Deep Blue Tea

Life doesn’t always go as planned, especially when you want to be a writer, and Sarah Porter has learned that one the hard way.  Like a lot of millennials, she’s had to move home after chasing a dream that didn’t quite work out the way she hoped it would.  Some sobering time in the big city can make one long for the comforts of home and family; after all, London can chew you up and spit you out if you let it.  So Sarah heads back to her hometown to live with her mum and nan, who run a cafe in Weston-super-Mare, a sleepy coastal town near Bristol, in England, just across the Bristol Channel from Cardiff.  I checked, it’s not that close to Torquay, so you might not be able to grab a coffee at the cafe and then pop over to Fawlty Towers for the night.  I was raised on British comedies (and The Golden Girls and The A-Team), so I’m always on the lookout for them and while I’ve watched many that have been fine, I eventually came across one that I wanted to share with you.

It took me a little bit to connect with The Cafe, as you do really see Weston through the eyes of Sarah, played by Michelle Terry, who also wrote the series about her real life hometown.  You’d probably imagine that she’s not too happy to be back in Weston and you’d be right.  Disappointment always takes time to bounce back from, so I get it.  But she does mope around a bit as she comes to terms with her new reality.  Now, I haven’t lived in London and I definitely haven’t lived in Weston-super-Mare, but I’ve lived in big cities and small towns and coming back to a small town after the city is quite a culture shock.  All of a sudden, your whole world narrows, your choices are limited, and everything feels so different.  But small towns can have their charms, especially on TV (you know me, I’m a city boy through and through; when told to touch grass, I have to take an Uber to the closest grass zone, which is what I think normal people call them).

Sarah’s mom Carol runs Cyril’s, a struggling cafe that represents the dreams of her dead husband, right on the boardwalk by the shore.  It’s an idyllic spot.  Every time the opening credits crawl over the wide shot bringing us into the cafe, despite the theme song being a version of “Beyond the Sea”, which is a song I’ve always found funereal and have, as a result, never liked, I can’t help but think it seems like a hell of a nice place to visit.  Carol, played by Ellie Haddington (Enola Holmes), is both happy to have her daughter back and concerned about her future, often pushing her to settle down.  She’s also in an incredibly Victorian-feeling will they/won’t they with Stan, the local florist.  The series is contemporary to the time it was made, which is 2011, but you wouldn’t really know it to look at it.  I mean, the struggling cafe owner in a very Westley and Buttercup relationship with the local florist, who brings her clippings everyday so she’ll have fresh flowers?  Most of the time, that kind of thing feels saccharine and would make my stomach turn, but here it’s just so…Luke’s in reverse without the gruffness. 

It’s a sleepy town, with not a lot going on, an aging populace, and modernity far away, Weston feels like it came out of a time capsule.  Much like other colorful small towns, though, it’s really the residents who give it the bulk of its charm.  And this little borough has its fair share of Stars Hollow-like folks who call Weston their home.  Don’t get me wrong though, there’s still not much exciting going on.  The major conflict in one of the episodes is about whether, when having a cream tea, a traditional English afternoon snack, you should put the clotted cream on the scone first or if the jam should go on first.  Now, it’s fair to say that will sound completely foreign to most Americans, but if you contextualize it as milk before cereal or cereal before milk, it’s completely relatable.  We all get needlessly pedantic about kind of meaningless things all the time, it’s part of the human condition

Also, it’s cereal before milk, obviously.

Then you have Carol’s mom; Nan to Sarah, Mary Ellis to everyone else.  Mary Ellis, played by June Watson (The Death of Stalin), mostly just knits, but she also nitpicks.  It’s really interesting to see these three generations of women all together, each generation looking at its successor and predecessors, trying to learn, trying to teach, and sometimes, well, more often than not, being a little too judgmental.  But there’s wisdom and caring too, which is why I suppose people put up with family.  Mary Ellis’s friends come in for tea and scones and arguments with Mary Ellis of course.  Then there’s also Richard, who comes by everyday for his regular cuppa.  Sweet, kind Richard, played by Ralf Little (Death in Paradise), who is also a writer on the series, has had a crush on Sarah his entire life and that hasn’t changed, and while they were some sort of item when they were younger, he doesn’t seem to have shaken those feelings, but in a very innocent kind of way.  He’s such a good dude, though; always on the cusp of finally getting a car, he’s a man of endless patience.  He works at the nursing home in town and seems to care genuinely about the people who live there. 

Sarah’s childhood best friend Chloe is still in Weston too: a bit ditzy, quite a bit more outgoing than Sarah, and a true free spirit.  Chloe, played by the incredible Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, the best part about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), is always a bubbly presence on screen and brings a lot of the show’s laughs.  She also happens to be Stan’s daughter.  Kieran, the living statue is always coming by in his newest ludicrous getup, spanning from Hellboy to Homer Simpson.  And who can forget Frank?  I admit, I don’t really know Frank’s whole deal.  But he generally seems to hang around outside the cafe and ask for leftovers too early in the day.  I don’t know if he’s unhoused or just unable to find a job, but to see him at the cafe everyday, being treated with dignity and kindness make his little cameos endlessly pleasant and often quite touching.

