Category Archives: TV/DVD

The Oscars 2023 Season Finale

March 13, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Posters for all this year's 10 Best Picture nominees.

Excerpted from host Jimmy Kimmel’s ABC ad for the event, which also featured Jon Hamm and a very special guest.

Oscar season is over at last! Tonight ABC aired the 95th Academy Awards, once again held at ye olde Dolby Theatre and hosted for a third time by ABC’s favorite trooper Jimmy Kimmel. Coming in at 158 minutes by my clock including end credits, it was nowhere near the longest ceremony ever, but that didn’t stop Kimmel and his writing staff from relying on runtime jokes for half their material. To be fair, runtime jokes are as much an Oscar Night tradition as the lengthy runtime itself. If watching these telecasts is your annual Super Bowl, then you’re used to both of those things.

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The Oscar Quest ’23 Grand Finale: All the Other Nominees I Could Catch

March 6, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tobey Maguire as a rich, Mob-connected ghoul in "Babylon"

Peter Parker #2 declares, “THIS IS CINEMA!”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Longtime MCC readers know this time of year is my annual Oscar Quest, during which I venture out to see all Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family have ever heard of them. I’ve seen every Best Picture winner from Wings to CODA, and every Best Picture nominee from 1987 to the present, many of which were worth the hunt. You take the good, you take the bad, and so on.

In addition, this will be my third annual Oscars Quest Expanded Challenge, which was inspired by that darn pandemic — to see not just all the Best Picture nominees, but as many nominees as possible in all the other categories as well…

That was January 24th. Fast-forward to today, and I’ve watched all I can watch, for better or worse. A grand total of 53 different works are up for Oscars this year. As of this writing I’ve watched 50. Of the four irritating omissions:

  • Ireland’s The Quiet Girl is coming to Indianapolis theaters March 10th, at the eleventh hour before the ceremony when we have an extremely busy week planned. [UPDATED 3/12/2023, 1:40 p.m.: I did fit it in and wrote about it in the nick of time.]
  • The documentary All That Breathes is exclusive to HBO, which we don’t normally have. (Our cable company had another “Watchathon” weekend recently; this film’s HBO debut was the following Tuesday. Grrrrrrrr.)
  • The international feature Argentina, 1985 is exclusive to Amazon Prime, which we’ve never had.
  • The documentary short How Do You Measure a Year? has no streaming plan announced yet.

A perfect record would’ve been nice, but I’ll cope. I can mentally file it as “a Delaware Problem” and my heart will go on.

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The MCC 2023 Oscar-Nominated Short Film Revue

February 26, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Two stop-motion puppets: a puzzled office worker looks weirdly at his calm, seated coworker who may not be real.

Just another day at the office…OR IS IT?

Each year since 2009 (except for 2021’s pandemic lockdown marathon) I’ve paid visits to Keystone Art Cinema, the oldest surviving art-film theater in Indianapolis, to view the big-screen releases of the Academy Award nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film. Results vary each time and aren’t always for all audiences, but I appreciate the opportunities to sample such works and see what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences deemed worthy of celebrating, whether I agree with their collective opinions or not. This year my wife and adult son also accompanied me on the journey even though my annual Oscar Quest is not their problem.

Since 2019 I’ve also assigned myself the extra-credit activity of catching as many nominees for Best Documentary Short Film as possible, depending on their availability online. But first up: my rankings of this year’s five Best Animated Short Film nominees, once again a mixed bag. For the second year in a row, the five nominees ran so long that no “Highly Commended” runners-up were packaged with the program. Links are provided where available in non-bootlegged form.

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My Oscars Quest 2023 Quick-Start Scorecard

January 24, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Michelle Yeoh looking peaceful, eyes closed, with an explosion behind her.

Michelle Yeoh descends from the heavens to accept her honors.

It’s that time again! Longtime MCC readers know this time of year is my annual Oscar Quest, during which I venture out to see all Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family have ever heard of them. I’ve seen every Best Picture winner from Wings to CODA, and every Best Picture nominee from 1987 to the present, many of which were worth the hunt. You take the good, you take the bad, and so on.

