Sun Apr 05 2026 20:09 March Film Roundup:

• The Royal Tenenbaums (2001): Wes Anderson's Die Hard, the moment he figured out his style and decided to never do anything differently again. I like that style, so I enjoyed this movie. I'll say my favorite bit was the way Etheline Tenenbaum spends years being courted by intense, Wes Anderson geniuses but she's sick of that shit and ends up marrying the accountant.

  Yesterday Sumana and I happened to rewatch the "Wes Anderson horror trailer" SNL sketch and I can now see it's basically just parodying The Royal Tenenbaums. Truly a touchstone.

• That's the only movie proper I watched in March but we also watched a stream of the National Theatre's production of The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Max Webster. It's a really funny play, but if Oscar Wilde was in my writing group I'd tell him "you have a serious problem where all of your characters sound like you, to the extent that all of your famous quips turn out to be lines you put in the mouths of one character or another." And then he'd probably say "Bah, Leonard, you know the price of everything and the value of nothing. —The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter IV"
• Oh yeah, I should also mention we recently watched some midcentury military training films:
  • One Too Often (1950), featuring Jack Lemmon(!) as the Private Snafu-esque knave who keeps gambling with his life while on leave. It's full of the sort of cinematic vocabulary familiar to me from MST3K sthorts, complete with guardian angels who keep bending the rules for ol' Jack... until they don't.
  • Resisting Enemy Interrogation (1944): This film packs a feature's worth of intrigue into 66 minutes, as the enemy use clever interrogation techniques and deductive reasoning to blow our boys out of the sky, like an evil version of Mathnet. Highly recommended as a thriller in the same vein as Eye of the Needle (1981).
  • Undercover (1943): Kinda hamfisted John Ford short where Gallant practices good spycraft and successfully establishes his cover story (Or does he? discuss, men!) Whereas Goofus takes one step across the border and screws everything up. Pretty entertaining, but unlike Resisting Enemy Interrogration I don't think it holds up well as a narrative film.

Sun Mar 08 2026 10:36 February Film Roundup:

• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2025): A high-concept sci-fi thriller is periodically interrupted by Black Mirror episodes. I found this uneven in the same kind of medium-budget indie sci-fi way as Chappie. But also uneven in a different way! The repeated time loops and select-your-party opening scene set the expectation that, like Hundreds of Beavers, this universe has strict video-game-like rules. But as we go through the loop, the fabric of reality starts breaking down in a Dickian way until there's no way to tell what's real and what's not. Once reality has collapsed, going back in time won't solve anything, so the movie is moot!

  I did like all the party members in this movie although I sense some major scenes were cut from the film or the screenplay, because two of them didn't get their Black Mirror episode. It was good to see Asim Chaudhry again after Taskmaster.

Sat Feb 07 2026 11:55 January Film Roundup:

• An Unmarried Woman (1978): Like Claudine, one of those hidden gem '70s rom-coms that's now forgotten because a) all old movies have been forgotten, b) it doesn't fit the post Nora Ephron rom-com formula. I feel like Judd Apatow tried to give the genre a raunchier spin in the 2000s but I haven't seen any of his movies and if he changed the heading of the USS Rom-Com, it wasn't by more than a few degrees. Anyway, this is a really fun, romantic and somewhat raunchy (by 1970s non-porno standards) movie.

  Saw this on a date with Sumana and we were both primed by modern rom-coms for the psychologist to be portrayed as a comic-relief blowhard, but her advice was actually pretty sensible! Later on we learned from IMDB trivia that the psychologist was played by a real therapist who was improvising a therapy session with Jill Clayburgh. Classic '70s improv/Method acting; I love it. The therapist, Penelope Russianoff, also cashed out on her sudden fame with a tie-in self-help book. Another classic move!

• Blithe Spirit (1945): A Noel Coward play... in movie form? Maybe he figured he was doing his bit for the war effort. It's entertaining, but mostly because of the visual effects and Margaret Rutherford's kooky old crone, the only character who doesn't know she's in a Noel Coward play. The other characters are content to waft timelessly around their country house like the holodeck people in Celine and Julie Go Boating. In fact, I think the holodeck people in that movie are made up to resemble the ghost from Blithe Spirit.

  Coward was pretty cranky about the adaptation of his screenplay and claims the ending ruined the best thing he ever wrote, which a) the movie ending is way better than his original ending, b) if I thought this was my best work I wouldn't brag about it.

• One Battle After Another (2025): An exciting thriller with the huge thematic problem that the first part really wants to take place in the early '70s, and they barely make it look like 2007. I assume this is a requirement of the source material (which I'm reading now and it's hilarious). Would it have cost that much extra to make this a period piece? Then you wouldn't need to add cell phones to the story and then clumsily take them out again. Or just claim the second part of the movie is taking place in 1990 and bluff your way through it, the way Uncut Gems is set in 2012 but any New Yorker can tell it was filmed much later. What am I going to do, post a nitpicky three-hour rant on Youtube? I don't have the time!

  The most thriller-y part of the movie was the exciting middle sequence with Guillermo del Toro. And the part I hope comes directly from Vineland is that the protagonist bumbles through the entire movie having no idea what's happening and no effect on the plot, but ends up saving the day retroactively by having been a loving and supportive father.

• What Did the Lady Forget? (1937): A charming "brassy dame" kind of family comedy goes sour near the end with an act of domestic violence that was acceptable in a 1937 movie but won't fly today. The dame is brassy the whole way through, to the point of becoming a kinda unlikable antihero—itself, a brassy move.

This month the Television Spotlight shines on both versions of Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, a comedian panel show themed as a volatile and often unfair spelling bee. Sumana and I met Guy with the infamous season 2 of Taskmaster NZ and he has the same kind of sinister charm necessary to be a Taskmaster himself, or (as seen here) any kind of game show host. Since the entire New Zealand comedy scene seems to be about as big as Dropout, it was a relief when Guy moved the show to Australia and got a wider variety of... wait, people are showing up in both versions? I just don't know, man.

Mon Jan 19 2026 11:30 The Crummy.com Review Of Things 2025: Review of Things 2025? Yeah, I'll review some things 2025: generally speaking, 2025 sucked. And 2026 doesn't look much better. At least we have art. In 2025 I watched 40 films for the first time and almost half of them were good enough to be recommended on Film Roundup Roundup. Here's my top ten for the year:

1. Paperhouse (1988)
2. Grosse Point Blank (1997)
3. Quick Change (1990)
4. Born Yesterday (1950)
5. Sinners (2025)
6. After Hours (1984)
7. The Iron Sheriff (1957)
8. Minbo: The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (1992)
9. The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
10. Claudine (1974)

Paperhouse isn't the kind of film I usually watch, but it was so creative and such a pleasant surprise that I had to give it the nod.