But even a show as cozy as this has conflict.  Of course, there are Carol’s past due bills and the ever forward march of progress that threatens the cafe’s continued existence.  Oh yes, that old dance, the ever-present bugbear we call progress.  It’s not progress that’s the problem, of course.  Progress has given us so much.  It gave us the Internet.  Okay, bad example, that one’s a pretty mixed bag.  It all depends on who’s steering the ship, doesn’t it?  Sometimes progress is just change for the sake of change, so someone looks busy while they collect a check.  Sometimes it’s nefarious, involving someone collecting more than a check.  Sometimes, it’s good, though, which is why all have to keep progressing, annoyingly enough.  But the real black hat here, at least depending on your perspective, is John, played by Daniel Ings (who will be in the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel).

John grew up in Weston and has long since moved to London.  He’s gotten in shape, he has a good job and a Porsche, and he’s back in Weston to deal with the affairs of his ailing mother, whom he hasn’t seen in years.  And boy, do you just hate John the second you see him.  John is perfectly crafted to be disliked from the very first frame.  Driving his Boxster down the motorway, talking on a Bluetooth headset, with so many shirt buttons undone as to render them mere suggestions, and an attitude that says “I’m too good to be here”, he’s immediately at odds with everything his hometown is and represents.  I mean, his ringtone is the James Bond theme song.  Even in 2011, that was douchey.  And I should know, my ringtone used to be fairly off-putting to people.  John butts heads with Richard, who has been his mother’s caretaker at the nursing home, for several reasons.  Richard seems to resent that John hasn’t had contact with his mother for several years as she’s staring down the barrel of dementia and her memories losing a battle with time, but they’ve had beef that goes back to childhood. This particular Wellington, of course, has everything to do with Sarah.  John fancied Sarah when they were younger, which upset Richard quite a bit and apparently in the way that you hang on to.  But I suppose even Richard is allowed his sharp edges here and there, I sure know I have them.  So you hold on to that grudge, Richard.  Sparks don’t exactly fly between John and Sarah, but there is a connection and jealousy rears its head again.  Not that romance is the main focus of the series, but it’s always nice to have a love triangle to get invested in (like in Star Wars, with the gold robot guy, the little trash can, and the old guy who lived in desert).

Also, of course progress is the real black hat.  At least this kind of progress.

Despite all this small town quirkiness, the problems all seem very relatable.  Sarah is trying to figure out what to do next.  So is Carol, whether she wants to admit it or not.  Sarah may not have realized it yet, but it will eventually dawn on her; just because you “grow up” doesn’t mean you have all the answers, it only seems that way when you’re a kid.  Carol is just like any one of us; she has to weigh her options, think of the pros and cons, make a decision, and, crucially and cruelly, she has to live with them.  So do I.  So do you.  So does Sarah.  So does John.  John, for whatever reason, isn’t very close with his mother, but now she’s dying and in one of the worst ways possible; by losing herself slowly, a little more each day.  And he’s trying to cope with that and do right by her at the same time, splitting his life in two, between Weston and London.  He’s got a journey ahead of him.  And while I only watched the first season, I get the feeling it’s going to be a satisfying one.  Our cast of characters live in a postcard, a picturesque utopia where nothing goes quite right and it feels like one big wave, from the ocean or otherwise, could come crashing down at any moment and wash it all away.  They call this a comedy, but it’s not.  Not just a comedy, anyway.  Sure, it’s funny, often more smirk funny than laugh out loud, but it’s not the comedy that’s the star of this show.  No, not at all.  It’s the connections the residents of Weston make with each other, their quiet struggles, their refusal to not be there for each other when they need it, those are the things that stand out to me.  I do always say the best comedies are a bit sad because comedy often comes from a place of sadness (The Bear, Fleabag, Lodge 49, the list goes on) and there’s definitely enough sadness to go around in Weston-super-Mare.  But there’s more than that too.

The Cafe rarely has me rolling on the floor in fits of uncontrollable laughter, but through the first six episode season, I admit to having to wipe a tear more than once.  But the good kind.  The kind that lets you know that even though you definitely spent too much time scrolling Twitter and getting mired in the helplessness of the world, there’s still some life left in that chest cavity and it’s not gone completely frozen over just yet.  It paints an unbelievably cozy picture that leaves my heart full and hopeful.  In a time when it seems like everyone is hurting, seeing these characters look out for each other and care for each other is really nice, like a warm blanket with a British accent.  After all, it’s not where you are that matters nearly as much as the people you surround yourself with.  Because you never know what people are going through and it never hurts to help lighten their load if you can.  Apparently, sometimes it takes a small seaside town on the Bristol Channel to help you feel like things might get better out there.  The Cafe is streaming on Peacock and BritBox and it ran for two seasons.

Also, there aren’t that many high res photos out there for to share with you, so apropos of nothing, here’s Jeff the Land Shark looking cute as heck.

The Last Toy Scout

As we dawn a new day (or several new days, I know this post is late) on a new year, let’s go back to the early 2000s for a moment.  It was a simpler time; our phones weren’t all that smart, if you said the word “grok” people just thought you were a nerd, not an idiot, and stores still existed that you could go to, walk in, look at the products on shelves, pick them up, and then buy them.  Right then and there.  No ordering and waiting and then receiving a box, opening the box, thinking “Oh yeah, I remember buying this”, and then hanging on to the box until recycling day.  But sometimes when you go into a store, you want to do it with a little flair, like cutting through the roof and locking the staff up in the freezer and helping yourself to the contents of the safe.  Sometimes, you do that 45 times.  And then sometimes, you decide that you’re going to move into that store until the heat’s off.

