Indiana Comic Convention 2025 Photos, Part 1 of 3: Cosplay!

March 16, 2025 By in Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
cosplay: Linguini and the Swedish Chef, with Remy and Kermit dolls and a copper frying pan.

Linguini (with Remy!) from Ratatouille and the Swedish Chef, who had BETTER NOT HARM KERMIT.

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the eleventh edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. They’ve stopped calling themselves “Indiana Comic Con” on paper for tiresome legal reasons that aren’t their fault, but to us they’ll always be Indiana Comic Con.

ICC 2025 was another opportunity for fans to look at walls covered with old comics, build lightsabers, buy 3D-printed knickknacks, overstock on Funko Pops, respect the anime fandom whose population dwarfs us older generations, and navigate those vast crowds. This year the showrunners occupied more square footage than ever, and last year’s edition was by no means dinky. Geek life had more space to thrive and sometimes enjoy some breathing space in between some of the narrower alleys of thriving pop-culture commerce

While we recuperate and wait for our feet to forgive us for their punishment, please enjoy this modest collection of cosplayers who brightened our two days around the show floor. The jazz-hands photo ops and other sights will be shared in the other chapters. We regret we can only represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the total cosplay wonderment that was on display this weekend. We’re just an aging couple doing what we can for happy sharing fun. Enjoy! Corrections are humbly welcomed for any we might’ve misidentified!

Continue reading →

So You’re Going to a Comic Con: Our Convention Survival Tips for Beginner Geeks

March 9, 2025 By in Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments
us with Chris Evans, all doing jazz hands, and he is smiling SO brilliantly.

Let the clipfest begin! From C2E2 2023, Anne and myself in a jazz-hands photo op with Chris Evans, the old Captain America.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife Anne and I share a fannish love of attending entertainment and comic conventions together, whether in our hometown of Indianapolis or in adjacent states (or sometimes beyond). She’s been doing them since the early ’90s, and invited me to tag along as our relationship evolved from classmates to coworkers to neighbors to BFFs to married geeks, now twenty years and counting. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Every con is someone’s first. We’re happy to offer advice whenever we chat with newcomers to the scene. In the various Facebook groups dedicated to each of the cons we regularly attend, Anne has taken to posting practical advice for newer con-goers — the teen, the elderly, and everyone in between — who are beyond excited to mingle in all those crowds of merry hobbyists and scintillating costumes and vintage collectibles and character merchandise and rows of celebrities from their favorite movies, TV shows, animated works and streaming channels. It’s a lot. It can be daunting to figure out where to start. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed. It’s impossible to prepare for every possible contingency.

Cons are foremost on our mind in anticipation of our season beginning next weekend. As we discard the psychological shackles of a depressing winter and prepare to leave the house a little more often, we offer a selection of suggestions for coping with some aspects of the comic-con experience for the absolute beginners out there.

Continue reading →

The Academy Awards 2025 Season Finale

March 3, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Conan doing photo ops on a black stage with a giant Oscar statue behind him. He's grimacing and holding a large jar of cotton balls or something resembling them.

He’s written for comedy shows, starred in talk shows, and hosted other award ceremonies and events. Some of that might’ve prepared him for tonight!

Oscar season is over at last! Tonight the 97th Academy Awards were aired live on ABC and streamed live on Hulu, once again held at ye olde Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and hosted for the very first time by beloved funnyman Conan O’Brien. This year’s soiree clocked in at 229 minutes, twenty minutes longer than last year’s and fifteen longer than The Brutalist with intermission. O’Brien was his usual uproarious self, taking more potshots at himself than at anyone or anything else and (mostly) refraining from hot-button politics. Anyone who needs more political debate can go overdose on any given social app anyway. Most such netizens generally avoid the Oscars anyway, or spend the evening replying to Oscars fans with such scintillating pearls of Oscar Wilde brilliance as “Who cares.”

Continue reading →

Oscar Quest 2025 Final Scorecard: 47/50

March 1, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan sit in character in the back of a limo. Strong glares at Stan, who's on the 1980s car phone.

“Look, Bucky, you’re gonna get me into the MCU right NOW.”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 is over! I did my best to catch all the Academy Award nominees I could in every single category before the big ceremony Sunday, whether in theaters or on our household’s available streaming services. Last year I managed a 100% completion achievement, but no one gave me a trophy for my amateur hobbyist efforts. My wife Anne was relieved to know our routines could get back to normal, but that’s about it for prizes. Oh, and it was a great excuse to catch some fantastic films I might otherwise have missed…as well as a few pieces of garbage.