Games

The Crummy.com Game of the year is my new anti-doomscrolling game, Lost For Swords. It's a real hidden gem of tactical positioning. Apart from that I haven't spent much time playing new games. I'm glad Caves of Qud made it to 1.0 though.

Literature

The Crummy.com Book of the Year is Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe. I'm not wild about the plot but the worldbuilding is amazing and he's so damn good at putting sentences together. I've had the tetralogy on my shelf for a while and will probably read the other two books this year.

Runners-up:

• Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. Another banger from another master of sentence construction. The detective novel is a perfect match for Pynchon's sensibility and I'm glad he's found it.
• Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, the original novelizations by screenwriter Shigeru Kayama. The Godzilla-worshiping death cult was an interesting idea that didn't make it into the movie.
• Gaming the Iron Curtain by Jaroslav Švelch. This very readable academic work combines two of my top current interests: old computers and surviving a repressive regime.

My accomplishments

I dunno, not a lot, it feels like. I kept the lights on. I sold a Ravy Uvana story, "People of the Consortium of Worlds v. Rax, God of Misery", to Analog, and it was published in the final issue of the year. Two already published Ravy Uvana stories ("Stress Response", and "Meat") appeared in Chinese translation in Science Fiction World.

My procedural work appeared in Output, edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort.

I now work full-time at Bookshop.org and in 2025 I worked on a couple big projects, primarily the ebook store and reading system.

Thanks to the deadlines of my writing group I finished three new stories: "The Spare", "The Arcade, The Marble, The Door", and "We're From The Help and We're Here to Government". The Constellation Speedrun is still sitting around waiting for me to get an agent. I've got two new novel ideas but it's a struggle to get anything on the page.

Thu Jan 01 2026 19:29 December Film Roundup:

• Samurai Shifters (2019): Like Shall We Dance? I've been looking for this one for a while ever since I missed it at the 2019 Japan Cuts festival. Finally got a chance to see it and... it's all right. A fun and goofy take on a samurai flick, mixed with too much overt sentimentality for my taste.
• The Perfect Furlough (1958): Dames, dames, dames! Who doesn't love 'em? The boys up at the Arctic research station sure do, especially that hot tamale they've discovered crashed in an ancient alien spacecraft. Va-va-voom! ... Wait, I've gotten this movie mixed up with The Thing (1982).

  Anyway, dames. This movie's got 'em, and it's even a bit wholesome in a comedically sexist 1958 way, since Tony Curtis is lusting after his real-life wife. But even as the actors on screen went through their shenanigans and mixups that could have been avoided with some basic communication, I couldn't stop thinking about the Arctic research station and the stir-crazy flyboys we see in the first part of the movie. Even if you don't go full The Thing, there's got to be a more interesting movie there.

• Hundreds of Beavers (2022): Saw it on the big screen at IFC and in doing so discovered that Hundreds of Beavers is on its way to becoming a Rocky Horror-type cult film. Well-deserved, I say. It's always fun to be in a theater full of people who can't stop laughing.

  In my original #💯🦫 review I complained that the first 30 minutes of the film are "an aimless mess of laughs" and that's true if you haven't seen the movie before—i.e. it's still basically true. But this time I can see the aim: the first 30 minutes are the movie's tutorial. Sort of like in What's Up, Doc? the first act is there to show you that this movie operates by Looney Tunes cartoon logic. That's why you have rabbits at the start of the movie even though they don't play a big role later on: rabbits are the tutorial animal.

I'm pointing today's Television Spotlight on Pluribus, the beautiful and depressing show where they give Vince Gilligan Apple TV money. I recommend Pluribus, but having completed the first season, I think you can wait a while to get into it. It goes at its own rate, and the two-year-or-longer wait while they write and film the second season is really messing up the pacing.

This month Sumana and I also watched the 2002 PBS reality miniseries Frontier House, and had a good time watching people put up log cabins and mow hay. Pretty interesting to watch people from the dial-up era talk about getting away from the distractions of modern life. It was ever thus, I guess.

Tue Dec 02 2025 21:42 November Film Roundup:

• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) One of those post-Bonnie and Clyde films that defies conventional notions of story structure. Save the cat? There's no cat here at all! Just senseless violence, though fortunately depicted with spectacular stunts rather than gore effects. I loved the train robbery scenes, loved the language-barrier bank robberies when BC&tSK move to Bolivia. I dunno what's up with the bicycle scene or the bouncy Henry Mancini tune, seems tonally inconsistent, but that's the New Hollywood for ya.
• Claudine (1974): A really nice romcom with good attention paid to character development, especially Claudine's oldest son. James Earl Jones is great as the love interest. The scenes with the social worker go alongside the unemployment office scene in Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) as satirical indictments of the now-dismantled welfare state.

  I've mentioned before that I often go to the Museum of the Moving Image looking for hidden gems, films I've never heard of but which turn out to be something really special, and Claudine is one of those for me.

• Please Turn Over (1959): When it comes to double entendres, this is of those postwar British movies that wants to have it both ways. (Nudge nudge, wink wink.) It's absolutely loaded with phwoar, but the phwoar is smothered in layers of framing devices so that nothing dirty actually happens. It's a movie, guys! We know it's fiction. It's a lot of cinematic work to go through just to show a woman en deshabille.

  Halfway through Please Turn Over, safely ensconced in framing devices, the actors get to do some Unfaithfully Yours-style acting and play the polar opposites of the milquetoast characters they established outside of the framing devices. This is the most fun part of the film... except, I would argue, the ending. That's where Jo's parents tell her that although she has slandered them and her entire town, ruining everyone's reputation, they're proud of her for getting her novel published. Now that's supportive!

• What's Up, Doc? (1972): Peter Bogdanovich, man, what a director! When he wants to make a drama, he makes a boring slice-of-life thing like The Last Picture Show that wins all the serious awards. When he switches to comedy, he knocks it out of the park with this and its immediate follow-up Paper Moon, which are among the funniest movies I've ever seen. You've got to admire that level of talent.

  I saw What's Up, Doc? at the museum and it was pretty much nonstop laughs from the audience. It includes a car chase that's so funny it took a good three minutes before I noticed "this is a car chase in a 20th-century Hollywood comedy, those are boring" and another two minutes until I actually got bored. Unfortunately, it kept going for like three minutes after that. Apart from that, a stellar movie that accomplishes something normally thought impossible—recapturing a dead genre of film without emplying revisionism, nostalgia, or ironic distance. This isn't even a period piece: it's a real screwball comedy set in 1972. It's great stuff. Barbra Streisand really elevates the comedy, a phenomenon I've dubbed "the Streisand Effect."