And that’s the life Jeffrey Manchester was living back then.  He’s a veteran in a sadly familiar position for many Americans, veterans included, where he can’t quite make ends meet and finds his dreams quickly fading away.  He and his wife are estranged and he’s hardly his kids’ hero, even though the relationship between him and oldest child, his daughter, is very sweet.  He just can’t seem to get it together.  Jeffrey, as his friend points out, is hyper-observant.  I’m talking Shawn Spencer without the whimsy levels of noticing things here.  And his friend Steve, played by LaKeith Stanfield (Atlanta, Sorry to Bother You), tells him that he needs to find a way to use that skill, his superpower, to make the money he doesn’t have.  Unfortunately, Steve, Jeffrey’s sergeant when they were in, has used his skills in a variety of different ways, most of them seemingly not very legal.  And that maybe inspires Jeffrey down the wrong path.  As Steve also points out, Jeffrey is bad at following the rules, even in the military.  He just messes things up.  But when Jeffrey figures out that most McDonald’s restaurants operate using roughly the same blueprint and roughly the same schedules, he sees his next steps.  Cut a hole in the roof on the night before the cash is picked up by the armored car.  Go inside and hide.  Wait for the staff to arrive so he can get into the safe.  Put them in the freezer until the authorities arrive.  Repeat 44 more times, earning the nickname “the Roofman”.  Success.

But Jeffrey, played by Channing Tatum (Logan Lucky, 21 Jump Street), does something most people committing armed robbery don’t do.  Before locking the staff into the freezer, he tells them to put their coats on.  And when the manager says he doesn’t have a coat, Jeffrey takes off his own and gives it to him.  He doesn’t want them to get cold; the freezer is just secure storage while he makes his getaway, he doesn’t actually want to hurt anyone.  That’s the last thing that he ever wants to do, though somehow he keeps doing it.  And before you think that this is just too silly a character to base a movie around, let me tell you that it’s true.  Roofman is based on a true story and the movie is happy to show its receipts when it comes to accuracy.  Jeffrey Manchester really did all that.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course, that sort of life catches up to you, even in early 2000s, and Jeffrey finds himself in prison with an incredibly, unfairly harsh sentence that would mean the next time he was a free man, his children would be middle aged.  But luckily, Jeffrey uses his skills to devise a simple and genius plan to escape and it works like a charm.  He ducks into a store to avoid the manhunt and decides to stay there until the heat is off and he can try to see his family again.  Or at least talk to them.  But until then, he’s forced to live inside of a Toys R Us, living out every 90s kid’s dream.

(As a side note, I really do miss toy stores.  There’s a wonder to them that just isn’t replicated by the toy aisle of a big box store, just like a digital lending library will never feel the same as walking into a public library and smelling all those old books.)

It’s not nearly as fun as Bart and Millhouse make it seem to be, though.  Hiding right under the noses of hundreds of people a day while the manhunt continues can weigh on a person, especially when you’re in self-imposed silent solitary confinement.  He can’t make noise during the day, he could get found out.  As a result, he becomes a nocturnal animal, making the Toys R Us his playground every night after closing.  It looks like so much fun, I used to dream of things like that as a kid.  He literally lives off M&Ms and other candies and plays with toys every night.  But for an adult, especially a fugitive, that’s not really enough.  Eventually, Jeffrey sets up his own surveillance system in the store and uses them as his own personal soap opera.  Things get a bit complicated when he develops a crush on Leigh, a single mom who works at the Toys R Us.

Leigh, played by Kirsten Dunst (Fargo, Jumanji), is a fairly newly divorced mother of two who is struggling.  It’s no surprise that Jeffrey is drawn to her.  I don’t want to get too much into their interactions because it’s really such a genuinely nice to thing to watch that I don’t want to tell you any more about it and spoil that particular emotional journey.  But what I can say is that this movie showcases both Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst at the peak of their acting ability.  And they’re no slouches to begin with.  Channing Tatum has been in some excellent films and has shown great skill in different genres and with characters of various depth.  Kirsten Dunst can do more than just kiss you upside down in the rain; her run in Fargo season 2 was fantastic.  The subtlety on display here, the amount of acting they can do just by moving or not moving their faces is astounding.  The two of them are absolutely magnetic on screen and they have easy chemistry together.  I knew that Channing Tatum was capable of delivering this kind of performance, especially because he was able to be emotionally compelling in a movie as plainly silly as White House Down.  His arc of esteem in my mind has been so completely unexpected—I thought he was, you know, another actor for the longest time.  Then came the Soderbergh films Haywire and Side Effects, where he had small roles, and then there was 21 Jump Street, where he made the jump from “he’s fine” to “hey, I like this guy”.  With Logan Lucky, he completely won me over.  While I’ve always liked Kirsten Dunst, it’s rare that she’s given a role where she’s allowed to have this kind of emotional depth (and that’s more a Hollywood problem than a Dunst problem) and she expresses it with the kind of subtle power that is rare this side of Manchester by the Sea.  Her openness and vulnerability and kindness are on display at all times.  She could be saying nothing and her facial expressions would write several dusty tomes filled from margin to margin with her emoting.  Roofman is truly a vehicle for Tatum’s talents, with so much of the movie being him alone and trying to stay sane and positive and find a way out of his predicament while maintaining an amount of caring for others you sadly don’t normally see in people, but don’t for a second sleep on Dunst’s performance here.  If there isn’t Oscar buzz for the both of them, there should be.

