What I've Caught Up With, August 2025

August was an interesting month, and I didn’t watch a ton of movies. I also didn’t actually get through a full television series. Not a great deal to say, honestly. As the sign says on my office door, I can’t wait until we get back to normal fucked up instead of super fucked up.

What I’ve Caught Up With, August 2025
Film: Derek DelGaudio’s In & of Itself (2020)

Derek DelGaudio is a performance artist and magician, and probably a number of other things. In & of Itself is a one man show filmed in New York City by Frank Oz. The show ran for something over a year, and combines story, magic, sleight of hand, philosophy, and more. DelGaudio is a fascinating presence on stage, and the performance is one that weaves tales that may or may not be true and elements of his past that likely are. This is a piece of performance art that is beautiful in the way it is realized. If David Byrne were a magician, this is the kind of show he would have created. It’s the sort of thing that makes you want to create your own art and your own world.

Film: The Furies (1950)

My love of Barbara Stanwyck is well known, and I do love her in cowboy garb, so The Furies was not a hard sell for me. The story here is essentially Shakesperean in how it plays out. Ranch man T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) runs his world happily spending money and writing checks he can’t cash. Daughter Vance (Stanwyck) hopes to inherit the family ranch someday, but also disagrees with T.C. on virtually everything, including the family of Mexican squatters and her love of local gambler Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey). The ending is a bit odd, but even that feels like something right out of Shakespeare, and feels like it was duplicated in the last few minutes of the show Boardwalk Empire. Babs did better, but I do love her in Western wear.

Film: Quadrophenia (1979)

This is very much a rewatch for me, although it’s been years since I’ve seen it. Most coming-of-age films are about someone in their early teens or preteens coming to terms with life. With boys, it’s often about mortality and with girls, it’s generally about sex. Quadrophenia is about Jimmy (Phil Daniels), who works a dead-end job and spends his nights riding a scooter with his fellow Mods, looking for sex, and hunting amphetamines as well as finding/avoiding violence with the Rockers. Jimmy’s life is a dead-end, too, and he’s desperate for importance, self-worth, and a meaning more than just the wild weekend at Brighton. It would be a good movie based on what it is, but the Who soundtrack is what really sells it. That, and arguably the best-ever acting performance from Sting.

Film: My Favorite Wife (1940)

The standard screwball comedy from this era of Hollywood puts wacky people in ridiculous circumstances and sees where we end up. Thus we have My Favorite Wife. Nick Arden (Cary Grant) wants to marry Bianca (Gail Patrick), but needs to have his first wife Ellen (Irene Dunne) declared dead since she’s been missing from a shipwreck for seven years. Naturally Ellen turns up on the day that Nick marries Bianca. Worse for Nick, he finds out that Ellen was shipwrecked on a desert island with the handsome and studly Steve (Randolph Scott). This is one of those movies where the plot could be solved by a 30-second conversation, but it’s also the sort of light comedy where Grant really excelled.

Film: Baffled! (1972)

Touching lightly on horror but much more a thriller, Baffled! features Leonard Nimoy as a race car driver named Tom Kovack who has a near accident in a race when he is startled by a vision of a Devon estate and a screaming woman. Psychic Michele Brent (Susan Hampshire) convinces him to go to the actual estate, which evidently actually exists, as does the woman and her daughter who appeared in his vision, Andrea and Jennifer Glenn (Vera Miles and Jewel Blanch). Is Jennifer’s father still alive? Is he playing tricks on everyone? Are the psychic visions real? There are a lot of fun ideas here, as well as some of the worst rear projection work I’ve ever seen.

Film: Hunger (2008)

It's probably not a surprise that films about rebellion prisoners fighting back have become more interesting of late. Hunger is the story of the IRA hunger strikes in 1981, most famously carried out by Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender). It’s a reminder that, as Terry Pratchett once wrote in one of his books, evil begins when people are treated as things. It’s the directorial debut of Steve McQueen, and from this film, it’s clearly evident that McQueen had incredible talent. Fassbender, aside from a few regional competitions, did not get recognized much for a truly impressive performance. This is an ugly film, but a necessary one, and sadly a film that is likely to become much more relevant for the next several years. Nice to see Liam Cunningham as well. It’s briefly jarring to hear Davos Seaworth while he’s dressed like a priest.

Film: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

There’s something wildly entertaining about Jules Verne-based stories from this era. I grew up on films like Mysterious Island, but this one somehow avoided me until now. It’s fun and sufficiently “science-y” for the average young child to enjoy, and the anti-war message is a good one, even if Captain Nemo’s (James Mason) response to war is to kill everyone around him. It’s a fun cast, including Peter Lorre and Kirk Douglas, and the submarine they use to travel all of those leagues beneath the sea is a glorious rococo masterpiece. There’s some unfortunate racism here that doesn’t translate well to modern times, but from a film of this era with a boat traveling in uncharted Pacific waters, it’s not too unexpected.

Film: The Running Man (1987)

A new version of The Running Man, one of the books written by Stephen King under his pseudonym of Richard Bachman, is schedule for November of this year. The original filmed version from 1987 keeps the name of the story and the basic plot but reduces it in scope dramatically, giving the runner just 400 city blocks (in the book, he “ran” through the entire country). In a dystopian future, a disgraced cop (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is forced to play a sadistic game show where he can allegedly be exonerated of his crimes, but only if he survives a gauntlet of vicious killers. It’s a fun idea, and the film is loaded with cheesy spectacle entirely appropriate for the world it’s depicting, and Richard Dawson is perfectly cast as the slimy gameshow host. If you’ve read the book, though, you know this is a pale shadow of the real story; I have hopes for the film later this year.

Film: Holocaust 2000 (1977)

When a film or film style is successful, it immediately spawns duplicators and imitators. When The Exorcist came out, it was followed by an endless string of demonic possession films. Holocaust 2000 is the natural child of The Omen. Robert Caine (Kirk Douglas) decides to build a nuclear plant near a cave with religious significance in the Middle East, but discovers that his son Angel (Simon Ward) is the Antichrist and will use the plant to destroy the world. And, to help sell things, anyone with any power who opposes the plant is killed off in interesting ways, including one that presages one of the great kills of Dawn of the Dead, but that is clearly an homage to David Warner’s death in The Omen. It’s not terrible, but it is derivative. It naturally includes an age gap relationship between Douglas and actress Agostina Belli, who was half his age. It might also be the only film I know of that features Douglas’s wrinkly ass.