Watch Bruce Springsteen Perform “My City of Ruins” in Manchester (05/14/25)

Sorry, I’ve been a bit absent these last couple of weeks. I’ve been taking a bit of a break, I guess, and maybe having a little existential crisis.

I’ll have more to say about that in a day or two, but I’m gonna try to do better at posting, and what better way to start that than Bruce singing one of my all-time favorite songs?

As you may have heard, Bruce has been having a bit of a battle of words with the current President of the USA. He’s got a few things to say at the start of this video. I usually don’t get political on this blog, but I’ll proudly stand up and say I’m on Team Springsteen here.

And my god, he sure proves he’s still got it with this performance.

Doctor Who: The Savages Is the Pick of the Week

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I’m obviously a big fan of Doctor Who. There are lots of old, Classic episodes still missing (the original tapes were erased by the BBC to save money). Some of those missing episodes still have existing audio but no video. Sometimes they’ll take that audio and animate the video so we have something to watch.

They recently did that with a William Hartnell story called The Savages, and I’ve made it this week’s pick.

There’s also a new Soderberg, a big boxed set of Blaxploitation, and much more coming out this week. Click here to read more.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Freaky (2020)

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“What if Freaky Friday, but a slasher?” – some guy in a pitch meeting, probably.

Christopher Landon directed the two Happy Death Day movies, which were basically Groundhog Day, but a slasher, and they are both quite good. So is Freaky, which handles the mashup of comedy and horror with aplomb.

Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) is an unpopular and constantly bullied teenager (despite being very pretty, relatively stylish, funny, smart, and plays the school mascot at football games) who is still mourning the death of her father one year ago.

After a game, her (alcoholic) mother “forgets” to pick her up (she’s passed out in a drunken stupor), leaving Millie alone after dark. She’s attacked by a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), who stabs her with an ancient Aztec knife. This causes a body swap, and now Millie must stab the butcher with that same knife by midnight or the body swap will be permanent.

The specific plot elements of this film are pretty dumb. But the film doesn’t take them seriously. The joy of it is watching Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton play each other. Vaughn is especially a lot of fun. He gets a lot of mileage as a middle-aged man sporting a tall, bulky frame playing a small teenage girl.

Millie has a couple of sidekicks (played by Celeste O’Connor and Misha Osherovich) who provide a lot of banter and comic relief (some of which works, some of it doesn’t). The kills are clever and surprisingly brutal.

But really, the reason to watch this is Vaughn having a ton of fun and Newton getting to act like a brutish psycho killer in the body of a teenager.

Five Cool Things and Honey Don’t!

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I completely forgot to do a Pick of the Week this week, and since it is already Thursday, I guess I’ll just let it slide.

But I did write a new Five Cool Things. This week I’m talking about Twin Peaks, I See a Dark Stranger, Bob Dylan covering the Pogues, They Might Be Giants (the movie not the band), Platoon and a new movie from Ethan Coen. You can read all about it here.

Mysteries in May: Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)

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There is this thing that certain movies do where a character will have a vision or be foretold the future in some way. The future is usually bad for them; they’ll die or someone close to them will be murdered. The visions will include several very specific, yet strange details. The characters will spend the rest of the movie trying to stop the inevitable. At first, they will probably not believe in the visions, but as those specific, yet strange details all come true, there will be a mad rush to stop the horrific thing from becoming reality.

I don’t know if Night Has a Thousand Eyes was the first film to do this thing, probably it wasn’t. But I believe it is the earliest version of it that I’ve seen (or maybe not, I’m sure I’ll remember an earlier one once I hit Post.

Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of this trope, probably because it is a trope. Whenever this sort of thing happens, you know the prophecy (or whatever) will come true. A prophecy that doesn’t come true in a movie (or is narrowly averted) would be boring.

John Triton (Edward G. Robinson) used to be a charlatan. He had an act where he pretended he was psychic. He was good at it, too. Then one day, he discovered he really could see the future. But the things he could see were always terrible events, mostly people getting killed. The thing he pretended to do for money has now become a curse.