  I did find one part of the movie hard to read initially: I didn't get why Judy is so cruel to Eunice. The movie itself isn't cruel to Eunice—she and Howard achieve a Billy Wilder-esque mutual cheating arrangement and she ends up with Max from The Muppet Movie. Then it clicked: Judy is Bugs Bunny, and Eunice is her Elmer Fudd. I spent the whole movie thinking Howard was Elmer Fudd, but he's actually... a really big carrot, I guess?

Wed Nov 05 2025 20:36 October Film Roundup:

• Hopscotch (1980): Yes, a film I saw a long time ago and forgot to review. It wasn't that memorable, to be honest. In particular I don't think I ever felt like Walter Matthau's character was in danger.
• Truck Rascals (1975): This was entertaining enough but it felt a little bit... high-budget. The fight scenes and vehicular stunts were suspiciously well-produced for what I'd assumed was a random B-movie comedy. Then I did my usual post-film investigation and found that there were ten of these movies produced by Toei and released in a four-year time span! I guess the CB radio craze made everyone a bit truck-focused in the 70s.

  Between this and Tampopo and Supermarket Woman I feel like I'm getting a glimpse at a hidden Japanese trucker culture that only shows up in movies. I don't remember any highly customized trucks or restaurant brawls from my trip to Japan, although there was a poster at a rest stop asking you not to park your compact car into a parking space intended for a bus. Exactly the sort of thing a "Compact Car Rascal" would do.

  Anyway, the movie's fun, but I don't think I could handle nine more in the series since Wikipedia says they all have the same plot. I have watched a ton of Fast and the Furious movies though, and those don't have any plot at all, so who knows?

• Joysticks (1983): Surprisingly, this 80s sex comedy about arcade games is not a good movie. The most enjoyable things about it are all bad things. Like the very first scene, where I was thinking "it doesn't look like they got a permit for this" and yes, they were just filming a movie with topless nudity in the middle of an LA street.

  Then there's the brief flight of fancy where the arcade owner (who's not sleazy enough to be funny and not emotion-y enough to be sympathetic) claims to the town worthies that his arcade is no den of sin, but a place of learning where he teaches computer science to underprivileged girls, creating new opportunities for women in STEM. The chalkboard behind him has a flowchart of the sort you'd draw if you'd looked at a book about data processing several weeks ago.

  The games themselves are filmed well, and it's pretty cool to have a tournament machine where the competitors must control a joystick that's as big as they are. But... the only joke in this supposed comedy which I would classify as "funny" is the way King Vidiot's groupies mutter the Burgertime song in unison as they shuffle around like zombies. That's, like, a Futurama-level joke.

• Paperhouse (1988): A child's magical drawing powers are rendered horrific and grotesque by the fact that kids can't draw for crap. This was a really pleasant surprise, not only in the clever concept and the Tiny Art Director-esque set and prop design, but in the screenplay's sympathy for the way everything seems emotionally huge and super important when you're a kid. Anna's dad shows up as a horrifying slasher-movie monster in the dream world, but in real life he's just a normal father who's absent and a bit distant.

  In possibly the greatest movie endorsement in cinema history, first-time actress Charlotte Burke never appeared in another film because (via the director via IMDB trivia) "she really loved Paperhouse so much, that she never wanted to do anything else and was done with acting."

• Minbo: The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (1992): Saw it with Sumana as part of our gradual Jūzō Itami catalog watch. This is a really didactic movie, in that it is structured to train you, a random civilian, how to deal with blustery yakuza. This means that there's a lot of wimpiness in the first part of the movie as the characters find their bearings. Eventually it picks up though and you get some good solidarity as the entire hotel staff, from the cleaning women to the Uncle Pennybags-looking chairman, stand together. Sumana posted her thoughts on the film to Metafilter.
• Tree of Life (2011): I admit I wanted to not like this movie. It's such a pretentious concept. I wouldn't have watched, except I wanted to get out of the house and that's what was playing at the museum. But... it's pretty good! I was engaged the whole time, even though most of the scenes would sound really slow if I were to describe them to you. The dinosaur scene, in particular, really moved me in a way I'm not sure how to articulate. (Not the plesiosaur scene, plesiosaurs aren't dinosaurs.) I was also getting an Omega Point vibe from the ending, which is... underutilized in film, I would say.

  I also love that they brought Douglas Trumbull out of retirement for one... more... job. Although I don't think this movie came up when I saw him in person at the ST:TMP screening in 2020. Disjunct audiences, I guess.

(1) Tue Oct 07 2025 20:44 September Film Roundup:

• A League of Their Own (1992): Forgot to review this when we watched it, and that was so long ago I don't think I can do a really detailed review. This was fun, though. Lots of star power, the look of that distinctively 1990s version of the 1940s... it's a feel-good classic! Come on, you probably watched this movie before I did, you know how it goes.
• After Hours (1985): Remember how "computer" used to be a job that people had? Well, Paul, the main character in this movie, is a word processor. You can hear him shout it near the end: "I'm just a word processor!" As such, Martin Scorsese has some pre-Wolf of Wall Street fun lovingly panning through Paul's midtown office with all of its cool 1985 technology. (I'm guessing those are dumb terminals connected to an on-site mainframe.) But then Paul decides to go out and have some nighttime fun in the Big Apple, and his trouble begins.

  Overall this was fun; I was thinking it would be a fast-paced picaresque trip through Soho, but it went slowly back and forth between just a few different locations, adding layers of complexity to the characters each time.

  I'm reminded of Very Bad Things (1998), a comedy that has a similar relentless focus on everything going wrong, which I really disliked when I saw it on a free student preview ticket. After coming out of the theater having enjoyed After Hours I wondered if I just wasn't in the mental space to enjoy a comedy as dark as Very Bad Things.

  But After Hours, although dark, isn't misanthropic. When the worst thing in this movie happens, the community rallies. When someone incorrectly thinks Paul is a burglar, the community rallies again (admittedly, by forming a lynch mob and hunting him down). It's much more positive. My point is that Very Bad Things still sucks, 27 years later. I'll never forget!

In news of TV Spotlight, Sumana and I have caught up on "For All Mankind", Ron Moore's second TV show about how you should never install the software updates. We're enjoying the alt-history even though its treatment of the Internet got really weird in the fourth season. I will say I like the "this space base is really cramped and we're starving/going crazy" setups better than the "there are a lot of people on this space base and we're causing soap opera drama for each other" setups, but they are switching back and forth between them pretty reliably as humanity expands through the solar system.

