What I've Caught Up With, December 2025 Part 2

When it comes to catching up on television, I knocked out some big shows in December. These include Batman: The Animated Series and the follow-up, The New Batman Adventures (same voice cast, more stylized art). I also finished both Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return. The biggest removal, though was Lucifer. It's a fun show, but as often seems to be the case, it started to drag once it moved from network TV to NetFlix.

What I’ve Caught Up With, December 2025 Part 2
Film: The Polar Express (2004)

I think when filmmakers create a new Christmas movie, the hope is to make something that is considered a classic and that will become a yearly watch. Sometimes you get Elf and sometimes you get The Polar Express. This is a divisive film—a lot of people love it and others, not so much. Sad to say, I’m in the second category. The motion capture used for this is bizarre, turning everyone into a bizarre homunculus, many of whom sound like Tom Hanks, who plays what feels like half of the roles. The myth this movie wants to portray is bizarre for a Christmas movie—the poor kid straight up acknowledges the fact that he gets ignored by Santa Claus, which makes for an uncomfortable religious metaphor. Also, the know-it-all kid (Eddie Deezen) needs a punch in the face.

Film: A Town Like Alice (1956)

When the Japanese army attacked British Malaya in 1941, they moved quickly, capturing a number of British nationals. The men were sent to labor camps, but the women were essentially abandoned. Forced to march in hopes of eventually reaching a ship to Singapore, Jean Paget (Virginia McKenna) tries to care for the children of her former employer. It’s a brutal trek with death constantly looming, broken up only by the sometime assistance of Australian soldier Joe Harman (Peter Finch). Virginia McKenna seemed to excel in roles that allowed her to demonstrate nobility and determination under terrible odds. Honestly, this is surprisingly grim for its era, but that’s what makes it worth watching.

Film: A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966)

I don’t always love Westerns, but I do like it when films bend their genre or do something interesting and out of the ordinary. A Big Hand for a Little Lady is very much a Western in the sense that it takes place in the West and in the 19th Century, but we’re not going to see a single gunfight. Instead, we have a poker game of the richest men in the Texas territory that is suddenly an inexplicably crashed by a settler with a gambling addiction (Henry Fonda), who is desperate to win enough money so he and his wife (Joanne Woodward) can buy an even larger farm. A fantastic cast and a wild game of poker follows. This one keeps you guessing until the end.

Film: Heart Like a Wheel (1983)

Shirley Muldowney (Bonnie Bedelia) broke the gender barrier in drag racing in the mid-‘60s. Heart Like a Wheel is her story, at least up to the early 1980s, and honestly probably for the best, since she was in a near-career ending wreck the year after this was released. This feels a lot like a movie of the week, but Bedelia is always a charmer, and she’s very good in this. The “good for her” genre feels exclusively for horror movies and thrillers, but you can make a solid case that this belongs in the same rough genre of film. Honestly, I don’t care a whit about drag racing, but it is fun to watch the cars go really fast. It’s also nice to see a young Anthony Edwards as Shirley Muldowney’s son.

Film: Hard to Be a God (2013)

The final film of Russian filmmaker Aleksei German, Hard to Be a God began filming in 2000 and was in the post production phase in 2013 when German died. Taking place on a different planet that is identical to Earth in the Middle Ages, this is on the surface an exploration of the Star Trek Prime Directive. Scientists are sent from Earth to this planet to observe, but are not allowed to intervene in any way, a problem since a brutal regime has taken hold and prevented any chance at a renaissance. And so we get three hours of squalor, mud, and violence. Not much happens, and everything that does is ugly. This is a film that tells us we are doomed to our lowest common denominator: violence and abuses of power, and it’s as close to a vision of Hell as a film like Mad God. You can smell the black mold and mildew on this—I’ve never seen a film that is this overwhelmingly damp.

Film: Casshern (2004)

Essentially a live-action anime, Casshern is visually flashy and impressive, even with the sections that are clearly and obviously animated. What it isn’t is really coherent. It’s the complaint I almost always have with anime—there’s not a great deal of exposition, so I often feel lost. The film concerns the end of a fifty-year war that leaves the population of Eastern Federation left diseased and suffering. The people of an oppressed area are discovered to contain cells that can be used to regenerate the cells of other people, sort of like super-powered stem cells. Somehow, all of this hinges on Tetsuya (Yusuke Iseya), who was killed in the war but is revived by these “neo-cells.” This is visually interesting, and shot entirely on green screen on what is called a “digital backlot.” So, while it’s pretty and technologically fascinating, it’s a film that literally put me to sleep.