The film begins with Jean Courtland (Gail Russell), an heiress, attempting to kill herself by jumping in front of a train. Her boyfriend, Elliott Carson (John Lund), saves her in the nick of time. When she asks him how he knew where she was, he takes her to a bar where Triton is waiting for them.

Lund is skeptical of Triton’s psychic abilities, but Jean is a firm believer. Triton then tells the whole sordid deal of how he came to know Jean and how she found herself about to commit suicide. We see this in flashbacks.

Basically, Triton had a vision that Jean’s father was going to die in a plane crash. He tries to warn her, but is unsuccessful in saving him. They begin to talk, and Triton has another vision, foreseeing Jean’s death under the stars, in a few days.

Jean can’t take the pressure and decides it isn’t worth living, knowing she’ll be dead soon anyway. But after Lund rescues her, she decides to try for life. Lund calls the cops, and a whole bunch of people try to make sure the prophecy doesn’t come true. The prophesy has some of those pesky details I was telling you about and as they come true everybody is freaking out.

I won’t spoil it all for you, but you can probably guess most of it. I will say it does something at the end that’s pretty interesting, but most of it is rather pat.

Edward G. Robinson is great, though. He’s always great, and he plays the tormented psychic pretty well.

Mysteries in May: Lady In Cement (1968)

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In my review of Tony Rome (1967), I noted that it wasn’t a bad film, but that it lacked a certain something, that it didn’t “pop.” The thing is, it was so close to being a very good film. With a few changes, it could have been brilliant. It was close enough that I decided to watch the sequel, Lady in Cement, in hopes that the filmmaker would make the proper corrections and turn the story into something wonderful.

Sometimes, even the smartest people are wrong. Lady in Cement does make some changes—all the wrong ones. In my opinion, Tony Rome needed a sharper script, some tighter one-liners, and an endlessly cool lead. What Lady in Cement does is lean into the more sexist and homophobic tropes, make the jokes much broader and, therefore, lame, and allow Frank Sinatra to be even less interesting and cool than before.

It starts out strong. Tony Rome is looking for some Spanish gold that was lost at sea in the 1500s and instead stumbles across a dead woman at the bottom of the ocean, her feet encased in concrete. (I do always wonder about these situations – did they force the woman to stand in wet concrete for hours until it dried, or did they kill her first and then someone stood her up until it dried?)

He reports the incident to our friendly neighborhood detective, Santini (Richard Conte), and carries on with his life. That doesn’t last long as a big old brute named Waldo Gronsky (Dan Blocker) hires Rome to find a lady named Sondra Lomax. Naturally, this case connects to the dead lady with cement shoes.

Raquel Welch makes an appearance as a lady who threw a party that Sondra Lomax attended. She’s connected to some gangster who gives our hero trouble. There’s a lot of shoe leather questioning at local hotspots and more than a lot of dumb gay jokes. The 1960s were a curious time in cinema as gay people were suddenly allowed to exist but they usually wind up just being stereotypes and the butt of dumb jokes.

None of the story is all that interesting, and the filmmaking doesn’t perk it up any. I’ve decided that Sinatra, who was in his 50s at the time, just doesn’t have that cool factor at that point to make his Tony Rome <ahem> sing. I love the guy, but he just doesn’t work for me in these films.

What we’re left with is a movie that could have been a lot of fun to watch but winds up being kind of a bore.

Mysteries In May: Twin Peaks – Fire Walk With Me (1992)

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I never watched Twin Peaks when it originally aired. As I noted in my Five Cool Things column, I do remember seeing some magazine spread that talked about the show, detailed what we knew (at that time) about the central mystery, and gave some details on the various characters inside the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Washington.

The series was massively popular at the time, and the question of Who Killed Laura Palmer? was a cultural phenomenon. But then the popularity waned, and it was cancelled after two seasons.