(1) Sun Sep 07 2025 09:41 August Film Roundup:

• Grosse Pointe Blank (1997): Every scene in this movie made me happy. It's not the tightest screenplay, it's got a lot of minor characters and backstory that aren't relevant to the plot, and you don't need the feds at all, but all of it is fun and I'm glad they put it in. If the screenplay was really tight it wouldn't fit the emotional mood; you'd expect something more action-forward like Die Hard.

  Old video game watch: as soon as I saw the Doom II arcade game in the convenience store I thought "this prop that had to be created specifically for the movie does not bode well for this convenience store in a film that both critiques and celebrates action-movie violence." Maybe not in those words.

• Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935): On a slow evening I picked this movie for the obvious Lebowski connection reasons. This 61-minute film felt more like a serial than a "movie", though such distinctions were still fuzzy in 1935. Gene Autry plays a character named "Gene Autry" which I guess implies that the evil dad in this movie is his actual dad?

  I dunno. The whole thing makes very little sense, but the music was good, and in that respect it sets the tone for the entire "singing cowboy" genre. I would judge the old movie racism level in this one as medium, but I think their heart was in the right place?

Sun Aug 10 2025 11:20 July Film Roundup:

• Parade (1974): The scene: Jacques Tati is in movie jail after Playtime cost one gazillion francs, so he turns to sources of foreign funding. By this point—his final film—he's reduced to doing his nightclub act for Swedish television. There is some astonishing juggling in this movie, and some more of Tati's philosophy that we are all little kids playing dress-up and pretending through life. But as for the rest of it... "mime of sporting events" isn't even a comedy category anymore, and for good reason.
• The Phoenician Scheme (2025): Love the graphic design as always. The madcap, sketchlike quest plot keeps things moving. But in classic "Leonard goes in imagining the movie he wishes he'd made" style, the trailer made me believe that the titular scheme was to unite the greater Middle East into a recreation of the ancient Phoenician civilization, a scheme that would naturally have great-power geopolitical implications and lead to a lot of violent pushback. But actually this film takes place in an alternate universe where the Middle East has already been conveniently unified into a single* country as of the 1960s, allowing Wes Anderson to make his usual goofy Wes Anderson film without it getting all heavy and topical.
• Ocean's Eleven (2001): There is a Merry and Pippin in this movie. In fact, this movie's almost beat-for-beat the same as Logan Lucky (2017) which I saw first and like better. It's not bad by any means, just not as good as Logan Lucky.
• Superman (2025): I've remained aggressively normcore about superhero stuff even as it takes over more and more of pop culture. My takes are the most middling ones you can imagine. I liked Iron Man (2008) and then I thought the trend went out of control. I think Batman is goofy and that Batman stories should lean into the inherent goofiness. And when it comes to Superman, my tastes are simple: I want to see a powerful, well-intentioned person wrestling with the fact that enormous power and good intentions aren't enough to solve every problem. Suffice to say that this movie delivered.
• Ruggles of Red Gap (1935): Definitely not a B picture. Charles Laughton mixes a feel-good American immigrant story with a helping of humorous British culture-clash snobbery. Ruggles is a great character, someone who can deeply believe both "All men are created equal" and "Blood will tell". The book is on Project Gutenberg if you want more of that style of humor.
• Ragtag (2023): I have a fondness for films that are supercuts of clips from other films. Though it's becoming really easy to put such films together without doing any substantive creative work, so as a viewer you gotta be careful. In The Afterlight (2021) the idea was to show the same kind of scene from many different movies. Here it's more like stretching video out, playing it back and forth, turning cinema into something closer to an animated GIF.

  Also like The Afterlight, Ragtag was born of a director deciding to watch a ton of movies during lockdown. And presumably torrenting them all because how else are you going to get all that footage into Final Cut Pro? Hey, I'm not judging.

• Born Yesterday (1950): Continuing our Holliday holiday with this lighthearted tale of political corruption. I hypothesized this in an earlier review, but Holliday's character in this one is a direct antecedent to Elle in Legally Blonde: a smart person who's never had to be smart before. Really enjoyable.

Sun Jul 06 2025 09:03 June Film Roundup:

• The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956): Another film where Judy Holliday brasses her way into getting what she wants because she's worth it. Her film persona is often described as a "ditz". I haven't seen Born Yesterday, whose title implies it has something to say on the issue, but I feel like that's not quite right, or maybe the meaning of "ditz" has changed over the years.

  I feel like "ditz" implies a level of absent-mindedness, like Lucy Ricardo. But so far the distinguishing feature of Judy Holliday's characters is that they believe women are equal to men. Not in an overtly militant way, just always acting from a position of equality with all other human beings. The world throws a lot of bullshit in their path to try to dissuade them from this attitude, but they ignore or plow through it. A more recent version of this character might be Elle from Legally Blonde (2001).

  You could say that this belief is fine in 2001 but naive in 1956, and Laura in The Solid Gold Cadillac is pretty easy to manipulate, which I guess is where "ditz" comes from. But since these are feel-good comedies and not the real 1950s, Laura's stubbornness wins through and she is proven correct. So really, she has an accurate view of the universe in which she lives.

• Three Ages (1923): Sort of a proto-History of the World, Part I but I didn't like that movie very much either. Some slapstick, a couple of great stunts, a soupçon of 1920s racism. There is a laugh-out-loud joke right at the end, but does this film really need to be four reels long? You're just making more work for the preservationists, Buster.
• Full of Life (1956): We're surely going to watch every Judy Holliday movie, so this won't dissuade me, but she wasn't very wacky in this one. It turns out her all-too-brief career is not an uninterrupted streak of inspired comedy chaos, and thus this was only kinda enjoyable.

  Apparently the screenplay was toned down from something more "frank", so you're left with a kitchen-sink dramedy that's extremely tame by today's mega-frank standards. Whereas The Solid Gold Cadillac still feels fresh, and It Should Happen To You feels maybe even more transgressive than before in its portrayal of low-stakes feminine obsession.

Fri Jun 20 2025 13:41 The Coffeeshop AU: My metafictional Great Gatsby fanfic "The Coffeeshop AU" is published in Solsitita issue #3, the appropriately named "Coffeeshop!AU" issue:

"He's in love with Daisy," said Jordan, with as much certainty as if she'd added the tags and written the content note herself. "Maybe Tom," she hedged, "but Tom's an asshole. Daisy's nice enough." This belief of Jordan's — that Daisy was any less obnoxious than Tom — was the first of many alarms I missed as I dropped like a flipped coin on the unalterable trajectory of my relationship with her.