And this is where it gets a little tough.  Jeffrey and Leigh feel like such full, real characters that you can forget the reason they feel that way isn’t just excellent acting, it’s because these are real people, who lived this in real life.  So when I started yelling at my TV, realizing I had become way more invested in what I thought was going to be a silly movie about a man who turned a Toys R Us into his own personal version of The Terminal, I realized that narrative structure and satisfying endings no longer mattered.  I knew how I wanted the story to go as a story and even though I didn’t know the story of the actual Roofman, I’ve lived enough to know that the reason we tell stories is that real life is often too heartbreaking to live in without an escape.  That’s not to say sadness and pain shouldn’t be part of storytelling, not at all; it’s just that you get the feeling that if things went well and everyone ended up happy then it wouldn’t feel like a real story.  Because real life doesn’t usually get a happy ending.  Or a happy middle.  Or often times, a happy start.  As you watch Roofman, you’re constantly vacillating between being drawn into the relationships between the characters and the knowledge that a man who lives inside a toy store while being the subject of a manhunt is not hurtling towards a normal, stress-free family life.  You switch between being hopeful and filled with dread, but you’re rooting for Jeffrey the whole time.  Even though I didn’t even really know what Jeffrey winning would look like.  All I knew is that I wanted it to happen and that it couldn’t happen.  And the easy, silly laughs in the first two acts of the film feel like a warmth that’s been blown away by an icy gust of gale force winds.

This movie is so fun.  It’s also completely and utterly devastating.  It encapsulates the wonderfully eccentric life of a man who wanted simple things.  He wanted a family, he wanted kids that adored him because he was a good dad, he wanted a partner who didn’t hate his guts, he wanted good things for himself and others.  He wanted to belong and be connected with something.  It’s a tragedy in itself how much a man like that had to live in self-imposed isolation.  But when it all plays out, it still feels good somehow.  You’re hurting, yeah, because people did get hurt along the way (more emotionally, but also physically), but it’s not in a bad way.  Yes it’s sad, but not the bad kind of sad, if that makes sense.  It’s a little inspiring, in some ways.  I’m not saying that I had the urge to climb up a ladder and cut through a roof, but it did make me wonder.  If Jeffrey could be so considerate and kind in the situation that he was in, can I?  Can others?  I can’t go so far as to say that the world would be a better place if more people were like Jeffrey, because he’s a real person with real flaws; he’s not Captain America, he’s not Superman.  He makes bad decisions.  Jeffrey really proves that you can be a good person and still make bad choices, but it doesn’t make you a bad person (and then also the reverse must also be true; you can make good choices and still be a bad person, which is something I want to explore at some point).  But maybe it would be a little bit better if we could leave behind the armed robbery bits and isolate that part of him that made him care about others.  Because that’s really lacking in the world right now, at least from what I can see.

Roofman is perhaps a few minutes too long at 2 hours and 6 minutes; it could have tightened a little bit in the edit, but it doesn’t waste your time or really drag ever.  With the true story nature of it, it feels ever evolving, not like other movies where you watch until a certain moment and get to the point where it really starts.  It’s also rated R, with a decent amount of profanity and a lot of naked Channing Tatum, so this is perhaps not one to watch with the kids.  It’s also on Paramount+ exclusively at the moment, but I do hope it gets to more popular streamers in the future, because this movie is really very good and engages on an emotional level that was completely unexpected for me.  It’s a unique blend of Superstore and Shawshank, and it really works.  Roofman is a fascinating real life story that feels important somehow.  And with this one, definitely stick around through the credits, you’ll see why.

Tuesdays with Memento Mori

You know, I never hated Mondays.  Don’t get me wrong, logistically, they’re a nightmare.  You have two days, two and a half at most if you count Friday evening, but I personally think that’s cancelled out by somber feeling of a Sunday evening, and then you’re back at it for five days.  So yes, Mondays weren’t great and it was a rare Monday that I’d wake up chipper and at it (but that’s rare any day since my mid teens, I suppose).  But whatever the practical issues of a Monday, it was also the start of a new week; a new chance, a fresh start, fifty-two times a year.  And one time a year, we get a New Year’s Day, the start of a new year.  If Mondays, in some small way, felt like clean slate, then New Year’s Day is like the Super Bowl of fresh starts.

I’ve always thought it’s good to end a year the way you want the next one to start.  I think that’s why we dress up, force ourselves out into the cold, surrounded by suburbanites who flock to my fair city to try and pack a year’s worth of missed opportunities into one night, to pay too much money for too few drinks (or too many), all while muscling your way through a crowd of people and peacocking so thick that you might as well be trying to leave a Walmart as the doors open on Black Friday and the crowd comes rushing in.  The countdown and the ball drop get all the press, but New Year’s Day is important too.  And for 2026, I want to start on a hopeful note.  So I want to give to you as a final gift this festive period, a look at a movie about a fresh start.  In the face of your own imminent death, but hey.  Nobody’s perfect.

