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.
What I’ve Caught Up With, July 2026
Film: Idiocracy (2006)
Completely average guy Joe (Luke Wilson) and prostitute Rita (Maya Rudolph) are subjected to a military experiment that was supposed to freeze them for a year. Instead, they are frozen for half a millennium and awaken to a world where the average intelligence has cratered because it’s the dumb people who have been having kids for centuries. This is a true cult classic, a film that was ignored on release, mainly because it was mis-marketed, and has found its audience. It also feels very much like it is more and more a documentary. We’ve been living in this society for 10 years. I’ve never liked Beavis & Butt-Head, but when Mike Judge goes with live action, his work is near-perfect satire.
Film: The Americanization of Emily (1964)
As the Allies prepare for D-Day in 1944, Lt. Commander Charlie Madison (James Garner) works as a procurer for Admiral William Jessup (Melvyn Douglas). Among the things that he procures is female companionship, including Emily Barham (Julie Andrews), who quickly falls for Charlie, mainly because she’s already lost too many people in the war and wants a man with a streak of cowardice. Unfortunately for everyone, Admiral Jessup is convinced that the Navy is being sidelined and wants to make sure that the first man killed on Omaha Beach is a sailor, and he wants Charlie and his friend Paul Cummings (James Coburn) to be the men who film the casualty taking place. Don’t worry—while there are serious moments, this is mainly a comedy and a romance. Garner is always engaging on screen, and Julie Andrews is, well, Julie Andrews. Hard not to like this one.
Film: City Slicker (1951)
One of the few things that I decided when I began this blog is that I would take things seriously. If someone suggested a movie or challenged me to watch one, I would watch it. It might take years for me to get there, but I would get there. I have no idea who suggested that I watch the cartoon City Slicker, and now that I’ve watched it, I don’t know why they suggested it. This is a weird knock-off Tom and Jerry cartoon, where a city mouse, harassed by a cat, runs off to the country to visit a cousin. Once there, he’s harassed by a chicken. Despite defeating the chicken, he returns to the city. Any classic T&J cartoon is better than this, as is any Sylvester and Tweety...and I don’t like Sylvester and Tweety.
Film: Leave No Trace (2018)
Ben Foster is one of those actors who regularly turns in good work and gets absolutely no credit for it from most people—he’s always worth watching and seems completely invisible. Leave No Trace puts him in the role of a former soldier with PTSD living in a national park with his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie). They are eventually caught and brought more or less into society. Leave No Trace is not a plotless movie, but it’s a plot-light movie. It’s essentially a character study, mostly about Ben Foster’s Will, who doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere and may not really want to, and about how Tom deals with the world that she grew up in and the much larger world that she is brought into.
Film: Platinum Blonde (1931)
Platinum Blonde, clearly named after Jean Harlow’s character, is most interesting because of the tragedy of leading man Robert Williams. Williams plays Stew Smith, hard-bitten reporter, who is sent off on a story about a cheap romance between a society man and a chorus girl. He ends up falling for society girl Anne Schuyler (Harlow), and elopes with her, much to her mother’s chagrin. Anne, of course, wants to reform him into a society man despite his objections and the pining affection of his colleague Gallagher (Loretta Young). It’s a dandy pre-Code screwball and a star-making vehicle for Williams, who tragically died of peritonitis three days after its release. His career is one of the great “what ifs?” of old Hollywood—he clearly had the chops to be one of the greats.
Film: The Final Cut (2004)
I like Black Mirror as much as the next person, but it puts us in a position where every time a film that deals with some dystopian technology shows up, the first thought is, “That would be a good Black Mirror episode.” Thus we have The Final Cut, which presents us with technology much like one of those episodes—some people are implanted with devices that record their entire lives. In this case, they are used to create “Remembrances,” or pastiches of the person’s life after they have died. Those who do the work are called cutters. Experienced cutter Alan Hakman (Robin Williams) is given a job that suddenly become dangerous—the man in question was a higher up at the company that makes the technology, and Hakman is now privy to all of his secrets. This is a solid film, but because “The Entire History of You” exists, it feels redundant even though it was first.
Film: Flash Gordon (1980)
In the opening moments of Flash Gordon, we are introduced to bad guy Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow!), who starts causing disasters on Earth, a planet he has just discovered and never heard of. One of the buttons he uses to cause mayhem is labelled “Earthquake.” Take all the time you need to think about that, and understand that’s how much thought went into making this movie. Star football player Flash Gordon (Sam J. Jones) finds himself forced to battle against Ming and his minions to save the world. Straight out of comic books and old serials, it’s impossible to take seriously, but hard not to enjoy. And since this is a couple of years older than Raiders of the Lost Ark, I have to wonder if Raiders wouldn’t really exist without it. Oh, and the soundtrack is all bombast and Queen at its best/worst.
Film: Innerspace (1987)
In a sort of homage to Fantastic Voyage, Innerspace presents us with a somewhat disgraced pilot Tuck Pendleton (Dennis Quaid), who volunteers to be miniaturized and injected into a rabbit. But, of course, a group decides to steal the technology before he can be injected, and a scientist runs off, eventually injecting him into hypochondriac grocery store worker Jack Putter (Martin Short). Now Jack has to figure out how to get the miniaturized capsule out of his body before Tuck runs out of air, reunite Tuck with his estranged reporter girlfriend Lydia (Meg Ryan), and evade the people hunting him. This is fun and ridiculous sci-fi and is as much a comedy as it is anything else. The cast has a ton of great people in it, including an evil Vernon Wells and an equally evil and comic Kevin McCarthy. Hard not to love it at least a little bit.
Film: The Clock (1945)
I wasn’t sure what to expect with The Clock. I went into it knowing not a thing, and figuring that a film from 1945 with that name was probably a film noir. It is not. It is, in fact, a romance. Soldier Joe Allen (Robert Walker) is in New York on leave when he literally runs into young Alice Maybery (Judy Garland). What follows is a sort of whirlwind romance, which consists mainly of Joe forcing himself into Alice’s path. They spend a day together, have dinner, miss the last bus and end up spending a night with each other as well (and not in that way—it’s 1945 after all). Honestly, it’s hard to object to it, but this is lesser Judy Garland and Robert Walker is upsettingly naïve. Evidently, the entire world likes this more than I do.
Film: Europa Report (2013)
There is a strong connection between horror and science fiction. Any time that we are dealing with the idea of discovery, or exploration, or touching on the unknown, there is a strong possibility of horror. Europa Report has figured this out. A group of astronauts and scientists head out to Jupiter’s moon Europa to see if there is life under the ice, a trip that will take near two years each way. Naturally, things do not go as planned in a number of ways. There are shades of films like Event Horizon and Alien here and with reason. There are already a lot of ways to die in space; adding in the possibility of organic life on a distant moon only multiplies these possibilities. Not always easy to watch because of how much appears as surveillance footage, but it’s worth digging through.
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