Available for cheap as an EPUB or PDF!

Thu Jun 05 2025 07:05 May Film Roundup: I've been putting off writing this for several days now, so short reviews written first thing in the morning will have to do.

• Sinners (2025): This movie has one of the best individual movie scenes I've ever seen. If you've seen it you know which scene. It's a transcendent standout in what is otherwise a pretty good monster movie. A little crowded, maybe. I liked the first half (talky setup) more than the second half (monsters) but I think that's how I feel about horror movies in general.

  Fun monsters, though. The vampires in Sinners are very zombie-ish, and seem to have some kind of hive mind, which makes them pleasingly Borg-like and also feeds into their creepy Manson Family thing.

• The Great Waldo Pepper (1975): Here's a fun trick: watch this movie and then watch The Right Stuff (1983). They're very similar movies, but film nerds still remember The Right Stuff and nobody's ever heard of this flick, even though it's a big Robert Redford action spectacular. That's because Star Wars happened in 1977 and changed moviemaking, and now nobody makes this kind of movie anymore, they only make Right Stuff-type movies. Waldo Pepper is full of amazing, ill-advised live aerial stunts that don't feel as exciting as they must have pre-Star Wars.

  Bonus: I can't think of another movie that makes you look at the title of the movie for as much screentime as this one does, because it's painted on the side of Waldo's biplane. This film is famous for coining the unforgettable catchphrase, "There's Waldo!"

• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016): Speaking of Star Wars, you dig that Andor season 2? Good stuff. We did a Rogue One rewatch and it really highlights how much better Andor was than even good Star Wars movies. Rogue One feels like a rough draft now. Great art direction as always.

Sat May 03 2025 14:19 April Film Roundup:

• Johnny Dangerously (1984): The first 30 minutes of this movie are really, really funny; a nonstop gag assault in the style of Airplane!. Then the plot happens, and the comedy kind of loses momentum. It's still pretty funny though, and if you're one of the few living people who still watches old gangster movies you'll appreciate this long-overdue parody. I do think this movie would have been more successful if it had come out in the mid-1960s, but Hollywood was in one of its periodic "comedies don't need to be funny" phases.

Tue Apr 01 2025 19:02 March Film Roundup: One of those months where I realize I'd better see a movie quick if I want to have a Film Roundup, and here's the movie:

• Midnight Diner (2014): Kind of saw this one out of order. I thought the TV series came afterwards but looking at Wikipedia I see that the series and movies are intermingled. Oh well!

  Though this wasn't the only thing the movie was going for, I thought it was at its best in scenes like the opening one, achieving a cozy feeling of being in a quiet restaurant with colorful characters from different walks of life. It's a bit anthology-ish, and felt hit-and-miss in a way that I think bodes well for just watching the TV show.

Since this was a short one, I'll also mention that Sumana and I have been watching a lot of the now-on-hiatus ABC show "Holey Moley," which features a real sports anchor commentating an infernokrusher miniature golf tournament. It's a real "America: The Good Parts" kind of show: a celebration of different kinds of people with diverse skills, who can improvise in ridiculous situations and are willing to charge headlong into seemingly impossible problems. The contrast between the fine motor control necessary to sink a putt and the broad slapstick involved in running up a glycerin-soaked ramp never gets old, or at least it hasn't yet.

Sat Mar 15 2025 11:19 The Crummy.com Review of Things 2024: It took me til March, but I pulled it off this year! Here are the best media I experienced (or created) in 2024:

I'll start by tooting my own horn, because why not. I had two stories published in 2024: "Expert Witness" (A Ravy Uvana Story) in Analog and "The Blanket Thief" (cozy fantasy) in the Winter 2024 issue of Baubles From Bones. You can hear me read "Expert Witness" on the Analog podcast.

I gave a talk at PyCon US, How to maintain a popular Python library for most of your life without with burning out", and I was honored with the Python Software Foundation Community Service Award. I wrote two as-yet-unpublished stories in 2024, "A Tomorrow Problem" and "Cause of Action" (both in the Ravy Uvana universe).

Now, on to things not created by me. The Crummy.com Game of the Year is Balatro, a game that doubles down on the part of roguelikes I enjoy the most: the clever creation of wacky, game-breaking combinations from randomly presented choices. Honorable mention to Slice & Dice, the roguelike I have on my phone to stop myself from doomscrolling.

Other games of note: Animal Well and Baldur's Gate 3. I was really into BG3 and played it exclusively up until the point of my Japan trip, but when I came back the spell had been broken and I can't get back into it to finish it.

The Crummy.com Book of the Year is Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks. The story of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park has been well told, but I'd never before considered the parallel story of the people creating codes for Allied intelligence to use. This memoir was a fascinating look into bureaucratic infighting; logistics nightmares; the simultaneous invention of one-time pads; and the difficulties of trying to give cryptographic training to a rotating cast of strong-willed characters who, Wikipedia will tell you, frequently do not survive the war.

I spent a lot of 2024 reading comic crime novels for research. I read a bunch of Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books (Drowned Hopes stands out but I don't recommend that as your first one), Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, Kyril Bonfiglioli's art scam trilogy (I tried to watch Mortdecai (2015) but couldn't get through the first friggin' scene), and the first three of Sarah Caudwell's academic/lawyer murder mysteries.

Also of note: the manga Yokohama Station SF, The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, old issues of the trade publication The Soda Fountain, and the really funny The Husbands by my friend Holly Gramazio.

(1) Sun Mar 09 2025 10:29 February Film Roundup:

• The Iron Sheriff (1957): Above-average western focusing on the psychological stress of being the only sheriff in town but having a major conflict of interest during an investigation. A little bit of noir and mystery in there. Good stuff.
• The Quiller Memorandum (1966): George Segal as a spy? I was dubious. But the sort of spy he plays is the kind who pretends to be a doofy backslapping George Segal American, which made for some fun interrogation scenes. Was it really an act, though? I have serious doubts about Quiller's tradecraft, like when he sets up a timed explosion without making sure he has a clear escape route. Also, I don't think he ever writes the titular memorandum.

  Great location shots of 1960s West Berlin, similar to what you see in Assignment K but in a better movie.