In addition, this will be my third annual Oscars Quest Expanded Challenge, which was inspired by that darn pandemic — to see not just all the Best Picture nominees, but as many nominees as possible in all the other categories as well. When new releases were going quickly or directly to home video while theaters were shuttered, the Expanded Challenge was easier for me. I saw all but two of last year’s nominees, and am still missing eight nominees from the year before that. Someday maybe I’ll complete those sets. In the meantime, I have concerns about this year’s logistics now that theaters are back in business. I’m probably looking at far more trips away from home to reach my pointless personal goal, mood and local cinema schedules permitting.

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2022 at the Movies at My House

January 22, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson as astronauts just standing there looking pained.

Live footage of Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson exiled off-planet as punishment for costarring in Moonfall.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in 2022 I made 18 trips to the theater to see films made that same year. Though I’ve tried to get back out there with my vaccines and my restlessness and whatnot, more often than not the motivation level still wasn’t quite where it used to be. As a sort of compromise, in the year’s back half I tried to overcompensate and catch up with 2022 through our various streaming subscriptions and a smattering of Redbox rentals. We don’t have HBO Max or Amazon Prime, but I nevertheless watched plenty by estimation, enough to present the third annual installment of the MCC tradition borne of the pandemic: a ranking of all the brand new films I saw on comfy, convenient home video in their year of release.

Whittling away any and every film with a pre-2022 release date, our living room hosted 28 films in 2022 that fit the specific parameters for this list. We’re not far away from the Oscars’ nominations announcement on January 24th, which for weeks I’ve been keeping in the back of my mind as the deadline for this listicle, so…on with the countdown!

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Our Star Trek Renaissance Year

January 8, 2023 By in Conventions & Events, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
John de Lancie on a stage accompanied by hundreds of Star Trek fans.

John de Lancie and his Friday panel audience at GalaxyCon Columbus 2022, in a photo the showrunners posted on their Flickr account two weeks later. If you know us, we aren’t hard to spot.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in 2022 our usage of the words “Star Trek” in sentences increased 10,000% over the previous nine years combined. We were happy to find excuses for that.

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“The Crown” Season 5: All Ten Episodes Ranked According to a Guy Who Was Never All That Attached to Princess Diana

November 27, 2022 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Elizabeth Debicki and Salim Daw at a horsing exhibition in episode 3 of The Crown season 5, "Mou-Mou".

Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw) enjoy themselves a little too much in the Royal Penalty Box.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: at the start of the pandemic my wife Anne and I binged the first three seasons of Netflix’s The Crown and soon caught up with the rest of fandom. One slight hitch: while Anne is a major history aficionado, that was never my forte, especially not the story of Queen Elizabeth II and her subjects, some of whom were her own trod-upon relatives:

Compared to my blissfully ignorant self, Anne is far more knowledgeable of history in general and British royalty in particular. My interest in their reigning family went dormant for decades beginning on the morning of July 29, 1981, when my family woke up at 5 a.m. — over summer vacation, mind you — to watch Prince Charles marry Princess Diana, two strangers I knew only as frequent costars of my mom’s favorite tabloids. Their wedding lasted approximately six days and was performed entirely in slow motion with British golf commentators prattling through the lengthy silences in between the happenstances of nothingness. For the next 15-20 years I retained nothing of British history apart from their role as the Big Bad in the American Revolution. Frankly, I’ve learned more about their country’s storied past from my wife and from Oscar-nominated movies than I ever did from school. Sad, unadorned truth.

So far I’ve enjoyed The Crown anyway, and understood most of what’s gone on…

I found myself so entertained by Peter Morgan’s principally fictional creation that I was compelled to compile my ten favorite episodes of those first three seasons based on my own finicky and sometimes underschooled impressions. That listicle unexpectedly became this site’s most popular entry of 2020 for lack of competition during an unprecedentedly sedentary year. Naturally I was compelled to post follow-ups as they happened — a sequel listicle for season 4 and a recount of that time on Labor Day weekend 2021 when we attended a Dragon Con fan panel about the show but suppressed our responses and ripostes behind our sweaty pop-culture COVID masks in a rather Royal Family manner.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #11: A Trek Tech Trove

September 27, 2022 By in Travel, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Anne in captain's chair!