Meet Harold Crick.  Harold lives a horrendously routine- and efficiency-based life.  He is the absolute definition of no nonsense; no wonder he works for the IRS.  He’s even the same amount of late for the same bus every morning.  Of course, most people live routine lives, that’s not sad in itself, but he’s about to learn something about taking chances.  His life is as rote and predictable as a network crime procedural until one morning, when he starts hearing a voice in his head narrating his every move.  When he stopped, it stopped.  You can see why this is alarming; most people don’t hear voices in their head, let alone the voice of a British woman who’s just talking about the things you’re doing.  And that’s how Stranger Than Fiction begins.  Will Ferrell’s first foray into more dramatic acting, you’d get whiplash if you jumped from Talladega Nights to this, his other live action film from 2006.  Let’s get into it.

The voice in Ferrell’s Crick’s head is Karen Eiffel, played by Emma Thompson (Love Actually, The Remains of the Day), a celebrated author who’s about 10 years overdue for her next novel.  She’s got a case of writer’s block so bad that her publisher sends Penny Escher, played by Queen Latifah (Set It Off, Chicago) to be her assistant and get her over the line.  Karen is resistant and curmudgeonly, as is how we generally depict writers in media (and as one myself, I don’t have the courage to say it isn’t accurate), but her writer’s block is killing her.  And while her narration is already so distracting that Harold can barely cope with it as he tries to audit the lovely and very principled baker Ana Pascal, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight, Donnie Darko), she just told Harold that he’s going to die because of his wristwatch.  You’re already hearing voices and now it drops the dreaded “little did he know” in his head and then tells him he’s going to die.  That’s a bad day.

Harold is indeed a reminder that we will all die some day and that our time here is painfully, cruelly, and demonstrably short.  I’m reminded of a line Death speaks in The Sandman, saying that we all get what everyone gets, the time that we got.  But that’s not exactly true, is it?  I’ve always hated that line.  Some get a day, some get a hundred years, some less, some more.  Most people don’t know.  Harold does.  Harold has to go on with life knowing not only that he’s going to die, which is already tough enough for most people to deal with, as evidenced by the massive weight of media and literature devoted to reconciling that idea, but also when.  Not vaguely, not some notion of a faraway death; Harold gets to know the moment is coming and soon.  And yet he must choose to go on.

Now, on another day, I would go into great detail about how Harold’s lack of agency in life as a character in someone else’s book mirrors our own as we go through life in a society that pushes people to put aside their wants, needs, desires, and even their own identity at times for the sake of others’ comfort and fitting in.  I could talk about the idea that choosing to die rather than running away from it is Harold’s most significant means of taking his agency.  On another day, I could mention Stranger Than Fiction alongside masterpieces of mortality like The Green Knight, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and Logan, and perhaps on another day, I will.  But not today.  Today’s about hope and fresh starts.  So I’d rather focus on his other main act of agency.

Harold buys a guitar.  He’s always wanted to learn to play, but he never did.  For whatever reason, life got in the way of that and he made it to middle age without ever getting to (I know the feeling, with my own midnight wine Stratocaster gathering dust in some forgotten corner).  But first, he goes to a psychiatrist who tells him that he’s experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia and when he protests, she suggests he speaks to someone who knows about literature, if he is indeed in a book as he believes.  Enter Professor Jules Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man, Kung Fu Panda 4), who devises a series of tests to find out what kind of story he’s in.  When Jules comes to his conclusion, he tells Harold to just live his life.  He is marching inextricably towards his own demise.  He has no control over his life and he could die at any moment, so he should live life to the fullest.  So Harold buys a guitar and decides to act on the feelings he’s been developing for Ana, whom Gyllenhaal plays with a great deal of charm.  Ana plays Harold hot and cold, being mean to the auditor and making his life miserable, but also doing something nice for him to balance things out.  Harold can’t help but fall for her and I get it.  Not only is there a voice in his head telling him that he’s catching the terrible ailment called romantic desire, but Ana is beautiful, caring, gentle, free-spirited, and unlike anyone Harold has ever met.  No wonder he’s intrigued.

I will say that the romantic plot line of the film is its weakest; 20 years ago, I thought it was very sweet, but now I do see it a little differently.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call it problematic—we’re not talking Three Days of the Condor here, but it’s not the most artfully handled and I think we could have spent more time with the two of them as the different storylines progress and intertwine.  It’s still a bit sweet, for sure, watching this repressed man try to reconcile his feelings for a free spirited woman who is nothing like him, and while Ana is far from a manic pixie dream girl, I do wish we got a little more meat to her character.  She’s not just some object of desire, though, Ana does get to be her own character, but I would have liked a little more.  Gyllenhaal is so good here, I can’t help but want more of her in this movie.  And perhaps some less clumsy writing as Harold tries to express his feelings, but overall, it doesn’t detract too much from the film.