• Quick Change (1990): Saw this on a date with Sumana and we both loved it. Like Working Girl and Something Wild, this is one of those excellent 80s comedies that have slipped through history's cracks despite having big stars and big laughs. They could be considered rom-coms, but they don't fit the Nora Ephron formula which has persisted to the present day. And they're not designed to appeal to teenage boys who are now middle-aged, like Big Trouble in Little China or Ghostbusters. But man, this is a great movie, full of minor characters who get their time to shine. I've been seing Jason Robards a lot in his "handsome leading man" phase (A Million Clowns, Once Upon A Time In The West) and it's good to see him still getting work in his "crusty police chief" era.

  While discussing this film with Sumana afterwards I had cause to look at the Film Roundup Roundup films for 1990, and I hereby propose that Quick Change, Mo' Better Blues and Gremlins 2: The New Batch are all taking place at the same place and the same time. IMDB trivia backs me up: "The bank was located at 101 Park Avenue, just across the street from 100 Park Avenue were Gremlins 2 was filmed." Quite a busy weekend at 40th and Park!

  IMDB trivia also says that Ron Howard turned down the chance to direct because he couldn't find a character to root for in this movie. This explains Ron Howard's directorial style as much as the Ron Howard/Billy Wilder anecdote explains Billy Wilder's. PS: if you're stuck, you can always root for the punctilious bus driver. He's just trying to keep the city running!

Mon Feb 03 2025 12:05 January Film Roundup:

• Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024): A fun movie, but I wish they'd come up with a brand new villain. Instead they brought back Feathers McGraw, who's enjoyable, but I think this trend of creative people mining their past triumphs is getting a little worrisome. If we must mine the past for Wallace & Gromit villains, why not bring back the stop-motion monstrosities from the Peter Gabriel "Sledgehammer" music video? Just throwing out ideas here.
• Thirty-Day Princess (1934): With a title like that you'd expect this to be a Lifetime original from 2015, but with a screenplay credit for Preston Sturges you'd expect it to be better than that, and it is. A Prince and the Pauper-type screwball farce with a pretty long automat scene. Cary Grant hasn't got The Voice down yet. It's all right.
• The Last Married Couple in America (1980): George Segal and Natalie Wood are always fun but this was more successful as a time capsule than as a comedy. Also, I have to point out the shadow hypothesis that this movie never dares to mention: Jeff and Mari may actually be causing their friends' marriages to break up, draining their compatibility energy to keep their own relationship afloat. I think this is a really strong possibility, given that at the end of the movie they're able to destroy another couple's marriage just by spending five minutes alone in a room with them. The power of their love vampirism can't be overstated.
• Inspector Ike (2020): A "loving parody", as they say, of 70s detective shows, which is also a decent Columbo-style mystery. I really enjoyed this because... well, it's a goofy version of Columbo. Nuff said. Can't wait for Poker Face season 2? Check this out. I do wish Aparna Nancherla had a bigger part, but it feels like a "I'll do one day of filming as a favor" kind of part.
• One, Two, Three (1961): Rewatch with James. Still a hilarious movie, an all-time great at making me laugh. Almost 20 years after we first saw this film, Scarlett's "Well, bye!" is still a common reference in our household.
• It Happened Tomorrow (1944): The strange sequel to It Happened One Night. A fun light fantasy story, with the fantasy element being slightly more fantastic than It's A Wonderful Life. I thought the most fun part of this movie was its illustration of how an artifact from the future swiftly ceases to be interesting or valuable once your timeline catches up with the time of its production. It's not from the future anymore!
• Batman Returns (1992): I wasn't expecting this, but this is way better than the 1989 Batman, and it's completely down to Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's a movie all about the villains, with Batman himself being almost absent. Batman (1989) was also all about the villain, but with an annoying amount of time dedicated to Batman himself.

  The Batman Returns screenplay doesn't really need Batman at all, though the marketing surely does. This could easily be the story of Catwoman and Penguin attempting to team up and then destroying one another. When he is on screen, Michael Douglas has the same blasé attitude towards the part which he'd display (I have to admit) to greater effect in Birdman (2014).

  I didn't know Christopher Walken was in this, but he Walkens his way through this movie and it's a treat. One of the most Tim Burton-compatible actors. Speaking of Burton, I've seen enough of his movies now that certain aesthetic choices are repeating. I guess I'd classify him as a wackier version of David Lynch? He really puts his id on the screen, but not in a way that's terribly hard to figure out. Spirals and stripes; the guy loves spirals and stripes.

  And I just realized this while writing this Film Roundup: the scene in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl where they're tracking the gnomes through the sewers is a clear reference to the part of Batman Returns where Batman is tracking the penguins through the city streets. The UI is the same and really, the penguins in this movie should've used the sewers. Good call, Feathers McGraw.

Sun Feb 02 2025 14:34 Beautiful Soup 4.13.0: After a beta period lasting nearly a year, I've released the biggest update to Beautiful Soup in many years. For version 4.13.0 I added type hints to the Python code, and in doing so uncovered a large number of very small inconsistencies in the code. I've fixed the inconsistencies, but the result is a larger-than-usual number of deprecations and changes that may break backwards compatibility.

The CHANGELOG for 4.13.0 is quite large so I'm writing this blog post to highlight just the most important changes, specifically the changes most likely to make you need (or want) to change your code.

Deprecations and backwards-incompatible changes

• DeprecationWarning is issued on use for every deprecated method, attribute and class from the 3.0 and 2.0 major versions of Beautiful Soup. These have been deprecated for at least ten years, but they didn't issue DeprecationWarning when you tried to use them. Now they do, and they're all going away soon.
• This version drops support for Python 3.6, which went EOL in December 2021. The minimum supported major Python version for Beautiful Soup is now Python 3.7, which went EOL in June 2023.
• The storage for a tag's attribute values now modifies incoming values to be consistent with the HTML or XML spec. This means that if you set an attribute value to a number, it will be converted to a string immediately, rather than being converted when you output the document.

  More importantly for backwards compatibility, setting an HTML attribute value to True will set the attribute's value to the appropriate string per the HTML spec. Setting an attribute value to False or None will remove the attribute value from the tag altogether, rather than (effectively, as before) setting the value to the string "False" or the string "None".

