We have Superman (2025) on the way, which means a whole new, very specific wave of merch will roll out from now until, likely, next Christmas.
In a general sense, *some* Superhero nerds will buy almost anything with the right logo or image on it. T-shirts, sure. But I've had toothbrushes, picture frames, piggy banks, rubber ducks... I'd feel worse about this, but I also follow sports, and, friends, there is *nothing* you cannot buy that doesn't come with a Cubs logo slapped across it. The point being, one will find a wide array of items featuring superheroes, and for a bit, this will feature the Superman movie-specific license.
Back in 2001, I remember my own brother, Steanso, saying to me "if I put a Superman sticker on a pile of dog@#$%, I think you'd buy it." And that has haunted me ever since. But he's not too far off when it comes to how far DC and Marvel will go in letting just about anyone license DC and Marvel art to slap on a product.
And, since Zazzle showed up 20+ years ago, DC in particular, has been pretty free with "yeah, here's some clip art. Go nuts." And a lot of their imagery has just been out there, with Superman logos showing up on anything you can imagine.
Job: Puzzle maker and Police Investigation Meddler
new skill: Escaping from enclosed spaces
Man: Brennan Elliot
Job of Man: Detective
Goes to/ Returns to: Remains in NYC
Event: None, really
Food: you know, I don't think they stop to eat in this movie
If I was concerned this was going to be a series of movies about crimes being hidden in crossword puzzles, I needn't have worried. Instead, the crossword tie-in here is that the victim is a friend of Chabert who (prior to checking out involuntarily) asks Lacey to hide his marriage proposal in the Sunday puzzle. A few days later (that very Sunday!), he manages to gets murdered.
Rather than a crossword housing the mystery, there's a whole thing about cryptography, WWII codes and a hidden treasure. It's not bad. The idea here is that Chabert's character is naturally adept at solving puzzles and codes, as well as driven to do so, exploiting her interns along the way - in pursuit of justice!
Detective Man is assigned to the case, and immediately he and Chabert cross paths. Flirty paths, with meaningful glances.
Our victim, Chabert's platonic college pal, had just received tenure at College University, and was getting engaged to a woman he met a year ago. She's a chef with access to pointy knives. In addition to the fiancé, other possible suspects pop up, like a librarian, a faculty member, an antiquarian and an ex who is a surgeon.
Dug tells me this movie has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I have no idea why. It is true the entire Mission: Impossible franchise has been a struggle for me, going back to MI:2. The movies are mostly Cruise running around and not getting his MacGuffin, punctuated with Ving Rhames reiterating the threat, so you don't forget what we're doing here, and Simon Pegg giving objectives for the next action sequence. However, the action sequences go on so long, I completely forget what the objective was by the end. Between the cut-scenes explaining things and the long, overly complicated action bits - it is very, very, very much like watching someone else play a video game.
The cast is impeccable. The globe-trotting locations tremendous. Cruise looks 45 at age 60. Stunts are stunty.
The plot is that an AI has gone rogue - and seems conscious. And devious! It has failed QAT, and apparently the dev team had never seen a Terminator movie. The MacGuffin is a literal key that exists in two pieces that will *possibly* help control the AI. People keep having it and then not-having it. No one wants to just put it somewhere safe. Hayley Atwell* shows up as one of those thieves that exist in movies like this. She's not a spy, she's just big on ripping people off. Vanessa Kirby, the latest addition to the Marvel U in this summer's coming Fantastic Four movie as Sue Storm, appears as The White Widow, just as she has for a couple of these movies. Rebecca Ferguson shows up, and has like two lines, and I struggled to remember why she was important, but I think she's been in several of these. Pom Klementieff shows up as our sexy, silent awesome hitwoman (and it feels like they let her dress herself, which I applaud).
Job: New editor of the Puzzles section of a major metropolitan newspaper
new skill: solving crimes!
Man: Brennan Elliot
Job of Man: Detective
Goes to/ Returns to: Remains in NYC
Event: Crossword contest
Food: There are a lot of pastries seen, and deconstructed canapes
If you're a cord-cutter, you may not know that multiple Hallmark Channels exist on the cable spectrum. In the holiday season (1/4th the year), they kind of throw the intention of the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel out the window, pre-empting their cozy-mysteries format with Christmas movies.