My assumption was that they did not solve the mystery in those two seasons, which is why they made a movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Many years after the original airing, my wife and I borrowed the series on VHS tape from the local library. They only lent it out one tape at a time. I think we watched the first two tapes, but it could have been three or even four. We definitely did not finish the first season. But then the next tape was not available, and we got distracted and never returned. I thought about it often, but Twin Peaks is the sort of series you really want to watch straight through, and eventually, enough time had passed that we knew we needed to start it all over again.

Weirdly, my wife at some point watched Fire Walk With Me. Again, my assumption was that the movie solved the murder mystery, and since I hadn’t finished the series, I did not partake.

Recently, we finished the original series, and I finally caught up with the movie.

For those of you who know nothing about Twin Peaks, I think I can say, without really spoiling anything, that they do solve the murder of Laura Palmer somewhere in the middle of Season Two.

For those of you who know even less about the series, Twin Peaks is a television series created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, which ran on ABC for two seasons in 1990-1991.

The fictional town of Twin Peaks is an idyllic small American town with picturesque views of the Rocky Mountains. As the series begins, Laura Palmer, the beautiful Homecoming Queen and apparent darling of the town, is found brutally murdered, lying naked in the river.

FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is sent to investigate. While the town is seemingly as American as Apple Pie and as idyllic as those snow-covered mountains, Agent Cooper will soon discover a dark underbelly to Twin Peaks. And Laura Palmer likewise is found to harbor dark secrets, including drug use and promiscuity.

The series is relatively light-hearted, treating most of the characters as quirky and mysterious rather than lecherous monsters. It is very much an entertaining small-town murder mystery, albeit one with periodic turns into surreal horror.

The series doesn’t judge Laura Palmer’s darker side; it doesn’t blame her murder on her various indiscretions. But it doesn’t absolve her of them either. It seems very much a part of Lynch’s obsession with revealing the darkness behind bucolic settings (see Blue Velvet for more).

And now, we finally arrive at Fire Walk With Me. If Twin Peaks: The Original Series was all about answering the question “Who Killed Laura Palmer?”, then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me attempted to answer “Who Was Laura Palmer?” Which makes it not really a mystery, but as it does answer some of the lingering questions of the series (though not nearly all of them) I’m allowing into my Mysteries in May series.

Since she is dead before the original series begins, we only know her through the memories of others and the clues Agent Cooper finds. Her friends and family members remember her fondly, with rose colored glasses. She was the homecoming queen, a good girl, a saint. But then her drug use and promiscuity are revealed. She’s shown to have worked at a cat house and sold cocaine. The assumption is that she was just a stereotypical “bad” girl, rebelling against her white picket fence home life.

Fire Walk With Me plunges us into who she really was.

But first, there is some business about another murder. The film begins with two FBI agents (portrayed by Keifer Sutherland and Chris Isaak) investigating a murder very similar to that of Laura Palmer, which occurred sometime before Laura’s death. But just as we’re starting to get invested in that case, one of the agents disappears.

Back at FBI headquarters, several agents (including Agent Cooper) are discussing the matter when Agent Jeffries (David Bowie), who had been missing for many years, suddenly enters and tells them a wild tale involving spirits and a Red Lodge (something that would feature prominently in the original series). And then he disappears.

We then move on to the last days of Laura Palmer, and that initial mystery is just left hanging. Apparently, David Lynch shot a lot more footage dealing with that first mystery, plus hours of footage around Laura Palmer, but cut it for the final movie. He has since gone back and compiled many of the cut pieces into something of its own, semi-coherent movie entitled Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces. I have yet to watch that, but it is on my Criterion Collection Blu-ray.

In the original series, Laura Palmer was a mystery to be solved. We learn about her, but she’s never anything more than a murdered corpse. Fire Walk With Me lets us know her as a living, breathing person.

In the series, she was a “bad girl” who pretended to be good. But in the film, she’s a tragic figure. We learn that she endured years of abuse and trauma. The drugs, the sex weren’t a good girl acting out, but a young woman who has systematically been abused trying to cope.

Obviously, we know Laura Palmer is going to be murdered, but the character seems to know she’s living out her final day as well. It is a staggering, heartbreaking performance by Sheryl Lee.