  This means that some programs that modify documents will generate different output than they would in earlier versions of Beautiful Soup, but the new documents are more likely to represent the intent behind the modifications. To give a specific example, if you have code that looks something like this:

  checkbox1['checked'] = True
  checkbox2['checked'] = False

  Then a document that used to look like this (with most browsers treating both boxes as checked):

  <input type="checkbox" checked="True"/>
  <input type="checkbox" checked="False"/>
  

  Will now look like this (with browsers treating only the first box as checked):

  <input type="checkbox" checked="checked"/>
  <input type="checkbox"/>
  

  You can get the old behavior back by instantiating a TreeBuilder with attribute_dict_class=dict, or you can customize how Beautiful Soup treats attribute values by passing in a custom subclass of dict.
• If you pass an empty list as the attribute value when searching the tree, you will now find all tags which have that attribute set to a value in the empty list--that is, you will find nothing. This is consistent with other situations where a list of acceptable values is provided. Previously, an empty list was treated the same as None and False, and you would have found the tags which did not have that attribute set at all.
• When using one of the find() methods or creating a SoupStrainer, if you specify the same attribute value in attrs and the keyword arguments, you'll end up with two different ways to match that attribute. Previously the value in keyword arguments would override the value in attrs.
• The 'html5' formatter is now much less aggressive about escaping ampersands, escaping only the ampersands considered "ambiguous" by the HTML5 spec (which is almost none of them). This is the sort of change that might break your unit test suite, but the resulting markup will be much more readable and more HTML5-ish.

  To quickly get the old behavior back, change code like this:

  tag.encode(formatter='html5')
  

  to this:

  tag.encode(formatter='html5-4.12')

  In the future, the 'html5' formatter may be become the default HTML formatter, which will change Beautiful Soup's default output. This will break a lot of test suites so it's not going to happen for a while.

New features

• The online documentation now includes full API documentation generated from Python docstrings.
• The new ElementFilter class encapsulates Beautiful Soup's rules about matching elements and deciding which parts of a document to parse. This gives you direct access to Beautiful Soup's low-level matching API. See the documentation for details.
• The new PageElement.filter() method provides a fully general way of finding elements in a Beautiful Soup parse tree. You can specify a function to iterate over the tree and an ElementFilter to determine what matches.
• The NavigableString class now has a .string property which returns the string itself. This makes it easier to iterate over a mixed list of Tag and NavigableString objects.
• Defined a new warning class, UnusualUsageWarning, which is a superclass for all of the warnings issued when Beautiful Soup notices something unusual but not guaranteed to be wrong, like markup that looks like a URL (MarkupResemblesLocatorWarning) or XML being run through an HTML parser (XMLParsedAsHTMLWarning).

  The text of these warnings has been revamped to explain in more detail what is going on, how to check if you've made a mistake, and how to make the warning go away if you are acting deliberately.

  If these warnings are interfering with your workflow, or simply annoying you, you can filter all of them by filtering UnusualUsageWarning, without worrying about losing the warnings Beautiful Soup issues when there *definitely* is a problem you need to correct, such as use of a deprecated method.

• Emit an UnusualUsageWarning if the user tries to search for an attribute called _class; they probably mean class_.

Mon Jan 20 2025 07:39: “Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other.” —Benjamin Franklin

Sun Jan 19 2025 18:45 Miscellaneous 2024 Pictures: Since I went through the trouble of finding a static gallery generator for my Japan photos, I made another portfolio of miscellaneous pictures from the rest of 2024.

Enjoy glimpses of amazing things that were part of my life last year, but which I didn't necessarily take the time to write about here.

• the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame
• the Andy Warhol Museum
• Storm King
• a baseball game played under Brooklyn Atlantics1864 rules
• the inaccurate geographic center of New York City
• a visit to the Kaufman Astoria Studios prop trailer
• and lots more!

(1) Sun Jan 12 2025 13:56 2024 Japan trip: I've hinted at this before in NYCB but now I've got my photos organized and I'm ready to talk about the vacation I took in Japan last November. I was nominally on vacation with my friend James, but he was working most days, so I spent a lot of time walking around exploring before meeting him for dinner, which I found to be a great way to run a vacation.

I've put up a huge photo gallery of pictures full of wacky and interesting stuff, but in case you're planning your own visit, here are some of my recommendations:

• Hibiya Park in Tokyo, where they have a replica of the Liberty Bell.
• The Meguro Parasitalogical Museum
• The playful architecture of Makoto Sei Watanabe: Aoyama Technical College, the Iidabashi subway station, and, uh, the K Museum. I knew the K Museum had been shut down, but after taking a long bus ride to see its corpse, I discovered that it was also covered in tarps and undergoing demolition. Oh well, I got to see a neighborhood of Tokyo I wouldn't have seen otherwise.
• NTT DoCoMo History Square, featuring a timeline of hundreds of old cell phones. The moment in history where the iPhone is introduced looks like the mass extinction that wiped out the Ediacaran fauna. The guy who runs the museum was really excited to have a visitor, so check this one out!
• Huge tonkatsu. It's delicious. I tried the Nagoya style but I prefer the original.
• Between Tokyo and Kyoto we spent two nights at the Kashiawaya Ryokan in Shima Onsen, a place much like the onsen town in the movie River. It was great to have some downtime after a week of running around Tokyo.
• The Kyoto Railway Museum.
• The Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design. Don't be fooled by the size of the building; this a really small museum in the basement a convention center. Great museum, though.
• National Museum of Art in Osaka.
• The Silver Ball Planet arcade, also in Osaka. I'm sure there are bigger pinball arcades in the United States but this was the biggest one I've been in.
• The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima is rightfully famous but I was also struck by the actual hypocenter of the nuclear explosion, which just has a plaque next to a hospital and a parking garage.
• The Toyota Museum in Nagoya, which is divided into two parts: looms and cars. A must for fans of lean manufacturing!
• I don't want to contribute to Kyoto's overtourism problem, but the Fushimi Inari Shrine was amazing. I got there at 8:30 AM and it was pretty crowded already, but the further up the mountain you hike, the less crowded it is (and the more expensive the vending machine water is). I will tell you that I didn't get much out of the hike once I passed the scenic viewpoint about halfway up.
• The other huge overtouristed site in Kyoto, the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, is... not as amazing IMO. But, on the other side of the forest is the Arashiyama Park, which is really nice.
• Why did I call it Beautiful Soup instead of Nuts DOM?
• It took some planning but I got a great view of Mt. Fuji from the shinkansen on the way back to Tokyo. It's so much bigger than anything else in the landscape that it feels like someone landed an asteroid.
• The Tokyo Printing Museum, a museum designed to showcase the wealth of Toppan, a big printing company. But it's some pretty cool wealth. In addition to lots of old-timey prints and oboks there was a really nice temporary exhibit about linotype machines, but I've got nothing but memories from that part since photos weren't allowed in the temporary exhibits.
• There are two Tokyo neighborhoods with little whale statues, and I saw both of them in the same day: 1 2

Finally I want to mention a couple stores that I didn't take pictures of. B-Side Label has cool laptop stickers. There are a few locations; I went to the one in Kyoto.

