Take a Ride on the Reading

Film: Train Dreams
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on gigantic television.

At this point, I think the Best Picture race is pretty much limited to One Battle After Another and Sinners with an outside chance of Marty Supreme. Honestly, even Sinners feels like an outsider at this point, with oddsmakers giving OBAA a better-than 60% chance. Train Dreams has virtually no chance of winning, and that has essentially been the case from the moment the nominations dropped. It doesn’t have much of a chance, but I am pleased that it was nominated. Oscar should go out of its way to nominate films like Train Dreams more often, if only to call out more attention to them.

Train Dreams is not the kind of movie that is normally going to get a great deal of attention from the average movie watcher. It is slow to a fault. Not a great deal happens in it. Even the massive forest fire, something that could easily become something like an action sequence is slow. I don’t have a problem with this, but I imagine that some people will.

What I've Caught Up With, February 2026 Part 2

Television-wise, I didn't finish a lot of shows. I completed Jessica Jones. I had watched the first season years ago but never completed the series. I rewatched Season 1 and then the rest of the show. I also caught up with the second season of Hazbin Hotel. My current workout show is Evil, which is essentially the X-Files if it were Catholic. I'm also most of the way through The Good Wife. Interestingly, Mike Colter has a few appearances on Jessica Jones, is a regular on The Good Wife, and a main character on Evil. Other than that, I'm slowly getting through Babylon 5.

What I've Caught Up With, February 2026 Part 1

My yearly goal for movies is 400, which is less than it sounds. To be on pace, I should be at 64 movies at the end of February. I'm a touch behind at 60, but not terribly behind. I'm hoping to catch up a few in March. If I get 34 movies, I'm keeping pace; more than that and I'm catching up. This was a month where I got a lot done in terms of taking movies off the various lists. In the next few months, there may be less, because I'll be looking more at Oscar movies, at least for a bit.

At Least It Wasn't an HOA

Film: The Perfect Neighbor
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

There are too many stories where people of color who are not a threat or acting in a threatening manner are nonetheless gunned down by the police. What we don’t hear about as much, aside from particularly celebrated cases, is the people who are shot as a result of “stand your ground” laws. By some estimates, 700 or more people are killed using this law every year, and particularly in the cases of white people shooting Black people, they get away with it. The Perfect Neighbor explores one such case.

This doesn’t merely explore the situation in question, though. Rather than interview the children of the woman who was killed, or have a roundtable discussion with the neighbors, The Perfect Neighbor uses bodycam and police interrogation room footage to tell the story. This is literally a story told in the words of the people who experienced it, filtered only by what is included in the edit. There’s nothing cleaned up here—no language or action, no matter how ugly or unsettling.

Love for Sale

Film: Rental Family
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

Brendan Fraser seems like one of those people who is genuinely a nice person. He’s the kind of person who I want to see succeed; he seems like someone who would be fun to hang out with, or have dinner with. When I first saw the trailer for Rental Family, I was of two minds. First, I thought it looked like the sort of film that Fraser should be doing—a drama with a great deal of heart, but it also looked like a film designed to capitalize on Fraser’s recent resurgence and Oscar win. But I also knew that I would be unable to resist watching it.

This is important for Rental Family, because this is a film that only works if we like Brendan Fraser. Well, we need to like his character. This is very much a film about empathy, and getting to that is going to be hampered if we have none for the main character.

You Saw Me Standin' Alone

Film: Blue Moon
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

When people talk about very talented actors, people who are genuinely and consistently good at the craft, Ethan Hawke doesn’t get mentioned enough. Hawke feels (to me) like one of those actors who goes into every job like it’s the one that’s going to make his career. He commits, and he’s good to great in pretty much everything he’s been in, at least that I’ve seen (and I even forgive him for The Purge). I was happy to see that he was nominated for an Oscar, his third acting nomination and first for lead. Blue Moon hinges entirely on Ethan Hawke’s performance. This film is him, and he is the film, even with a good supporting cast.

Blue Moon is a memoir of sorts of Lorenz “Larry” Hart (Hawke), the lyricist half of Rodgers and Hart, who wrote a number of Broadway musicals over the course of a couple of decades. Hart’s decline came about not from rumors of his sexuality (he was what we would today probably call pansexual), but his copious drinking. Rodgers, needing a more consistent partner for his music, teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein to make the greatest musical composition team ever, starting with their first collaboration, Oklahoma!

A Boy and His...Zombie?

Film: Fido
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

The movie Fido tanked at the box office in 2006, and I think there’s a specific reason for it that has nothing to do with the actual quality of the film. The problem is that Fido is a spoof of a type of movie that is no longer made. This is a zombie film, which puts it firmly in the horror camp, but much more than that, this is a parody of Lassie movies, just with a zombie instead of a collie. The kid in this is even named Timmy.

Fido takes place in an alternate timeline in what looks like the 1950s. Because of space radiation, the dead come back to life as flesh-eating ghouls, which caused a worldwide war against the undead. The radiation still plagues the planet, and the newly dead also return as zombies unless they are quickly cremated or decapitated. Many people, though, are neither decapitated nor cremated—they are collared and become zombie servants tasked with menial jobs. All of this is controlled by a company called ZomCon, which also maintains fences around town, keeping folks safe from the zombie-infested wild zones.