But the rest of the year, the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries network is dedicated to movie series in which women solve mysteries. The movie-series idea harkens back to network TV movies of the 1990's, when we'd get, like, Perry Mason movies with Raymond Burr, with a recurring character, set-up, and supporting players.*
I was previously aware of these movies as, in my occasional channel surfing, I'd seen they had really wild titles like "Garage Sale Mysteries" and "Murder, She Baked". In their wildest dreams, SNL writers were not cooking this up. But I also hadn't seen any of them. However, when I was figuring out how many movies Ms. Lacey Chabert was responsible for, I stumbled across "The Crossword Mysteries" series - 5 films in all.
Yeah. So. I guess the deal is we're mixing in hobbies of the Hallmark audience with genre TV, and while it may seem silly on its face, I watch approximately 10,000 hours of superhero content every year. Let people like what they like.
movie tag lines are just kind of stupid, aren't they?
Watched: 02/08/2025
Format: YouTube
Viewing: First
Director: Cameron Crowe
I am of two minds how I would have viewed this movie in 1992. It is equal parts likely (1) I would have enjoyed it as a piece of media that seemed to be aiming itself at me and my generation, that had a happening soundtrack and Bridget Fonda. It is just as likely that I (b) would have found it an older person's attempt to co-opt some of the music I listened to and what was happening with indie culture, and make a movie about romance that in no way seemed based in reality and was just people trying to say quippy things.
It largely would have depended on my mood going in. I'm a monster that way. Therefore, I can only go off of how I reacted to other movies aimed at me that came after Singles (1992) that I did see. Reality Bites, Threesome, whatever that one was where Joe Pesci played a hobo at Harvard. I didn't like two of them, and for someone who once thought Reality Bites was surprising and kinda okay, I now find it painful to watch. It is, as the kids say, cringe. I know if I'd waited and seen it just two years later, this movie would have driven me as much into a rage as the endless advertising of Surge soda.
I am aware that one is not to speak ill of Cameron Crowe, and I also like Say Anything and Almost Famous, but... In it's way, Singles feels like Crowe tried to take some of the format of a Woody Allen movie, of romantic navel gazing, and remove it from Allen's very specific world, and sought to find another playground in which people sit around and talk about relationships, while saying things out loud, casually, in a way that would get your friends to tell you to shut the fuck up if you tried that after your sophomore year of college. What's novel about the movie is the structure, complete with MTV-approved hand-written title cards for each segment.
I watched this in January, before I committed to the Chabert-a-thon, and forgot about it immediately after watching it, but saw it pass by on Hallmark and was like "oh, right. That one."
This movie was bad and I didn't like it. There are two male leads, and both characters are terrible humans who suck. The jury is out on what kind of human Chabert's character is, but she's dressed very smartly.
Chabert plays a born-and-raised Manhattanite who is dating a Manhattan guy who sucks. They break up because she works too much/ is completely inconsiderate of her boyfriend over and over, apparently.
Mad that she's been dumped, she joins with best-pal Fiona Vroom, and they go to her father's BnB in Vermont at the height of MapleFest. AND WHO AMONG US HASN'T FOUND LOVE AT MAPLEFEST?
Her father had been a big-deal real estate guy in NYC, but after Chabert's mother passed has slowed down and re-married to Rebecca Staab (who this viewer knows from her role as a seductress of older, but viable gents on Superman and Lois). It turns out Chabert and her father have some tension about him selling the family apartment after her mother's passing, and leaving town to live in Vermont. She's kind of mean about it to him, but they've saved any discussion of this gigantic topic for the movie instead of when it happened.
I watched They Drive By Night (1940)about ten years ago now, and had only vague memories of the film. My write up of it is so brief, it did not help when it came to trying to remember more than a few snips of it.
But somewhere on the internet I saw someone mention it starred Bogart, Ann Sheridan and Ida Lupino in one movie, and that seemed like a darn good reason to watch it again as I've certainly become more familiar with all of their work in the ensuing years. The film stars George Raft, and, to be honest, George Raft is not my cup of tea. I think this movie was, even 10 years ago, when I decided "I just don't think that guy is much of an actor".
The movie is almost two separate movies - the first half being about the dangers of being a truck driver pre-WWII America, driving produce from Northern California to LA. There's lousy management that will try not to pay you, guys trying to seize your truck because that manager won't pay you, and the less than stellar pre-Eisenhower road system. And so being married seems like a dumb thing to do, because you're never home.
I hadn't seen this movie since VHS, I don't think. It kind of fell into the category of "a very well-crafted movie I never need see again". But, it had been a while since I had a hang with Simon, and this was where we wound up.