This year I earned no real bragging rights. Of the fifty different works up for honors this year, I’ve seen 47 in all as of Saturday morning, with no chance of getting any farther. Per my completionist tradition, the following are capsule summaries of the other ten nominees I watched over the past six weeks that I hadn’t previously written up. The services that granted me access to each of them are provided as well, though at least one has changed since I watched it.

Continue reading →

The MCC 2025 Oscar-Nominated Short Film Revue

February 28, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2-D animated woman asleep on a floor mat in light shadows with sunlight pouring in through a narrow rectangular window. Next to her on a table are components of an elderly relative's daily medicinal regimen.

Don’t sleep your life away! There’re always cool new things to see!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my annual Oscar Quest continues! I’m still trying to catch all the Academy Award nominees I can before the big ceremony 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 will care in the least bit.

Each year since 2009 (except for 2021’s pandemic lockdown marathon) I’ve ventured out to the few Indianapolis theaters carrying 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. My wife and adult son usually accompany me on the journey and we make a family outing of it, even though Oscar Quest is not their problem. Since 2019 I’ve also given myself extra credit for catching as many nominees for Best Documentary Short Film as possible, depending on their availability online, for the most complete shorts experience possible.

Continue reading →

Yes, There’s a Family Photo Album During the “I’m Still Here” End Credits

February 25, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A Brazilian mom poses on outdoor stairs for a photo with her five kids. All but two are smiling. Dad is not around.

We’re a happy family! We’re a happy family! We’re a happy family! Me, Mom, and…oh.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony. That includes any and all works I never heard of before they were nominated. I have no fear of subtitles — I relish them, in fact — and I’m always happy to learn more about the world history they failed to teach me in school, which was nearly all of it.

One of the interesting side effects of AMPAS’ membership diversification efforts of the past few years (contrasting with all their many other years of existence) is the Best Picture nominee lineups offer more surprises from other countries — works that only film-festival attendees could’ve possibly seen in their official year of release. Nominees about dictatorships are sadly commonplace across several categories, which is understandable considering our sinful humankind has spawned far too many tyrants throughout the millennia and on most continents. Most of those works used to be Holocaust films, but in recent times filmmakers from other countries have been taking turns sorting their own tragic histories. Next up is Brazil with I’m Still Here, following in the footsteps of recent-vintage, Oscar-recognized tales of South American regimes such as Argentina, 1985 and (technically) El Conde.

Continue reading →

“No Other Land”: The Oscar Nominee THEY Didn’t Want You to See

February 23, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Movie poster in a black case hanging on an exterior brick wall. Poster image is a young Palestinian man fallen on a rocky plain and a bulldozer parked on the distant horizon.

Now playing in 54 theaters this weekend, as opposed to Captain America 4‘s 4,100+ screens.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, assuming the filmmakers can afford a release wide enough to reach us Midwest film fans in time.

As of February 17th my Oscar Quest scorecard was down to the final five unseen works, all of which I’d assumed would remain out of my grasp for the rest of the season. Then up stepped Indy’s own Kan-Kan Cinema, an eclectic nonprofit who frequently hosts tiny new films that the major chains overlook or think aren’t worth their time and space, because they really really need a dozen screens showing Dog Man for the rest of the year. Of all our theaters, I should’ve known they’d be the first (and as of this weekend the only one) to jump at the chance to bring us No Other Land. In a true rarity for recent Oscar history, it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature without a preexisting distribution deal. The filmmakers themselves have had to foot the bills for a slow rollout because all the studios passed on it (major and minor), possibly because it contains that magic hot-button word guaranteed to start a riot whenever it’s dropped into a conversation among two or more people: “Palestine”.

Continue reading →

“The Girl with the Needle”: The Case of the 37-Week Abortionist

February 22, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Black-and-white poster for "The Girl with the Needle", featuring a glowering young lady in old-time sewing factory togs. A large sewing needle is stabbed into the film's title.

Not just another Lisbeth Salander mystery.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, no matter how dark or disturbing or draining.

The Substance and Nosferatu are the highest-profile nominees from the realm of horror, but farther down the ballot is a smaller tale of terror out of Denmark — The Girl with the Needle, inspired by the true story of a serial killer with a very specific, defenseless prey. Its nightmares are measured not in buckets of blood, but by the breadth of its unhealed psychological scars.

Continue reading →

“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”: Your Father Worked Very Hard for His Promotion to Death-Sentencer

February 20, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
An Iranian mom stands at a window with her two daughters, one college age and one high schooler. Nobody's happy, everyone's shadowy.

Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, some of which have had me driving all over Indianapolis to catch fleeting, one-week-only releases and sometimes having entire screens to myself.

