michael Glaser

Back in the 1980's it didn't take much for me to think a movie was pretty, pretty good.  We rented this when I was maybe 12, and we thought it was awesome.  But I also have not seen this movie in this century.  What I did know is that when this movie came up, people seemed to think it was quite bad.

I did try to rewatch part of this movie at some point in high school or college and was like "ah, yes.  This is maybe not as good as 12-year-old me believed".  But it isn't one that was popular to begin with, and did not become more popular over time.

The movie is essentially about an Outward Bound Intercept program that takes a sharp left turn and ends in a gang of troubled youth becoming remorseless killers with no future.  Is this how it's pitched?  Absolutely not.  But in a practical sense - that's it.

Waddingham News: "Ride or Die" coming to Amazon

Well, we'd be laying down on the job if we didn't keep you posted on Hannah Waddingham's coming releases.  

July 15th, we can expect to see the release of Ride or Die, a multi-episode series on Amazon's Prime Video.  It's a buddy comedy with Waddingham and the multi-talented Octavia Spencer - Spencer a normie and Waddingham is her best pal who, it turns out, actually works as an assassin.

They've released a trailer, and the show appears to be *exactly* what you just pictured in your head. 

And I'm not complaining.  

Anyway, don't say I didn't tell you in advance.  And, of course we'll be watching.

Monroe at 100 Watch: Monkey Business (1952)

Watched:  06/11/2026

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Howard Hawks

Not everything is going to land.  

This movie had everything going for it.  Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers star, Marilyn Monroe plays a major supporting role (just before she landed leads), Howard Hawks is directing, it has Hugh Marlowe, Charles Coburn and even the kid from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (an infinitely superior movie).  

But I only really laughed at a few bits.  

My real feeling is that this movie worked very well in 1952 and has aged badly through changing social conditions and what I'd guess is better versions of similar premises.  

Monkey Business (1952) is a screwball comedy when the genre was running on fumes and a decade before it would be transmogrified into live action Disney films and Jerry Lewis vehicles.  

Disney/Pixar Watch: Hoppers (2026)

Watched:  06/09/2026

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Daniel Chong

We don't get out to the cinema like we used to, and so it was that I missed Hoppers (2026) in the theater, despite what I'd call pretty good buzz.

It's an odd movie for Pixar, which is reeling from a few years of what I'd call unpredictable box office (which is just the industry these days).  A few movies tanked, and then a few sold like hot cakes.  If I was them, I'd be deeply unsure what to think audiences actually want in a film.

Hoppers is a weird movie.  I don't mean the sci-fi concept, which is cute and fun.  A young, plucky, adorably flawed girl, Mabel (Piper Curda) is doing battle with Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) who wants to build an overpass for his beltway through her beloved woodland glade.  She figures out a wacky scientist (Kathy Najimy) and her team (Sam Richardson and Melissa Villasenor) have built robots and can transfer their consciousness into the animal-shaped bodies.  This is done to observe species up close.  

Classics Watch: Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Watched:  06/08/2026

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  fourth, I think.  

Director:  Nicholas Ray

I didn't think I'd watched Rebel Without a Cause (1955) since the mid-90's - but here it is in 2012. I really need to start checking old posts to see what I've already covered here.

The first time I saw the movie I believe I was thirteen.  My friend's dad saw us entering teen-hood and wanted to share a bit of the teen-culture he'd grown up with.  The film had such an impact on the fellow, he bought the same car James Dean drives in the movie.

Rebel Without a Cause is, I think, one of those movies everyone knows but far fewer people have bothered to watch.  Which is a shame.  I think it's kind of a fascinating movie and it's remarkable it got made then, and now would be turned into a moist melodrama with someone muttering the theme of the film - which would be the title of the movie.  

Television Watch: Hacks Concludes

Apparently I've never posted about it before, but for the past few years, HBO's Hacks has been among my favorite shows.  