Captain Anne has the bridge.

Sure, Vermont was our target destination, but the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour might’ve been the stop on our itinerary that we were most excited to see. The town of Ticonderoga seemed an odd location choice, as opposed to a large city or squarely in California, land of ten thousand entertainment tourist attractions. But inside those doors and on those resurrected sets, all questions about the outside become irrelevant while you’re exploring this full-scale, familiar TV world.

Of course we couldn’t contain all that space goodness to a single chapter.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #10: The Enterprise Docked at Starbase Ticonderoga

September 25, 2022 By in Travel, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
transporter jazz hands!

Scotty, two to beam down!

MCC’s amazing colossal Star Trek year continues! So far in 2022 we’ve attended Star Trek: Mission Chicago (where we met cast members from multiple series) as well as two other conventions with Trek stars (another Chicago show, plus one here in Indy); we’ve shared and overshared our impressions of Picard; loved both Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds without writing about them; read a few Trek-related books, some of which I’ve discussed as well as others I’ll eventually cover when I get back to writing about my reading; and checked out the Captain Janeway birthplace statue in Bloomington, IN. After taking several years off from the universe Gene Roddenberry built, we’ve fallen back into it hard.

We even worked a heaping helping of Trek into this year’s vacation. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve detoured for Trek’s sake (cf. that one time in 2014 when a traveling Trek exhibition stopped at the Mall of America), but some extra mileage was necessary to reach this one. One does not merely swerve off-road on an impulse for this particular spectacle.

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A Dream Journal, As It Were: Too Many Thoughts on “The Sandman” Season 1

August 10, 2022 By in Comics/Lit, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tom Sturridge IS the Sandman!

Remember, kids: don’t dream angry!

I was in high school when The Sandman #1 hit comic shop shelves in the fall of 1988. Springing forth from the mind of Neil Gaiman, whom I chiefly knew from Miracleman and Black Orchid, it was unlike anything I’d read before in comics or other media, and was a must-buy over the next seven years — through its transition to DC Comics’ subsequently inaugurated Vertigo line, in its rise to alt-culture superstardom, and even during some of the least favorite parts of my life. The Sandman lasted longer in my life than I lasted in college. I still have all 75 issues, the special with Orpheus’ story, the two Death miniseries, the lovely hardcover edition of my favorite arc (Season of Mists), and some (not all) of the other ensuing spinoffs. (Of most recent vintage, I loved the Gaiman-approved two-issue crossover with Locke and Key, which may have meant more to fans of the latter but contained key prequel scenes to the world of Dream, including front row seats to the fall of Lucifer.)

I rarely allow myself high expectations for anything anymore, but The Sandman left a deep enough mark on my psyche that I insisted the all-new Netflix adaptation — closely supervised by Gaiman — simply had to be The Greatest Netflix Show of All Time. Nothing less would do. The jury’s out on that for now, but after having watched all ten episodes within a 21-hour span (with wasteful intermissions for sleep and life, not necessarily in that order), I can enthusiastically say for now it’ll do. It’ll very much do.

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Nichelle Nichols, 1932-2022

July 31, 2022 By in Conventions & Events, Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Nichelle Nichols!

The last time we met Nichelle Nichols, at Indiana Comic Con 2017.

Today we were saddened to hear of the passing of Nichelle Nichols, a.k.a. Lieutenant Nyota Uhura from Star Trek, life-changing inspiration and role model of millions. Millions of actors, creators, celebrities, fans, and news sites are online to explain who she is or what she meant to so, so many. For me as a youngster who caught the OG Enterprise crew in reruns, she was an integral part of a stellar interstellar ensemble who showed us, despite innumerable obstacles in their path, that theirs was a potential future for humankind, in which everyone works, lives, and succeeds side-by-side in forging new paths together.

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10 “Picard” Season 2 Follow-Up Thoughts From a Grieving Q Fan

May 12, 2022 By in Misc. Media, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Picard Q Finale!

“See you out there.”

by Anne Golden, MCC Staff.

