What I’ve Caught Up With, December 2022:
Film: Dead Presidents (1995)
I walked into Dead Presidents expecting something along the lines of Boyz N the Hood, but this is not that. It takes us 90 minutes to get to the heist that on the surface seems to be at the center of the film. Anthony (Larenz Tate) ends up in the Vietnam War, and when he gets home, his friends are addicted or wounded and jobs are thin on the ground. Out of work and desperate for money, trying to keep his girlfriend from seeing other men, he and some comrades decide to rob an armored car filled with unmarked bills. This is a lot deeper, a lot smarter, and a lot darker than I was expecting, and it’s a better movie than I was prepared for.
Film: The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
I’m very slowly trying to catch up on a lot of past television shows that I missed. The X Files was one of those, and it took me months to get through—I finally finished on the last day of the year. The second movie, The X Files: I Want to Believe, fits in with the series at the end of the ninth season. It is, essentially, a long episode of the show, and rather than put in the work of figuring out how to get Mulder out of the results of the last episode of the ninth season, it’s all just handwaved away. This would have been a fine two-part episode, but as a movie, it left a lot to be desired.
It's been a long time since I've seen Dead Presidents as I do remember liking it a lot.
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit schizophrenic, but it's worth seeing.
DeleteLOVE M*A*S*H and it does hold up. Part of that was that while there were constants in Hawkeye and Margaret Holihan the cast was fluid with major characters coming and going keeping it from becoming stale. While I enjoyed the entire run I'm more of a fan of the later seasons with Col. Potter and Charles Winchester. They were deeper, more complex men than Henry Blake and Frank Burns.
ReplyDeleteI also finally got around to The X-Files in 2022. I'm not a big sci-fi guy to begin with but so many people have such affection for it I've always been a little curious. I happened upon it just as it was starting to show the first episode, so I DVR'd faithfully until the end and it was okay. The early years better than the end but having seen it I'll never return to the show and the movie was one step further than I care to go.
I agree on the later seaons of M*A*S*H. I'm a fan of all of the character replacements--I like Col. Potter more than Henry Blake, I like B.J. more than Trapper, and I like Charles more than Frank Burns. It helps that the show was nicer to Charles than it was to Frank. Frank had no (or almost no) humanizing characteristics, but Charles was given the chance to grow as a person and show real humanity. That said, I'm always going to be a fan of Father Mulcahy.
DeleteSeasons 3-5 are the sweet spot for The X Files. There are good individual episodes in later seasons (watch the fourh episode in season 11, for instance), but I won't watch the mythology episodes again. And the movies are not at all required viewing.