Case in point: for the Iranian drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig on a late Tuesday afternoon, it was just me and one other fat, four-eyed white guy sitting in the way back who was hopefully not my evil twin. I’ve no idea whether or not he found it as chilling as I did, because we pasty introverts don’t run up and share our opinions with just anybody. The travel effort (to the other side of the city) and the social awkwardness were the least I could “suffer” for the sake of witnessing the work of writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof, who had to flee his home country so he could safely take a stand against it through his art.

Continue reading →

“A Complete Unknown”: Deluxx Folk Explosion

February 18, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Movie poster with Timothee Chalamet onstage, playing acoustic guitar and harmonica holder around his neck.

As seen on Saturday Night Live!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, regardless of whether or not I’ve previously connected with the subject matter in the slightest, and whether or not I’ll sound like a philistine to said subject’s biggest fans who outnumber me 500 million to 1. It wouldn’t be my first time speaking as an ignoramus who’s willing to learn.

Over the years James Mangold has directed films of all sizes and accumulated enough goodwill among studios and audiences alike that he’s now alternating between them — not exactly the vaunted “one for them, one for me” model of project selection, considering the last time he spent under $20 million on a film was 1997’s Cop Land. A steady career of dramas (and one fantasy-lite rom-com, the underrated Kate & Leopold) segued into blockbuster franchising with The Wolverine and Logan (still in my superhero-film Top 3), returned to true-story territory with Ford v. Ferrari, then was handed the golden keys to the Indiana Jones series and…uh, lost a lot of Disney’s money, but at least he helped the old man live down the one with Mutt and the aliens in it.

Mangold manages to do more with a little less in A Complete Unknown, technically another biopic in the manner of his Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, though it only covers a five-year period — the early years of Bob Dylan, which seem enough to convey his impact on the world of folk music and stopping short of…well, the last five decades of his career that fell within my lifetime. Hence why I procrastinated seeing this ever since its Christmas Day release until after it was a confirmed Oscar nominee rather than a presumptive one: folk music is generally not my thing.

Continue reading →

Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Captain America: Brave New World” End Credits

February 16, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , 22 Comments
IMAX lobby poster of Red Hulk towering menacingly over Anthony Mackie's Captain America.

Every heart bleeds true under Red, fight and BOOM.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: our family keeps up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe line of comic-book screen adaptation and transmutation products! Yes, we’ve even watched the ones that show up at the low end of every “Every MCU Movie and TV Show, Ranked” listicle whose criteria change whenever new interns update it. Someone needs to sort those with an “Every MCU Ranking Listicle, Ranked” listicle, but it won’t be me. Between the Marvel Zombies that give every release an A only because they have the “Marvel” cattle-brand stamped on them, and the four-hour YouTube anti-“woke” tantrum-throwers who think hate-watching is a wise use of their limited lifespans, I’d never get more than halfway through most of the contenders without developing listicular cancer.

I was perhaps a tad less cranky than the pro critics who groused about the MCU’s 35th film, Captain America: Brave New World, and the curious decision to devote Anthony Mackie’s first solo Marvel marquee to sewing up dangling threads from previous works. I can’t say it’d go in the top half of my own MCU rankings, but it got some things right, though part of the plan involved pleasing Disney’s superiors by forcing the MCU to diverge into a completely different political backdrop, quainter than our own reality.

Continue reading →

“Sing Sing”: The Divines’ Comedy

February 13, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Colman Domingo as a prison inmate sitting against an outdoor courtyard wall, laughing with eyes closed.

Colman Domingo, two-time nominee for Best Actor — for this and last year’s Rustin.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, no matter how much chase they give me as their showtimes are few and far between — disappearing from all local screens one week, only to pop up the next as a last-minute addition to fill up any remaining back-of-the-theater showings that weren’t already taken up by the cartoon about the weredog beat-cop.

Such was the elusive cat-and-mouse chase between me and Sing Sing, which seemed to hold down more screens here in Indy before its three Oscar nominations were announced. It finally slowed down and let me catch up so I could marvel at Colman Domingo’s bravura performance in a very different prison drama — no sex, drugs, gore, riots, or interfaith gang wars among tattooed factions. (There are tattoos, but no one declares war over wearing the wrong ones.) It’s based on the true story of a community of men encouraging each other to find new purpose in their broken lives behind bars.

Continue reading →

Yes, There’s a Q&A After the “September 5” End Credits

February 8, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Movie poster for "September 5" depicting the four main cast members, each visage divided across multiple TV screens.

We are all made of screens.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, even those named in just one category. In a possible historical first, one of our nominees is actually about ABC.