It’s that.  Choosing to die may exercise his agency in the ultimate way, but choosing to live—to really live, to do more than just work and survive—is his most profound act of defiance, it is an unbelievably beautiful choice.  So this is where Harold stands.  Death imminent, but still unknown, deciding that he’ll no longer be a passenger in his own life, that love and passion are worth pursuing with the time he has left, and that maybe, just maybe, doing his work as an IRS auditor and counting how many times he brushes each tooth and tying his tie with a certain knot to save fractions of a second over a different knot, isn’t the be all, end all of human existence.  That’s his fresh start.  He’s freed from the rote mechanical existence he’d been living by knowing that he’s going to die.

But here’s the thing.  We’re all going to die.  And very few of us know when or how.  So Harold isn’t just a reminder that we’re all going to die, he’s also a reminder that we need to remember to live along the way.  It’s in these moments, as Harold lays eyes on the battered, used Fender Strat he eventually buys and realizes that taking a chance on love is better than quietly waiting for his time to run out, that I take great, great hope for tomorrow.  Because we all can choose that.  We all can choose to live right now.  We can all buy a guitar or whatever our repressed passion may be, we can all take a chance on someone, we can all decide that whatever time we have is more precious than whatever we’re protecting by not doing the things we really want to do.

Stranger Than Fiction isn’t perfect, but it’s an absolutely beautiful, heartwarming film that I feel is overlooked, partly because of where it stands in Will Ferrell’s oeuvre.  It’s his first dramatic role, but he’s funny, playing one of his more typical characters almost in reverse.  It’s comedic, but it’s not a comedy.  It’s romantic, but it’s not a romance.  It’s ambitious and meta, but it’s not full of itself.  Sure, it’s a little full of itself, but you want a little bit of that in writing; you have to believe you’re telling a story worth telling, otherwise you wouldn’t spend the time creating it or hope that others will spend the time experiencing it.  The meta narrative about writing and literature particularly resonates with me as a writer myself, and every main character is named after some prominent philosopher, mathematician, or similar—Pascal, Eiffel, Crick, Escher.  So yeah, it’s a little into itself.  And while it has its flaws, there’s too much beauty in the way this story is told to ignore.  Yes, Everything Must Go might be Ferrell’s dramatic centerpiece, but Stranger Than Fiction is what got him there and it’s the role that made me take him seriously as an actor, and not just an SNL player from an era I didn’t enjoy with one-trick movies that didn’t really appeal to me.  The movie mirrors what Karen Eiffel wants out of her novel; a look at the interconnectivity of life, the seemingly unrelated things that butterfly effect us towards the little and big moments of our life, the importance of sharing our lives with others and enriching both our lives and theirs in the process.  It’s a wonderful movie to start the new year with; a fresh start deserves a fresh perspective and if you haven’t seen Stranger Than Fiction before, maybe it’ll do for you what it did for me.  Currently streaming on Peacock, it’s PG-13, which it really didn’t need to be, because I don’t think this subject matter will appeal much to younger audiences, and at 1 hour, 53 minutes, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

And now I get to thank you all again for the time you’ve spent here.  It’s a big internet out there, there are a lot of places and ways you can spend your time and I’m honored that you’ve decided to spend any amount of it here, reading my thoughts on movies and TV series, and letting me muse about how important media is.  If you’re going out to celebrate the end of a year and the start of a new one, please be safe and celebrate responsibly.  If you’re staying in, you’ve probably got a better head on your shoulders than I do.  I wish you all a happy and healthy 2026 and may we all take Harold’s example and choose to live rather than just exist.

Also, sorry for referencing Tuesdays with Morrie in a blog title again.  It just fit too well.  Happy New Year!

Stretch and the Family Four

Well, Christmas is fast approaching and perhaps, like me, you’re not really celebrating the holiday, but you still want a dose of all the good stuff from the best of Christmas movies without the trappings of the holiday?  Well, here’s a good alternative for any, celebrating or not, to watch on their time off.  And it’s even one that’s good for the whole family.  Way back in August I did a Lone Wolf and Stub about The Fantastic Four: First Steps.  If you’re not familiar with that particular series in my posts, it’s my absolutely spoiler-free, no context reaction series on movies I see in the theater.  These posts here are generally light on spoilers, but I do explain the premises of the subject matter—well, you know the drill by now.

So this holiday season, since I already found one Christmas movie I really enjoyed and didn’t think I should push my luck, I decided to revisit First Steps for a full post and found that it’s actually kind of a great non-Christmas Christmas movie.

You probably know the story of the Fantastic Four, but if you don’t, I’ll nutshell it for you.  They’re astronauts who go into space and are bombarded by cosmic rays, giving each of them unique superpowers through the altering of their DNA.  We open on Reed having a very normal moment of looking for something in the medicine cabinet and not being able to find it.  I get that, nothing is ever where I think it’s going to be.  But, unbeknownst him, his wife Sue is finding out that she’s pregnant.  Ben Grimm intuits it immediately and the family shares a nice moment as Johnny gets seriously excited to become an uncle.

