Review – Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

I made the mistake of watching this back to back with the original, which served to accent the utter charmlessness of the sequel. Rather than a cohesive story, this is more of an assemblage of inside jokes and other sub-references. Typical of the experience is the musical number: Harry Belafonte gives way to an awkwardly-choreographed and far too long lip sync to “MacArthur Park.” Between the odd bits of improv and dancing around absent cast members from the first one, there just isn’t enough to make this entertaining. See if desperate

Review – Chiefsaholic

Xaviar Babudar had it all: a fanatical love of the Kansas City Chiefs, an active social media presence, a powerful passion for high stakes gambling, and a willingness to rob banks to fund his habits. Stir in a bail jump followed by a cross-country chase, and you’ve got enough for a two hour documentary, more or less. Mildly amusing

Review – Mascots

I almost skipped this one, in part because I’m not currently a Netflix subscriber and in part because I’ve been unimpressed by the trajectory of Christopher Guest’s ensemble comedies. For Your Consideration was bad enough to make me swear off further efforts, but the assurances of someone I trust led me to give this one a try. I’m glad I did. This returns to the plot structure of Best in Show, only this time focusing on a sports mascot competition. The outre subject leads to some delightfully bizarre moments, and the cast doesn’t disappoint. Worth seeing

2024 Year in Review

Books were my number one media preoccupation this year. I managed to read 48 of them, more than double last year’s total and well above my previous record (38 in 1998). So this year for the first time I’m able to list my eight favorites (plus a bonus) among everything I read in the last 12 months:

• Madness
• Pathogenesis
• Out There Screaming
• The Trees
• The Zimmerman Telegram
• The American Plague
• Twelve Caesars
• Making Comics and Making Comics

Thanks to KCK Public Library’s access to Hoopla, I was also able to finish around 170 graphic novels. My eight favorites:

• Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash
• Through Clouds of Smoke: Freud’s Final Days
• Bad Dreams in the Night
• Macanudo: Optimism Is for the Brave (and two others)
• Banned Book Club
• Paper Girls
• The Secret to Superhuman Strength
• It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

Movie-wise, the results weren’t as good. Only three movies made it to a three-star rating, and nothing got a full four. So I’ll leave out the top eight this year and hope for better in 2025.

Review – Joker: Folie a Deux

If you let Charles Manson rewrite Chicago and then stirred in just enough comic book allusions to vaguely connect it to the DCEU, this is what you’d get. Surreal musical meets grimly violent crime drama meets art house message piece meets big budget Hollywood fiasco. If you want the live, at-home Joker 2 experience, take a messy shit on a paper plate and stare at it for two hours. At least that version won’t involve as much singing. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – An American Christmas Carol

I suppose it’s unfair to expect the relocation of Dickens’s famous story to Depression-era small town USA to be anything but grim. Unfortunately the script is so ham-handed that it’s hard to appreciate what might in other hands have been an intriguing twist. Henry Winkler stars in the Scrooge role, though in 1979 he was better suited for the flashbacks than for the main drama. See if desperate

Review – Civil War

As a drama about combat photojournalism, this actually works reasonably well. The trouble is that it keeps raising questions that it refuses to answer. It’s difficult if not impossible to tell who’s fighting whom, let alone what they’re fighting about. That’s either a deliberate point about the irrationality of war or the incidental effect of not wanting to choose sides in the current and sadly all too real state of unrest in this country. In either event, the ambiguity proves distracting. Are the soldiers on one side more country-fied than the other? Is the President meant to seem Trump-ish? The guesswork detracts from what might otherwise have been a good job of storytelling. Mildly amusing