The last time Peter Sarsgaard starred in a true-life tale of journalism and ethics, Shattered Glass was riveting and remains The Greatest Hayden Christensen Film of All Time. Sarsgaard returns to the news beat in September 5, moving from newsprint to live TV in an unofficial yet historically sequential headline-news prequel to Steven Spielberg’s 2005 Best Picture nominee Munich. It’s a true-life drama that’s half found-footage suspense and half You Are There recreation of one of the most horrifying moments in sports history.

Continue reading →

“Nickel Boys”: Press Start to Begin Empathy

February 6, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Large standee for the film next to a white theater wall. The image is first-person viewpoint from a kid on a bicycle, riding behind another one, both heading down a straight country road surrounded by fields.

New | Continue | Load | Save | Options | Extras

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony. Every year it’s a lively ballroom dance between new voices and For Your Oscar Consideration familiarity. Sometimes it’s two for the price of one.

Academy Award Winner RaMell Ross won that honorific with the live-action short film Hale County This Morning, This Evening back in 2019. This year the director scored another shot at the trophies with his first full-length feature, Nickel Boys — a period-piece drama about a subject familiar to longtime Oscar fans, not to mention historians and other decent folks still working and/or waiting for social sciences to discover the cure for American racism. To differentiate the film from past exemplars, Ross conducts an extended experiment with the narrative vantage approach that’s seemed revolutionary to scores of film critics whose only pastime is movies.

Continue reading →

My Reading Stacks 2025 #1: Walter White, Saul Goodman, and the Joy of Recaps

February 2, 2025 By in Comics/Lit, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Each of the two books covered in this entry -- one with chemistry glassware all over it in a Jolly Roger shape, the other with a billboard silhouette and a tiny shyster standing at its base.

The one on the left is autographed!

Welcome once again to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read lately that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit. This installment is all prose, though.

Granted, I haven’t even finished “My 2024 Reading Stacks” yet. Trust me, forgetting them is impossible — the literal stacks of books are still cluttering the living room, waiting for encapsulation here before they go to their next home in our library. I’ll get to those in the near future, but for calendar-related reasons I’m taking a quick timeout from Oscar Quest ’25 to praise a pair of recent reads that captured my attention at the intersection of reading and binge-watching.

Continue reading →

“The Brutalist”: Architectural Gothic

January 31, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
"The Brutalist" poster, with Adrien Brody lit by a furnace and surrounded by metalworking sparks below the logo and fine print.

A.I. art prompt: “Adrien Brody attacked by the internet, symbolized as flying glowworms”.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony. The rules are simple and the points don’t matter to anyone but me.

Critics had already been raving about The Brutalist weeks before a big night at the Golden Globes gave it some light mainstream recognition. Based on the buzz, I saw it two days before its Oscar nominations were announced so I could cross it off my checklist in advance. AMPAS voters traditionally love sweeping epics at the intersection of personal ambition and world history, regardless of runtime or controversies. Director/co-writer Brady Corbet (Vox Lux) and co-writer Mona Fastvold (Apple’s The Crowded Room) figured the time was right for a resonant, fictional, occasionally ugly tale of underestimated immigrants, family rent asunder, talent discovery, teamwork, overreach, exploitation, and how the symbiosis between artist and patron can drift from reign to rot.

Continue reading →

“Wolf Man”: The Entropy of Lycanthropy

January 26, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Woman with pricey hairdo and flannel shirt in a dark room viewed through a werewolf's perspective so the colors are weirdly red and blue around the shadows.

Life viewed through the eyes of a werewolf — warped colors and very few survivors.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Leigh Whannell’s reinvention of The Invisible Man was my favorite of the four whole films I saw in theaters in 2020 and smartly updated James Whale’s original mad scientist into a millennial tech-bro stalker who just wanted to dominate a single fed-up ex rather than the whole unwieldy world. Though Universal Pictures claims they’ve given up on their plan to reboot their classic monsters in an all-new shared universe (with or without a vaudeville act to string them together again), it wasn’t exactly counterevidential when they let Whannell take another crack at the catalog.

The next title on his checklist is The Wolf Man, but he’s dropped the “the” (it’s cleaner!) and adapted it to another modern metaphor rather than perpetuate the whole “gypsy curse” origin that would invite the wrath of the Romani on social media. The metaphor suits a smaller, more intimate thriller, a phrase that might not appeal to the millions who love their Universal Monsters big ‘n’ broad, or to fans of Twilight or Underworld who were hoping to see an entire team of vulpine antiheroes fighting a horror-fantasy gang war.