This is a big deal for them, that goes without saying; having a child is a life-changing experience for all involved and when your life involves dressing up in a bright blue sweater and fighting the forces of evil, it’s a different prospect altogether.  But it’s a bigger deal because not only have they been trying for a long time, they are also the first superpowered people in the world to get pregnant.  So they’re breaking some new ground.  As such, Reed is more worried than your average soon-to-be father.  He has no idea how their altered DNA will affect a child or how Sue will be affected by her pregnancy.  Johnny pushes Reed to go back into space, but he’s preoccupied, understandably.  Reed is afraid because even this clean looking retrofuturistic world they live in is a dangerous and frightening place, so he focuses on his very specific kind of baby-proofing.  But this is interrupted when a shiny woman on a surfboard flies in from space in dramatic fashion and heralds the end of Earth and the coming of Galactus.

And that introduces the main conflict of the story.  Johnny is impulsive and chases after her, going to such a high altitude that he burns out his oxygen trying to catch her.  It’s a short sequence, but it’s a pretty cool scene and it leads Johnny to want further understanding of The Herald, as they call her (you and I will probably know her better as Silver Surfer).  Having your entire planet marked for death by someone who is going to turn it into an all-you-can-eat buffet is a pretty rough circumstance to get your wish, but Reed decides they’re going back into space to meet Galactus on his terms and try to find a solution.  Little note here, their ship is called the Excelsior, and I love that.  I love seeing these little things that keep Stan Lee alive and present in these films.  Anyway, Galactus offers them a trade—give them their baby, whom he claims has the power to quell his endless hunger and he will spare their planet.  Now, if Captain America wouldn’t trade Vision’s life for the Infinity Stones, what are the chances that Reed and Sue Richards are going to give him their child?  There’s more than a little Star Wars feeling to these scenes, in the way they use the score and how the action plays out in space, and even though Star Wars isn’t exactly in a great place right now (especially with regards to the fandom), I mean this in the best way.  This is a very fun movie, but I don’t mean to say it’s frivolous, but this space sequence really gives you that intergalactic adventurer feeling that previous iterations on this foursome completely lacked (among other things).

Surprisingly, though, when they return to Earth, they reveal that they refused to trade their baby, Franklin, for the planet’s safety and this idyllic retrofuture shows it dark underbelly as they turn on their heroes.  This isn’t the dark, dusty post-apocalyptic retrofuture we’re used to seeing in properties like Fallout (coverage coming soon on that show).  No, it’s glitzy and bright and seems plucked right out of Walt Disney’s dome back in 1955.  But we’re all just animals when faced with extinction and it takes a lot to overcome that primal fear.

In fact, it’s always easy to do the cold math when you’re not the one who has to give anything up.  Everyone is happy with sacrifice until it’s their turn, then all of a sudden it’s a different story.  I suppose that’s the difference between a hero and a regular person.  A hero, like our four here, are willing to make the sacrifice, but not to sacrifice others.  And they are definitely willing to sacrifice, but not their child.  I’d go ahead and guess not any child.  It may be a bold stance to say that good people aren’t cool with child murders these days, but I’m willing to say it.

There were a lot of things I expected when I watched this movie and one of those things was great acting.  I know there were some murmurs about Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us, The Mandalorian) being a little overexposed at the moment, but when he’s that good, I don’t care.  He might not have disappearing into Reed exactly, but he was completely believable as the father-to-be.  He’s incredible in this movie, so vulnerable and brave.  Real bravery—not fearlessness, not bravado, not false machismo.  Being afraid to do the right thing and still doing it anyway.  Real bravery is something the world needs a hell of a lot more of these days and I’m happy to see it, even if only in a movie.  Pascal brings so much humanity to the role; he doesn’t feel like a character, he feels like a person.  Just a person that looks and sounds like Pedro Pascal with gray temples.  Reed is the portrait of a tortured man, and refreshingly, he’s not tortured by the weight of his own brilliance, like so many MCU heroes are (looking at you Tony Stark and Stephen Strange).  Rather, he’s haunted by a failure, his failure, to ensure that their last space mission was successfully completed.  Sure, they all came back alive, but they were forever changed in ways they are only beginning to understand.  Of course he’s afraid.  He feels as if he makes a mistake, if he’s not perfect, then everything that follows is his responsibility.  Reed is a man who feels the weight of the world and does everything he can to humbly carry it on his shoulders.

And the best part?  His performance isn’t even the best in this movie.  If you don’t know who Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) is yet, you really should.  First Steps marks his MCU return after the criminally underrated The Punisher and this time he’s a big rock guy, aka Ben Grimm, aka The Thing and he brings his certified brand of warm-hearted tough guy to him.  I love to see that archetype of character, the B.A. Baracus, as I like to call it.  If there’s one character archetype that always gets me on their side, it’s the gentle giant and Thing gets to show that in spades as he delights school kids with his antics in the street (and as a bonus, he gets to meet Natasha Lyonne, a dream come true if I’ve ever seen one).  But the two real stars of the show are Vanessa Kirby (Mission: Impossible series, The Crown) as Sue Richards née Storm and Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things, A Quiet Place: Day One) as Johnny Storm/Human Torch.  You see Vanessa Kirby’s name on the team sheet and you know you’re in for at least a 9 out of 10 on the pitch.  She’s so good and has been captivating on screen any time I’ve seen her and this is no different.  Kirby absolutely shone as Sue, the heart and soul of the team, but also a lot more than that.  She’s also the tooth and nail of the team, easily the fiercest one when it comes to not just keeping her family together, but also protecting the innocent.  When The Herald comes for her child, there is no hesitation, there is no equivocation.  There is nothing more important to her than protecting her family and she will stop at nothing to do so.  Both Sue and Kirby are the linchpins of this film.

