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.

BTS, Eat Your Heart Out

Film: KPop Demon Hunters
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Based on the film’s almost immediate cultural impact, I suppose I wasn’t really surprised at the Oscar nomination for KPop Demon Hunters. When this hit NetFlix, it became a huge sensation. What better place to start going through Oscar movies than this, I thought. It’s not a movie I would normally choose to watch and I’ll knock it out quickly and move on. Honestly, my original plan was to watch One Battle After Another, but by the time I had a chance to sit down with a movie, it would have taken my past midnight to finish. And so, KPop Demon Hunters it is.

This is a film where I want to spend a lot of time on what it is and less on the plot, so I’m going to speedrun the story in three paragraphs. Years ago, demons plagued the Earth, collecting souls and feeding them to Gwi-Ma (Byung-hun Lee), the demon king. A trio of women rose up to stop the demons, and pushed them back both with fighting skill and with the power of song, which created a magical barrier called the Honmoon. As time progressed, new signing trios emerged to maintain the Honmoon and fight against the demons who managed to break through.

More Like a Bad Dream

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

We have got to talk about Sleepwalkers. Once upon a time, Stephen King, who wrote this screenplay, had a serious drug problem. There’s evidence of that in some of his projects, like the ridiculous Maximum Overdrive (the only movie he directed), and this one. Sleepwalkers has a premise that is at least mildly interesting, if a bit derivative. But once you get past the premise, this movie is complete nonsense. What it has going for it is that it’s the ridiculous kind of nonsense that eventually gets beyond silly and kind of becomes entertaining again.

You should be aware right from the start that we are going to go in some nasty places here—not nasty in the sense of blood and gore, but nasty in the sense of the habits of our two main characters. We start with police in California investigating a house that is surrounded by the bodies of dead, often mutilated cats. There’s also the desiccated body of a young girl in the house as well, but no sign of the occupants.

Infect Me With Your Love

Film: 28 Years Later
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

28 Days Later is not just one of my favorite horror movies; it’s one of my favorite movies. I was wildly disappointed in the sequel, 28 Weeks Later. The first 10-15 minutes are brutal and fantastic, and then it becomes a series of plot holes. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland have returned to the series, though, and have inexplicably skipped having 28 Months Later, going instead for years. I was guardedly optimistic going into this one. I adore the first movie, but I’ve been burned by a sequel before.

The lore is something that definitely needs to be addressed here. The second movie ends with what seems to be the Rage virus being released on the European mainland, a fact that would quickly lead to the virus spreading across all of Europe, into the Middle East and Asia, and potentially into Africa as well. We get a snippet at the start of the virus spreading in the Scottish highlands, with a young boy named Jimmy Crystal (Rocco Haynes initially) escaping, and also watching his minister father willingly give himself over to the infected in what he believes to be something like the Rapture.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 2024

The Contenders:

Anora (winner)
The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Pérez
I’m Still Here
Nickel Boys
The Substance
Wicked

...But No Mule

Film: 40 Acres
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on gigantic television.

I’ve said a couple of times in the past that one of the subgenres we’re going to start seeing more and more of is environmental-based horror. Environmental disaster science fiction is going to be just as much a thing in coming years. 40 Acres is absolutely a film in that subgenre. While this is an action movie in a lot of respects, the entirety of the film turns on climate catastrophe and famine.

We are in the new future, and the world has experienced a massive catastrophe. A fungal blight has destroyed crops the world over, plunging the entire planet into a massive famine. While food is a prized commodity, it is arable farmland that is the true prize. Any place where actual crops can be grown is more valuable than anything else.