It is a difficult movie. Lynch infuses it with his surrealistic, nightmarish horror. Add to that the very real trauma Laura is experiencing, and it is a tough watch at times. But also beautiful, powerful, and brilliant.

I highly recommend it, but only after you’ve seen the original series and are braced for this to be something completely different.

Mysteries in May: So Evil My Love (1948)

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I watched this movie five days ago, and I have to admit I had to read the entire Wikipedia synopsis to remember what had happened. My mind was completely blank on the plot details. You would think that would mean I didn’t like it, but the opposite is true – I liked it a lot. I guess I’ve just slept since then.

So Evil My Love is a twisty film noir set in Liverpool during the Victorian era (Wikipedia says this subgenre of Victorian noirs is called Gaslight Noirs, and I just love that). Ray Milland stars as Mark Bellis, and Ann Todd plays Olivia Harwood. They meet on a boat returning from the West Indies. He is a rapscallion and a thief; she’s the widow of a missionary.

He’s sick on the boat with malaria, and she nurses him back to health. When they land in Liverpool, he charms her into letting him stay at her boarding house. A romance ensues.

He learns she’s got a rich friend and talks her into asking the rich lady for money. Then she becomes the rich lady’s paid companion. Meanwhile, Bellis is attempting burglary and stepping out with another woman. He pushes Olivia into blackmailing her friend.

It is less of a mystery and more of a naive woman being beguiled by a lecherous older man. The stuff between Bellis and Olivia is golden. The first act is a real treat. But when the plot turns to her rich friend and all those shenanigans, it becomes a bit of a bore. Thankfully, it turns a corner towards the end and creates a completely satisfying closing.

Well worth checking out.

In the Heat of the Night is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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There aren’t any major new releases this week. Mostly it is 4K UHD upgrades of things that have been previously released on Blu-ray. Criterion has two releases including my pick the classic In the Heat of the Night and the french musical Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

There’s also a boxed set of Star Trek movies, a cool looking double-pack of silent films and a few other things, all of which you can read about over at Cinema Sentries.

Mysteries in May: The Uninvited (1944)

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The Uninvited was not the first ghost story to ever make it on film, but it was one of the first movies to take them seriously. Prior to this, ghosts were used for comic relief, or there were natural or psychological reasons for them to “exist.” They were explained away in some fashion. In The Uninvited, they are quite real and quite terrifying.

Roderick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland) and his sister Pamela (Ruth Hussey) are holidaying on the coast of Cornwall. They fall in love with an abandoned seaside manor. When they inquire into whether or not it is for sale, they are at first told by Stella Meredith (Gail Russell) that it is off the market, but her grandfather, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp), immediately agrees to sell it for a low price.

Later, they’ll learn that Stella is quite attached to the house as it was her mother’s house, and where she died under mysterious circumstances when Stella was quite young. Roderick and Stella form an instant bond and the beginnings of a romance, but Commander Beech forbids it and for Stella to even set foot inside the house.

There are rumors around the village that the house is haunted, and sure enough, our heroes begin experiencing strange occurrences. Their pets refuse to go up the stairs. They periodically smell mimosa wafting from somewhere, though there isn’t any on the premises. And in the wee hours of the morning, they sometimes hear a woman sobbing.

At first, Roderick is skeptical, but Pamela wants to believe, and Stella is a firm believer and is fascinated. She believes her mother haunts the place. At times, she seems possessed by her.

One lonely evening, she runs out of the house in a trance and nearly falls off a cliff next to where her mother did that very thing. They hold a fake seance (to try and convince Stella to stay away from the house) and see a real ghost.

The film isn’t really scary. Not by the gore-filled, jump scare standards of today. But it is full of a wonderfully creepy atmosphere. It isn’t quite gothic, but it was certainly influenced by the genre with the big, creepy house and the various mysterious characters.

The main cast is all terrific, and while the story didn’t quite enthrall me, it did keep me fully interested and entertained. It is a perfect Saturday night movie to watch in the wee hours of the night during a thunderstorm.