Continue reading →

My Oscar Quest 2025 Quick-Start Scorecard

January 24, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Robot has baby bird in its palm. Hand emits red and orange light rays into the darkness around them, diffused through its fingers.

The Wild Robot, my favorite film of 2024, nominated for three Academy Awards!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: every winter is my annual Oscar Quest! The game is simple but time-consuming: after the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announces their latest nominations for the Academy Awards, I make plans to catch the nominees in every category, 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. They have the Super Bowl; I have the Oscars.

I’ve seen every Oscar-nominated feature and short released between 2021 and 2023 — running the full gamut from the highest-priority Best Picture contenders down to the mediocre flicks with negative Tomatometer scores that show up only for Best Original Song. I’ve seen every Best Picture winner from Wings to Oppenheimer, and every Best Picture nominee from 1984 to the present, many of which were memorable and worth the hunt. I’ve enjoyed surprises and suffered regrets.

Sometimes I have to wait for smaller films to arrive at the art-house theaters here in Indianapolis. Sometimes I luck out and they’re available on our subscribed streaming services of choice. Sometimes my only option is a streaming rental for a few dollars more. For extreme cases and a bit of savings, I used to turn to Redbox kiosk rentals, but alas, as of last July they are no more. I go wherever the Quest takes me, while my wife Anne waits patiently at home or in another room, like Penelope looking forlornly at her calendar and wondering why that pigheaded Odysseus insists on stopping at every single time-wasting Mediterranean island in his way.

Continue reading →

I Did Not See “Anora”. You Are Not Reading This.

January 19, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A smiling young couple sit at a Vegas card table, she in his lap, arms around his neck.

TikTok was made for couples like them.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I’m a prude who’ll never win a debate at Film Twitter’s water cooler and is not among the pro critics who spent the past few years writing thinkpieces about the lack of sex in today’s movies, up until Poor Things and Challengers apparently sated their appetites while they waited for the next Criterion 4K-remastered cult-favorite re-releases about sexual awakening or sexual liberation, which we all need now more than ever in case the internet runs out of porn. Ever the irrelevant blogger, I’m happy keeping my amateur-hobbyist consumption within certain boundaries.

That personal guideline sometimes conflicts with the rules of my favorite annual game: Oscar Quest! I’ve seen every Academy Award Nominee released from 2021 to the present and continue running myself into the ground while seeing how many nominees I can watch in every single category before the big ceremony — 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. Some years, I’ll try getting a head start and watch a few potential nominees in advance, based on buzz among the critics I follow on social media and, for my first time this year, begrudgingly peeking at the Golden Globes’ finalist list for possibilities. Sometimes the pre-homework pays off; sometimes I end up having watched a movie just for movie-watching’s sake.

Hence: Anora, a tiny indie released last fall that critics still won’t shut up about. I greatly enjoyed one of writer/director Sean Baker’s previous films, The Florida Project, whose characters and living situations reminded me of a few distant relatives and of old people I knew in my bygone restaurant-manager days. (Willem Dafoe picked up a deserved Oscar nod for it!) Anora‘s reviews positively glowed but kept calling it “SEXY!”, which for me is usually Strike One on my scorecard before deciding whether to see a given film. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot in hopes of reducing my fun workload after the Oscar nominations are announced this Thursday morning. As it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised once I could stop averting my eyes after the first twenty minutes.

Continue reading →

2024 at the Movies at My House

January 18, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Robot in darkness wearing headgear made of antlers, talking to someone in the shadows.

The Wild Robot 2099.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in 2024 I made 29 trips to the theater to see films released or screened in festivals that same year. Meanwhile at home, I kept up with select new releases depending on what was conveniently available through our family’s streaming subscriptions, what sounded most watchable, and/or what felt like potential future Oscar nominees that should be gotten over with in advance to ease my annual Oscar Quest time crunch. For value-added fun, as an anniversary gift from my lovely wife Anne we now have Max, which expanded our options without expanding my available TV free time. I did what I could within the time slots allotted.

Hence the fifth 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. Sure, they could’ve been 20 separate entries written in real time as I consumed them, but that’s not how I roll. The Academy Award nominations announcement is coming up January 17th, assuming the L.A. wildfires are quelled and no further raging of them continues endangering lives or homes. As a teenager Anne survived the ordeal of her family’s home burning to the ground, so we’ve been following those tragic headlines and testimonies as they’ve kept on coming. Our prayers are with all those whose lives have been deeply affected.

So. On with our countdown, ranked from awfullest to awesomest, name-checking which service had them at the time. Some have migrated to different services since then…

Continue reading →