4 Favorites: March + April 2025
Another Soderbergh! More Lynch! The beauty of baseball and animation! Vampires! The horror of AirDrop! Two dogs named after Bear Bryant!
March 2025
Welcome back to the 4 Favorites series! Got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get to it.
As Vin Diesel says … THE MOVIES:
“Black Bag”
I hope we continue getting two Steven Soderbergh movies a year for the rest of the man’s life, or until he finally decides to officially retire. Like “Presence” (another favorite) earlier this year, “Black Bag” is a tight-90 genre exercise from the prolific director that’s more Horny Agatha Christie mystery than Jason Bourne, whatever the trailers may have you believe.
Married couple George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) are both British intelligence agents who work for the same outfit. The movie wastes no time getting down to brass tacks with the plot: Someone suspects Kathryn of betraying the agency, and George has one week to find out if it’s true.
What follows is a cool, stylish, hot as hell look at monogamy and an examination of how marriage (at least, this one) is two people against the world — damn the consequences. I loved it.
Now available to rent or purchase on VOD and available to stream on Peacock.
“The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie”
Any time I get to see a Looney Tunes movie in theaters is cause for celebration, especially since Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Dumbass CEO David Zaslav decided to shelve “Coyote Vs. Acme.” Thanks to “The Day The Earth Blew Up” distributor Ketchup Entertainment, that film is finally getting released.
As for “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” I haven’t been this surprised by a cartoon in a long time. This baby has everything: Porky Pig and Daffy Duck raised from birth by a farmer named Jim, a rant against predatory neighborhood associations, a Baby’s First “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”/”They Live” plot for kids, and, ultimately, a lesson about friendship and working together. Not bad.
Now if Warners could just add all of their Looney Tunes episodes back to their own streaming service…
Now available to rent or purchase on VOD.
“Eephus”
An eephus pitch is “a type of curveball that is pitched so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter - makes us lose track of time,” as one character puts it in this baseball hangout movie. We get to see someone throw the eephus pitch before the movie is over, and that description is also applicable to what it’s like to watch this movie.
It exists now and in the past, as we see the final sandlot game of a bunch of would-be athletes in 1990s Massachusetts. This is a nostalgic movie, but it’s not pandering or cloying; these men are playing their last game together (for some, it’s the last game of their lives) because the field is being demolished. This is not because of corporate greed, or some sort of “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot” venture - it’s because the city is building an elementary school.
As the game stretches on into the night, multiple people have to leave for one reason or another- one guy has to get home for dinner, another has to bail during an at-bat because he’s late to his nephew’s christening. A forfeit almost happens due to a lack of players, but nobody wants to leave.
As they start to play by car headlights to finish the game, it’s hard not to think of another great baseball movie quote: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”
Related:
30 for 30: 1993 — "The Sandlot"
What’s this all about? I turn 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m going to watch one movie a day for 30 days and spend 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 1993. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries:
Now playing in theaters and available to rent or purchase on VOD.
“Wild at Heart”
I’ve written before about “Lynch/Oz,” the documentary that theorizes most of David Lynch’s filmography can be traced back to the director’s obsession with “The Wizard of Oz.” His 1990 road romance movie “Wild at Heart” is the most powerful argument for that theory.
Here we have Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), two young lovers on the run from Lula’s controlling mother Marietta (Dern’s real-life mother Diane Ladd, who also appears to Lula as the Wicked Witch of the West). As they get farther away from home, they encounter more obstacles to their relationship and run into more weird criminals hired by Marietta to kill Sailor.
That’s the boilerplate summary, but this is a Lynch movie, so it’s also got Willem Dafoe as a creepy thug and Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer herself) as the Good Witch. Throughout the movie, the only time bad things happen to Sailor and Lula is when they’re not together.
“Don't turn away from love,” the Good Witch tells Sailor in a vision. And that, for all the violence and Lynchian tendencies in the movie, is the point.
Available to purchase on physical media, possibly check out from your local library, or possibly see at a repertory screening at your local movie theater (which is how I saw it).