The real surprise here, though, was Joseph Quinn.  I’m not all that familiar with Johnny Storm as a character (I don’t even like playing him in Marvel Rivals), so my only experiences have been with Chris Evans and Michael B. Jordan in the awful Fant4stic film.  But I had not expected to see a Human Torch with so much humility, kindness, and caring.  He’s just so genuinely good-natured and desperately wants to be a hero.  He was great as Eddie on Stranger Things, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I found him to be the most moving character in a movie full of characters I absolutely adored.  Julia Garner (Ozark, Weapons) is a very talented actress as well and despite the fact her role as The Herald/Silver Surfer lacked the meat of the titular characters’, she played it with a quiet, compassionate desperation that is hard to pull off when you’re CGI’d and chromed.  I can only imagine how well she’d do if we could see her face and hear her unmodulated voice.  And yet, it was still a compelling performance.

At the core of this movie is the importance of connection and understanding.  Yes, you can insert a Fast and Furious meme every time someone says “family”, but it’s about so much more than the nuclear (or cosmically irradiated) family.  There are some aspects of First Steps that remind me of the cow translation scene from Arrival.  If you don’t know that reference, watch Arrival, it’s one of the best science fiction movies I’ve ever seen.  Communication is so key and at the same time incredibly difficult.  Even when two people know and speak the same language, it’s so hard for them to communicate effectively with each other.  I mean, just take one quick look at Reddit if you think I’m overstating my case.  But when people understand each other, they can accomplish new things.  In reality, there are no aliens (yes, yes, I know the law of large numbers); the only people we’ve got on the planet are each other.  As awful a prospect as that may seem, we either find a way to get along and maybe accomplish some things together or we can all die clawing at each other’s throats.  And that’s the decision the people of the world in First Steps have to make as well.

“We must support each other and dare to hope,” a news report says.  What a turn of phrase there.  I was reminded recently the importance of hope in the face of what feels like hopeless times.  It’s those who hold on to hope who have the chance to make a difference.  If you give up, if you concede, if you become a societal recluse doing your best ostrich impression, then you are giving up that opportunity and resigning yourself to your fate.  It’s not just our family in blue sweaters that needs to dare to hope, it’s every damn person on the planet.  And they have to support each other too.

There is a profound futility to their fight, like those who fight against death itself, but it is that fight that can never be relented.  There is real fear, real desperation, and real courage on display here.  How they managed to make such an emotionally impactful film out of such an ostensibly goofy property, I’ll never know.  And I know the Fantastic Four has lots of very devoted fans, but on the surface it’s about a superpowered Brady Bunch with a robot housekeeper (shoutout to H.E.R.B.I.E. though, that little robot has Wall-E charm in spades, I need a Funko Pop of it immediately) in a somewhat campy future where Paul Walter Hauser (Cobra Kai, The Naked Gun) is the leader of a race of subterranean mole people and he has a crush on Sue.  It’s objectively kind of corny, but it works so well because they play it straight up and down.  It isn’t winking, it isn’t trying to be too cool for the setting, it leans into it and creates something that feels wonderfully alive.  This is the kind of superhero movie I want to see more of.  They think things through, they approach problems in a way that makes sense for the characters. 

So many times, we get super-genius superheroes whose sole contribution to resolving the main conflict is how hard they punch.  Not compassion, not empathy, not intelligence, but brute force.  I mean, Tony Stark fancied himself the smartest man on the planet and his solution to the world’s problems was basically a wearable gun.  Which is fine, I like Iron Man.  But for the most part, his smarts went to creating weapons.  Not here, not in this movie; it’s not bigger explosions that they’re trying to make.  And not only that, the characters feel different from some of the relative carbon copies we were getting before.  No character is snarky or snippy and the comedic moments in the film come from plot-derived jokes and not just drag-and-drop quips.  First Steps, Superman, and Thunderbolts* are really showing the way forward for superhero movies.  Tell good stories with good characters and it won’t matter if they’re a store clerk or they can set themselves on fire and fly; you’ll have a good movie.  And that’s exactly what First Steps is. It’s great, actually. And at just 1 hour and 56 minutes, this PG-13 film that’s streaming on Disney+ is sure to be a hit this holiday season or whenever.

To those of you celebrating Christmas, I wish you a safe and happy one, that you give and receive good gifts, that you get to spend your time with good people, and that you are generous with the things you can’t buy, like your time, caring, and kindness.  Because if there’s anything I’ve learned from watching all these Christmas movies, it’s that the things fade away; the socks will wear through, the electronics will get replaced by newer models, gift cards will be depleted, but the time we spend with each other and the memories we make are irreplaceable.  And on a personal note, this year of blogging has been a real treat.  I truly enjoy bringing these films and TV shows to you every week and I’ve been lucky to see some real growth on this blog over the past year.  Things will be changing in 2026, I’m sure, but what won’t change is my dedication to deeper analysis, finding hidden gems, and helping you navigate the sea of media out there.  Thank you readers, old and new, for lending me your time.