The basic premise is that Ava (Hannah Einbinder), an up-and-coming comedy writer, seems to have a career on the slide when her agent, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) teams her with his top client, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a legendary stand-up comedian, now in her late 60's.  Deborah is fabulously wealthy from her long and lucrative stand-up career with side-businesses like a line of goods on QVC.  She has a team surrounding her that is probably insulating her a bit from dealing with any unpleasantness, a daughter in her 40's, DJ (Kaitlin Olson), who is erratic at best - and has kind of seen and done it all.  

Monroe 100th B-Day Watch/ Pride Watch: Some Like It Hot (1959)

Watched:  06/01/2026

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Third?  Second?

Director:  Billy Wilder

Maybe one of the movies that I pray never gets remade,* Some Like It Hot (1959) is a wild ride of a movie that seems like it absolutely couldn't have happened on screen as a major motion picture in 1959, but... it very famously did.  Whether audiences fully grokked the subversion of the film in '59, or even now, is something I'll need to dig into.

Starring Monroe at the height of her name as a draw, plus a young Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis - it's an oddball period piece about two down-on-their luck musicians who need to flee the mob after witnessing the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, and - knowing there's a job for two women in an all-girl band - go full Bosom Buddies and hop a train to Florida.  

Superman Movie - Catching Up On "Man of Tomorrow"

Today, James Gunn, Director and Writer of the next Superman film - Man of Tomorrow - released this still of Nicholas Hoult in some very familiar looking armor.  

This unleashed hordes of people who think they're clever and have never picked up a Superman comic, never watched a Justice League cartoon, walked down a toy aisle, etc... to flap their arms and ask if Gunn was ripping off any of the man franchises in which people show up in power armor, especially the video game I have never played, Halo.   

Look, dumb dumbs, this armor first showed up in a comic in 1983.  It's been adapted and changed by artist after artist since then - to the point where a few details remain common, but the general idea is that Lex, like Tony Stark, is constantly fiddling.  And, by the way, not one of you blinked about all the armored guys in the *last* Superman movie, so what are we even doing?

Marilyn Monroe at 100

Today is the 100th birthday of Ms. Norma Jeane Mortensen, better known as Marilyn Monroe.

We're fans of Monroe here at The Signal Watch, and whether that's because of her film work - and she's terrific in most of the work I've seen, or knowing her as an icon of the 20th Century - I don't know.  She was gone more than twenty years before I really understood who she was..  But even when it's a movie I don't love (see: The Seven Year Itch), or something far greater than I expected (Some Like It Hot, The Misfits), she is what they say, and few talents before or since have come anywhere near her place in the zeitgeist.  

There's no one else left, really, from this era of film that I think today's young adults and youths would readily recognize.  And even then, they may not even know she was an actress - she's simply a face on a t-shirt.  I don't know.  But she remains an icon, maybe an ethereal one at this point, but someone still seen as a sign of glamour.  We can save our comments about how some trash celebrities try and tried to steal some of her light.

90's Schlock Watch: Twister (1996)

Watched:  05/29/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Jan de Bont

This clunker that has aged poorly in so, so many ways is about two absolute perverts who clearly can only become aroused when their lives are endangered by natural disasters.  They are followed by a vast team of nameless people who delight in their kink, and seem to have no interior lives or external concerns other than bearing witness to the named characters' pursuit of their shameful desires.  

Why this was not directed by David Cronenberg, I cannot say.

Our male lead has met a stable woman, a therapist, who he believes can save him from his shameful kink.  Knowing this therapist will never join him in his thrill-seeking debauchery, he simply pawns her off on one of the sub-perverts.

Reunited with his fellow degenerate, scene after scene unfolds wherein Bill (Bill Paxton) and Jo (The Quarterback Princess, Helen Hunt) pursue tornadoes as threat to life and limb, delighting in the chaos.  Both know the old thrills are not doing it for them anymore, and only when they strap themselves with leather to ride out an F5 tornado with no protection - the ultimate depravity - are their degenerate appetites satisfied.