Se7en (1995) is fascinating as a movie that happened at a very specific time, with stars on the rise, stars at the height of their power, during a particular wave of movies passing through the world. And, certainly, a look brought to film that was different from everything else on the screen at that moment thanks to director David Fincher.
Pitt had been skyrocketing since 1991's Thelma & Louise, and co-starred with Tom Cruise the year prior in Interview With a Vampire. He was on the forefront of the new Hollywood of the era. I'd seen Paltrow in Hook and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, but didn't know who she was until this movie. Kevin Spacey, who had been around for a minute, had just exploded with The Usual Suspects, and was about to take off on a huge career. And Morgan Freeman, a veteran of the screen, finally blew up in 1989's Lean on Me, and seemed like the established star of the cast to my young eyes.
Job: Food Stylist for magazines shoots?
new skill: making chocolate/ chatting too much with royalty
Man: Will Kemp
Job of Man: failing chocolatier
Goes to/ Returns to: Goes to Bruges, Belgium
Event: chocolate tasting at palace/ royal ball
Food: guys, you're not gonna believe it... chocolate
Firstly, salute to Chabert for getting to knock around Bruges for however long this took to film. Well done.
This is a movie about a woman who flies all the way to Bruges to tour of the city, and spends her whole trip working for free in a chocolate shop that has no customers.
The start of the movie does nothing to explain what Chabert does for a living, and we're well past the half-way mark when she tells someone she's a food stylist for advertising and the like. Magazine covers get brought up before I finally figured it out.
What we do know is that she starts the movie with the world's least interested boyfriend who - in a completely whackadoo scene in which he looks like he has a bomb strapped to him and must dump her in under a minute or the whole place explodes - ditches Chabert for a promotion and a quick move to Albany. This leaves her with airline tickets and a trip she's already booked, wherein she is to tour Bruges and all the chocolate shops.
There are so many factors that have played into Marvel's post-Endgame slump. Too much content that felt rushed out was certainly part of it. Not following up on concepts we did like (Shang-Chi, cough cough), and not taking care with the concepts we were iffier about (Eternals, cough cough).
But the key issue for me was that the spirit of some well-loved characters just wasn't there on screen. DC's biggest struggle from the comics - and I love DC - is that they lack consistent vision and character from creative team to creative team unless you're talking about maybe seven or eight characters.* But Marvel has this down in comics - in part because Stan, Jack and the original bullpen laid down who these characters were with such a strong hand way back in the 1960's.
Yes, you get a James Gunn to come along and say "nobody knows who Rocket Raccoon is, so I'm just gonna James Gunn this @#$%", and that's great. But Tony Stark is Tony. Steve Rogers is Steve. Natasha is Natasha. And, frankly - and why I'll pay to see the movie - Sam Wilson is Sam (love me some Sam Wilson). But since? I think our best take on that was The Marvels - and as much as I liked it, the last few minutes made me wish they'd pushed a bit harder. Ant-Man and other movies just kinda slopped along. Who are all these characters and why do I care?
Due to licensing issues going back to the 1990's, Fox owned the Fantastic Four's film rights, and made 3 very bad Fantastic Four movies. We talked about them at the PodCast a while back. Part 1. Part 2. But Disney now owns Fox's movie wing, and therefore, has back X-Men and the FF.
I have some firm FF ideas in my head, and they're a mix of the very few comics runs I've read and a handful of cartoons. But I know the Fantastic Four when I see it, and... y'all... this sure finally looks like the Fantastic Four to me. There's no embarrassment at the idea, making it into whatever hokey mess the first movies were, or feeling like we needed to go grimdark, as the last movie did.
Yes, this is just a trailer, but we see that Reed is Reed, Ben is Ben, Sue is Sue, Johnny is Johnny and... holy cats... that there at the end is a big ol' gift to comics fans who have not understood why we couldn't see our pal, Galan, and his funny hat.
I dig the idea of making this a retro-future movie existing in the multiverse (and surely bumping up against the main MCU). The opportunity to put a real visual stamp on one of these movies for the first time in forever is deeply welcome.
We'll see how it goes! They kind of had me at comics-accurate HERBIE and Ben in the kitchen. They won me over with Sue being the backbone of the family.
Get back to what makes the characters work to begin with, Marvel. And I think this trailer, at least, feels like they have.
*I actually count Barry Allen among those, and never was comfortable with the Justice League movie version of Barry