EDITOR’S NOTE: My wife Anne has contributed to our past ten years’ entries in a variety of ways — photography, ideas, punchlines, caper-partnering, next-day proofreading, encouraging, fact-checking, nitpicking, and so on. She otherwise generally prefers to enjoy the site as a reader rather than as a separately credited blogger. This entry is a special case: she’s MCC’s very first Guest Blogger, though “guest” feels a tad off the mark. Except for light editing and two jokes, these paragraphs are all hers.

Her essay is aimed at fellow Star Trek viewers, whether they love or loathe Patrick Stewart’s further adventures so far, and presumes familiarity with common fan abbreviations for the various shows. And, relevant fun trivia noted previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover, Q is one of her Top 3 Favorite Fictional Characters of All Time. Suffice it to say the season finale struck a nerve. This entry is a rumination attempting to make sense of a tale that frequently didn’t make sense and in some ways still doesn’t. It’s a contemplation. It’s a eulogy. It’s a catharsis.

(Courtesy spoiler warning if you haven’t seen season 2 in general or the finale in particular.)

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Five “Picard” Season 2 Halfway-Point Spoiler Theories

April 6, 2022 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments
Picard vs Q!

If they were a couple we could call them “Q-Card”.

My wife Anne has been a Star Trek fan since at least high school, which is how long I’ve known her. I’ve tagged alongside her for the past few decades and watched a few hundred episodes myself. I’ve never 100% caught up to her but have seen Deep Space Nine in its entirety and can confirm it reigns above all. We attended multiple local Trek conventions and bought the occasional toys, comics, and other merchandise, but up until six months ago we had no investment in the new Trek works on Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access) because we weren’t in the mood to collect ALL the streaming services. And to us, CBS All Access at launch sounded like a non-starter. We regretted the Trek universe leaving us behind, but our longtime favorite geek universes have broken our hearts before. We planned to cope and move on.

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96 Tears and One Punch: The Oscars 2022 Season Finale

March 28, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Oscars 2022!

Purple, the color of bruises.

If you count the one-hour unaired portion of the 94th Academy Awards that began at 7 p.m. EDT, this year’s return to the Dolby Theatre technically came in at a staggering 272 minutes when the usual legal disclaimers rolled at 11:42 p.m., beating the year A Beautiful Mind won by nine minutes. We already knew going into this evening that it couldn’t possibly beat the Shortest Oscars Ever record of 100 minutes, achieved in 1959 when an angry Jerry Lewis gave all the Oscars to The Geisha Boy, read his 90-minute doctoral thesis about muscular dystrophy, and called it a night. Just the same, these Oscars were a lot, even before the cruel insult and the on-stage assault.

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The Oscar Quest ’22 Grand Finale: All the Other Nominees I Could Catch

March 26, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
tick tick BOOM!

Vanessa Hudgens and Andrew Garfield in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tick, tick…BOOM! on Netflix. To those who swear Garfield’s best performance of 2021 was in No Way Home, I am BEGGING you to watch a second movie.

It’s that time again! Longtime MCC readers know this time of year is my annual Oscar Quest, during which I venture out to see all Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family have ever heard of them. I’ve watched every Best Picture winner ever (some more closely than others) and as of this writing I’ve seen every Best Picture nominee released since 1987 (some in better-quality formats than others). Nobody I know cares, but it’s been my thing for years.

Thanks to pandemic restlessness and our current streaming media bonanza, starting last year I expanded the boundaries of Oscar Quest to see how many nominees I could watch in any category whatsoever, period. This is equally unimpressive to everyone I know, but now it’s like a game for me, and a far livelier one than solitaire.

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2021 at the Movies at My House

January 22, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Jamie Curtis in Halloween Kills!

Who among us hasn’t felt as stressed out as Laurie Strode lately?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in 2021 I made 22 trips to the theater to see films made that same year. The year before, the pandemic thoroughly quashed the moviegoing experience and shrank my annual year-in-review entry to a mere four entrants, which barely counted as a “list” and convinced me to start a new, separate annual MCC tradition: a ranking of all the brand new films I saw on comfy, convenient home video in their year of release.

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MCC Live-Tweeting: The Oscars 2021 Pandemic Dinner Theater

April 26, 2021 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Oscars 2021 telecast title card.

At least not all the awards went to white folks this year, so there’s that.