April 2025
“Drop”
Fans of Wes Craven’s “Red Eye,” rejoice! Christopher Landon’s one-location suspense film homage to Craven’s “Hitchcock on a plane” riff is fun, quick and tense, even if you can see who the villain is going to be right away.
The best thing about this movie is that it knows exactly what it is. There’s no fat on the narrative. This is a lean, sub-90-minute movie that gets the ball rolling on its central premise - a woman on a date starts getting anonymous threatening messages, and if she alerts anyone or leaves, she will die - right away, and never lets up. Craven would be proud. (Just look at that poster and tell me Landon wasn’t thinking of the original Drew Barrymore photo that became the “Scream” poster.)
And, for what it’s worth, of the two movies Brandon Sklenar has been in where he plays a romantic interest for someone who left an abusive relationship, this is the better one by far.
Now playing in theaters and also available to rent or purchase digitally, with a physical release coming soon.
“Ren Faire”
Taylor and I went to the Scarborough Renaissance Festival in Waxahachie for the first time a few weekends ago. It was a lot of fun and we spent way too much money (I got a giant wooden mug that can hold an entire French Press’ worth of coffee - Huzzah!).
But as we kept walking around, we wondered what it took to run a place like that. It’s part amusement park, part carnival and part LARP arena for medeival times enthusiasts. We got our answer when we went home and watched Lance Oppenheim’s three-part documentary “Ren Faire,” about the Texas Renaissance Festival down near Houston.
I wouldn't call this a straight documentary - there are too many scenes that felt staged - but this story about octogenarian Ren Raire founder and owner George Coulam searching for his successor has a great “Game of Thrones”/“Succession”/“Righteous Gemstones” feel. The ending is all too relevant to our world today, when presidential candidates refuse to let younger people take over, and the actual president has implied he might run for a third term.
The other great part about this is that it led me to the “King of the Hill” episode where Alan Rickman voices a character just like King George. His accent work on the phrase “Texas Workforce Commission” alone is worth the watch.
Available to stream on HBO Max.
“Sinners”
Last year, it was “Twisters.” Years before that, it was “Mad Max: Fury Road.” This year, the movie I have gone back to see multiple times in one week (and still might see again before it leaves theaters) is Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”
It’s the story of the Smokestack Twins, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who return to the Mississippi Delta in 1932 after fighting in World War I and then working for - and presumably ripping off - Al Capone for supplies to start their own juke joint back home: A place “by us, for us.” When vampires descend on the scene on opening night, they have to defend what little slice of freedom they’ve carved out for themselves.
This is a vampire movie, but before it becomes a vampire movie, it’s a movie about the blues, and how music has the power to save you, damn you, rescue you and make life worth living. I can’t think of another recent movie where the diegetic music was so important to the story (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, maybe?). There’s a scene in “Sinners” where the camera expands to the full IMAX width and showcases a song performed by a musical prodigy, and that scene could have only had the impact it has in the film medium. My jaw was on the floor the entire time.
It’s a summer blockbuster with a lot on its mind. “Sinners” is about culture vultures, appropriation, who gets to turn their pain into art and why, and why we even make art in the first place. See it immediately.
Now playing in theaters (“Thunderbolts*” took all of the IMAX screening slots until May 15, but seeing this in 70mm IMAX was awe-inspiring. Try and see it in an IMAX theater if you can.)
“Sweet Home Alabama”
I’ve seen the beach lightning kiss scene, but apparently, the rest of this Reese Witherspoon-Josh Lucas-Patrick Dempsey romcom has eluded me for the past 23 years.
This was very charming. The plot — Big City woman must return home to the country to finalize a divorce from her Country Husband before she can move on to marry her new Big City Boyfriend — is a classic romcom setup. And the casting is also spot-on; both love interests play their roles so well that I thought both “Patrick Dempsey did nothing wrong!” and “Yeah, she should get with Josh Lucas.”
Plus, it’s got not one, but two dogs named for University of Alabama head football coach Bear Bryant.
Available to stream on Hulu or available to purchase digitally or on physical media.
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