Police (Not So) Procedural

Film: Normal
Format: Streaming video from HBO on gigantic television.

Bob Odenkirk has an odd career trajectory. He made his bones in comedy as one half of the two heads of HBO’s Mr. Show, then became much more of a household name with his connection to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Recently, though, Odenkirk has become an action star, but a vastly different one in a lot of ways. Odenkirk’s action characters don’t spit one-liners and walk away with a couple of scratches. His characters get hurt—shot, stabbed, beaten, and bruised. And rather than one-liners, he’s going to have speeches and moments of surprising badassery. This brings us to Normal.

It’s also worth noting that there was a film made in the early 2000s that was also called Normal. It featured Tom Wilkinson and Jessica Lange as a married couple in a situation where he realizes that he is transgender and wants to undergo sex reassignment surgery. I say this not because these two movies would ever be confused beyond the name, but because it was filmed a few miles from where I live. Odenkirk’s Normal is not a story of discovery, but an extremely bloody action comedy with a surprisingly high body count and multiple Rube Goldberg-style deaths.

A Normal Day in Indianapolis

Film: Dead Man’s Wire
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

The old saying is that truth is stranger than fiction. There are variants of this: “You couldn’t write this” or “If I wrote this, no one would believe it.” Movies like Dead Man’s Wire show the reality of the saying. This seems like a story that comes out of a weird fever dream, something just barely on the edge of possible. And then, you have to wonder why it took 50 years to make this story into a movie.

This genuinely feels like the sort of story that belongs on a television show, either as a wacky plot for some weird sitcom or as some insane plot-of-the-week for a crime of the week show. Honestly, it would have worked really well as an episode of Burn Notice or Person of Interest. I still struggle to realize that this is something that actually happened.

Resurrection

Film: The Bride!
Format: Streaming video from HBO on Fire!

There are a couple of things I say pretty regularly here to the point where I’m not sure if I should keep saying them. One of them is that I genuinely want to like every movie that I watch, even when I suspect it’s not going to be good. With The Bride!, with or without the punctuation, there was added incentive to like the film. Any time a movie gets negative reactions because of the theme, the cast, or the director (see the recent controversy around The Odyssey), I go into it predisposed with the opinion that the attacks on it are probably nonsense. The Bride! got a lot of negative reactions, not a few of which regarded Maggie Gyllenhaal at the helm.

The reality, at least as I see it, is that this is a movie that isn’t sure what it wanted to be. It’s clearly a romance and there are clearly horror elements in it. Is it a feminist manifesto? A fever dream? A story of possession? An undead remake of Bonnie and Clyde? The problem is that it’s kind of all of these things, and because of that, it’s also kind of none of them.

Troy Story

Film: The Odyssey
Format: Market Square Theater #3.

It seems like every now and then, a movie shows up that really pisses off a lot of people for no reason more than the fact that it exists. The backlash against Barbie happened before it released, and the same thing happened to The Odyssey. Over and over again, the movies that draw this kind of negative attention prove to be wildly successful, just as The Odyssey has done. It’s gone from having the most-disliked movie trailer in YouTube history to a movie in the high 90s on Rotten Tomatoes and clearly on its way to more than $1 billion, and it still hasn’t opened in China.

So, while I am going to talk about the movie, I think the controversy is worth a paragraph here. The backlash against The Odyssey was framed as being “historically inaccurate” because of the casting. Were people upset that we didn’t have an actual cyclops? Or that Odysseus was being played by a guy from Boston? No, of course not. The problem was that Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, was being played by Lupita Nyong’o, a woman who is objectively gorgeous, but happens to be Black. Oh, and Elliot Page plays Sinon, who actually isn’t in Homer’s epic poem and that freaked a lot of people out. In fact it freaked people out so much that the rumor was that Page was actually playing Achilles. And in the movie? If you aren’t waiting to be outraged, you wouldn’t even notice.

What I've Caught Up With, July 2026

I’d love to say that I caught up a ton on movies in July and am now on track to hit 400 movies by the end of the year. Alas, the exact opposite happened, and life intervened in a lot of ways. On pace would be 34 movies in July, and I didn’t come close, watching only 22. Honestly, I probably won’t hit 400 this year, but 365 might still work out.

On the TV front, I finished The Americans, which I enjoyed, and The Boys, which I was happy to get through—there are some really good points to it, but it’s almost impossible to recommend to anyone. I also finished the ITV series Jeeves and Wooster, starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie when they were very young. As the show is based on the writings of P.G. Wodehouse and Wodehouse is one of my favorite authors, this proved to be a delight.

The Gaang is Back

Film: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender
Format: Streaming video from Paramount on Fire!

Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest television shows ever made. I say this with no conditions or reservations. The show is smart, the characters are deep and believable. There are moments of great humor and moments of real tragedy, and it depicts a world in terrible conflict, with young kids at the center of it—kids who are essentially charged with solving that world-spanning conflict on their own. It is (my opinion) the best animated show in history, and without qualification, a show that I think everyone should watch. So I was very excited to see that Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender was a thing. I was also happy to see that it received just enough of a limited release for it to qualify for awards season.

It would be impossible to give a comprehensive look at the Avatar universe, but a quick primer will help with understanding the movie. In this world, there are essentially four nations, each one based on one of the four classic elements. Some people in each of those nations—the Fire Nation, the Water Tribes, the Air Nomads, and the Earth Kingdom—have the ability to “bend” those elements, something akin to performing magic with those elements. Overseeing all of this is the Avatar, an element bender who has the ability to learn all four elements and who is charged with maintaining balance. When each avatar dies, the spirit is reincarnated in the person of another bender, and the title rotates from someone in one nation to the next.

From the Future

Film: Arco
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

As I say frequently, I try to go into everything I watch with a completely open mind. I want to like whatever it is I’m watching, but there are going to be times when, for one reason or another, I’m expecting something to be good or bad, not based on hype or the trailer, but some other reason. It might be the name of the film, or the cast, or a still. In the case of Arco, it was a still. Of all the Oscar films I was slated to watch from 2025, this is one that I really didn’t look forward to: I don’t like the art. For an animated film, that’s going to be hard to overcome.

Because of this, I went into Arco feeling like it had to prove itself to me more than the average movie does. That’s probably unfair, and it’s also pretty clear that I’m in the minority when it comes to the art style. I should also say at this point that, in a rarity for me, I watched the dubbed version of this. Typically, I watch with subtitles, but this bothers me a lot less with animation. Because of this, I’m not going to go through the typical casting—there’s a decent chance that the people I mention here won’t be the voices in the version you might watch.