At a cozy and snappy 217 minutes (two minutes longer than last year’s), the 93rd Academy Awards went hostless for its third straight year in its very special pandemic edition co-produced by director Steven Soderbergh. A maximum of 170 guests were allowed into an auditorium furnished like a company Christmas party inside L.A.’s Union Station, while all the European nominees who cared to participate holed up in a rented UK theater, and someone let Bryan Cranston have the Kodak Theater all to himself. In pre-show interviews Soderbergh insisted strict COVID-19 protocols were in place, same as they’re using for current Hollywood productions, and AMPAS president David Rubin swore from the red carpet that everyone was “100% safe”. Here’s hoping all the scaled-down glitz and glamour wasn’t for the sake of an awkward super-spreader event.

(Occasionally a mask could be seen in the crowd. At one point the camera lingered on a seated, masked Frances McDormand glowering in repose. She was among the few celebs I spotted taking measures for the public to see. In that one moment, at least.)

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24 Super Awesome “WandaVision” Clickbait Articles You Can’t Live Without

March 1, 2021 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
WandaVision!

America’s sweethearts! Live before a transfixed audience with or without lockdown orders.

If you’ve opened an internet device within the past two months, chances are you’ve been inundated with discussions, arguments, and most importantly nonstop headlines about the latest Disney+ series to mesmerize the nation, Marvel’s WandaVision. Thanks to the pandemic this nine-episode miniseries is the first new Marvel Cinematic Universe story we’ve been allowed to watch since Spider-Man: Far From Home was released in theaters, if you can remember those from your childhood. Picking up the pieces of Avengers: Endgame and everything that led up to it…well, I could assume you’re not watching it and need me to summarize its premise, but will it help? Will this make it more tempting to you? Now that the MCU is bogged down in a dozen years of its own increasingly insular continuity, take it on faith my rinky-dink one-man site is not the set of buggy steps you’d need to hop on board this bandwagon.

Nevertheless, WandaVision fever is sweeping the nation faster than that other, deadlier joykilling fever that’s been all the rage over the past year. Everyone loves WandaVision so much that WandaVision news, reviews, rumors, and contrived WandaVision bloviations are now a cottage industry unto themselves, particularly on geek news sites that thrive on new content including but not limited to speculative prattle about geek products that people are actually consuming and enjoying en masse, as opposed to the poorly selling comic books that made them possible. Try Googling any topic today and the first five search results will tell you how that topic relates to WandaVision. Day or night, geeks or norms, social media or niche sites, everything’s coming up WandaVision, WandaVision, WandaVision.

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Okay, Fine, NOW I Get Baby Yoda

February 4, 2021 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
life-size Baby Yoda statue.

Not mine, a coworker’s. But if he retires before I do and forgets to take it with him…

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife Anne and I subscribed to Disney+ a year behind the rest of the world and are doing our best to catch up on the content that matters most. So far that means Pixar’s Soul and the Star Wars universe. On a more inessential note I also watched Cars 3, which was better than the second one, which wasn’t too high a bar to jump.

But our primary objective has been Star Wars because for the past year everyone around us has been “Mandalorian” this and “Baby Yoda” that and of course they had to take turns asking us every ten minutes, “Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet? Do you have Disney+ yet?”

YES, WE HAVE DISNEY+ NOW. Um, finally. Sorry for shouting.

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2020 at the Movies at My House

January 11, 2021 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Tom Hardy as Al Capone.

If Tom Hardy is determined to play only inaudible characters from now on, might I suggest he grab a corncob pipe and reboot Popeye?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I saw four (4) whole movies in theaters in 2020, the Purgatory That Only Pretended to Be a Year on the Calendar. For those of us who didn’t live cocky, selfish lives, home video was our best possible escape hatch into other worlds, a lifeline out of this farcical fiasco of a reality, and our safest way to take a scenic cross-country walk in other shoes. And walk I did.

I don’t usually rank my home video viewing. I’d stopped keeping track of all that years ago because my posts about home video arrive with stats DOA. In 2020 I felt moved to devote full entries to a few key works, but by and large I watched them, I processed my feelings, I shut up, and I saved it for later. At long last, later is now.

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