Second, New Yorkers might remember City Bakery, which sold really great pastries including the legendary pretzel croissant, plus hot chocolate which was way too rich for my taste. In 2019 City Bakery went out of business, leaving Americans croissant-less. But there are twenty City Bakery locations in Japan! We were randomly walking through a mall in Nagoya—bam! City Bakery! Heading to the Kyoto shopping district—City Bakery! They're quite a nostalgia trip, with everything looking and tasting exactly like it did the old City Bakery on 19th street, or maybe 18th, I could never remember. Anyway, that's why I've now got a freezer full of pretzel croissants from halfway across the world.

Sun Jan 05 2025 12:51 2024 Film Roundup Roundup: I saw 73 movies in 2024, and twenty were good enough to be added to Film Roundup Roundup, my ever-growing list of over 300 really good movies.

Here's my top ten for 2024. A very big year for Japanese movies, but Hundreds of Beavers takes the gold home for the U.S. of A.

1. Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
2. Supermarket Woman (1996)
3. River (2023)
4. Tokyo Olympiad (1965)
5. Slacker (1990)
6. Dance With Me (2019)
7. The Big Clock (1948)
8. A Taxing Woman (1987)
9. Something Wild (1986)
10. The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)

Fri Jan 03 2025 10:46 The Eater of Meaning is now part of the olipy family: You know that email you get when a website you like is acquired by a big company and you know it's going to get shut down? This is like that, only the website shut down first and then got merged into a bigger project.

In May 2003 I created The Eater of Meaning, a web proxy that changes the words on a web page and renders the results. It was popular for a while in the "blogosphere" and then I kind of forgot about it for 20 years, until it broke in 2024.

Throughout 2024 I got occasional emails from poets about the Eater of Meaning and could I fix it. Upon reflection I decided that while running a public web proxy on my personal website in 2003 was kind of fun, doing so in 2024 is a bad idea. So the CGI script breaking was a blessing in disguise. But I didn't want the Eater of Meaning to disappear entirely because, as I've found out, it's important to some poets' artistic practice.

So I've rewritten the Eater of Meaning code in modern Python, and added it to olipy, my pack of art supplies. With basic Python skills (or even Python package-installing skills) you can have access to just about all of the Eater of Meaning's old functionality, as well as some new eaters based on the other olipy tools. I realize that this isn't as convenient as having it as a proxy on a website, but this is the best I can do for now.

Wed Jan 01 2025 15:46 December Film Roundup:

• Leah's Perfect Gift (2024): I had a part in making this movie! It's based on Leah's Perfect Christmas by Catherine Beck, the pen name of a member of my writing group.

  Near the beginning of the film the story train is visibly shunted off the generic "Hallmark Christmas movie" setup into a story that is, at best, poking loving fun at Hallmark Christmas movies, and then it's shunted back onto the track at the end for a Hallmark Christmas movie conclusion. In the middle the movie's all right, but the book spends a lot more time on Leah's outsider's view of Christmas in a way that really rings true. Also, in the book they take the Metro North up to Connecticut rather than driving, which makes way more sense.

  The book is better, is what I'm saying. In a Film Roundup first, I will reproduce some of my old notes from the meeting of our writing group where we went over Leah's Perfect Christmas:

  Really cute, I don't have a lot to change.

  The best part was the dinner where Leah takes Gavin's bleu cheese because his mom won't make a meal accommodation, and then his mom makes a completely unnecessary meal accommodation for Maddie.

  The parents are ridiculous stereotypes, but I didn't reliably find them ridiculous to the point of satire. I'd like to see more of that.

  The main issue I felt was a kind of emotional monotony through the middle of the book. Often a rom-com has a red herring romantic partner. I would either introduce a red herring or make the Christmas experience—not necessarily the parents—less uniformly unbearable. There needs to be something to distract Leah from Gavin, because I'm not being brought through the story solely by the idea that Gavin isn't the guy he seems to be when they're in New York.

  I haven't read the final version of the book, but in the movie they chose door #2, giving Leah a variety of Christmasy side quests that let them showcase the many, many colorful sets and props available to the production.

• Beaches (1988): The chick flicks continue! On my way back from Japan I stopped in LA to see Susanna and family. She and I walked around Crystal Cove State Park, where the beach house seen in Beaches has been preserved as a miniature film museum. (According to the museum, that house was used in a lot of movies, but most of them were silent movies in the early days of Hollywood, so nobody cares anymore.)

  This reminded me that our mom loved the soundtrack to Beaches, or at least kept the tape in her car for a really long time until we knew all the songs. (Other albums I assume Mom loved from the same evidence: Neil Diamond: His 12 Greatest Hits.) So I told Susanna I'd watch the movie with Sumana when I got back.

  And... it's pretty good. The critical consensus is negative, but I thought it did a good job of showing a long-lasting friendship between two women, a friendship that is strained but never breaks. And there are a lot of good songs on that soundtrack. In the 20+ years since I last heard the Beaches soundtrack I've grown more able to recognize the musical homages going on in the songs. In particular, I correctly identified "Oh Industry" as "a Laurie Anderson thing."

And now, it's time to send off another Star Trek series with this month's Television Spotlight.

• Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-2024): A standout of the Stream Trek era. I looked forward to every episode and thoroughly enjoyed the mixture of fan callbacks and traditional Trek stories. But there's one thing I didn't enjoy, and it's summed up by Sumana's common refrain while we were watching: "No one's making you be in Starfleet, Mariner." I griped about this in my roundup of season 1 and it never stopped being a problem. Beckett Mariner, the main character of the show, acts like a sulking draftee for nearly the entire series, even though she's a graduate of an elite military academy and a member of a post-scarcity civilization devoted entirely to personal betterment.

  She sulks on a ship whose crew starts out mediocre but improves in cohesion over time. She sulks on her punitive assignment to a crappy space station, which we later see get turned around by crew who came in with a more positive attitude. Other people improve, but she doesn't. There's a blissful couple of episodes when she actually leaves Starfleet and seems to be living the life she wants, but she comes right back. I can sorta make this make sense based on the exposition we get—mommy issues plus Dominion War PTSD, basically—but the series kept showing Mariner grow as a person, only to hit her reset button at the end of an episode or season. (Tendi did have sustained, persistent growth throughout the series, so it is possible.)

  The versions of Mariner and Boimler in the Strange New Worlds crossover were much more appealing than the cartoon versions, which probably indicates that the characters' flaws are exaggerated for comic effect vis-a-vis what they'd be like in a live-action show. But I don't find it funny to see people learn the same lessons over and over. It is a tribute to the writing of Lower Decks and the charisma of the actors that I loved the show despite this really annoying problem they never fixed.