🎬 “If they gave a prize for being mean, the winner would be him!”

8 min readDec 18, 2020

I had intended, in this edition, to bring you a review of 1966’s The Fortune Cookie. It’s a Billy Wilder-written comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and, well, I enjoyed the first two-thirds of it. Then the DVD broke.

Normally, the remedy would be simple: Find the movie on streaming, or, failing that, rent or buy it from one of the big digital platforms. But for some unknown and probably stupid reason, it is not legally available anywhere online, so no Fortune Cookie for you. $8.78 later, a used copy is on its way to me — hope it works.

A gentle reminder, but only if you can spare the change, to support this newsletter with a one-time donation on Buy Me a Coffee. Today’s contribution is tomorrow’s unnecessary eBay purchase!

P.S. Want to hear me being interviewed about my new company? Of course you do!

🐘 Animals Are Beautiful People

Animals Are Beautiful People is a lighthearted nature documentary that I found to be surprisingly lovely.

The conceit, which you might have guessed from the title, is simple but effective: Fun and relatable anthropomorphic stories and characters based on well-filmed wild animal footage, most of which evokes the right mixture of wonder and cheer. In one sequence, for example, a motley crew of creatures in the Okavongo Delta eat the rotting, fermented fruit that has fallen off of the marula tree and (we’re told) stumble around drunkenly before falling asleep and waking up with the pained expressions of a hangover headache.

Some of these scenes are exaggerated or fabricated, and there is a cringeworthy sequence about Africa’s “bushmen” that has not aged well at all for reasons you can probably imagine, contrasting the lives of indigenous peoples to “civilized” man. But if you can power through that gross misstep and don’t take the rest too seriously, the movie is quite enjoyable. Recommended. ★★★★

Animals Are Beautiful People is not currently streaming anywhere, but it is available to rent or buy (in standard definition) from these platforms.

☠️ First Blood

Like a lot of people who hadn’t seen the Rambo movies, I had a picture of John Rambo in my head: An army-of-one killing machine returning to the jungles of Vietnam for one last mission, a denialist symbol of America’s inability to deal with its humiliating loss in an unnecessary war.

Imagine my surprise to find that First Blood, the movie that introduced the world to Sylvester Stallone’s second-most-famous character, is set in (checks notes) the Pacific Northwest? Turns out, Mr. Rambo doesn’t go back to Vietnam until the sequel. And what’s more, this movie somewhat cleverly flips the script by pitting him against an overconfident machismo-driven American police force.

The character here, other than his guerilla war expertise, is not at all who I imagined. Rather than an impervious brute, he’s been psychologically decimated by PTSD and the resentment he faced upon returning home. There’s plenty of shooting and explosions to go around, but I really admired that this is an action movie without a one-note protagonist. Recommended. ★★★★

First Blood is currently streaming on Sling TV.

⛸ I, Tonya

I hadn’t seen I, Tonya since it came out in 2017, and I liked it even more on this viewing than I did the first time around.

I especially love the way the film is constructed, around “wildly contradictory, totally true” faux-documentary interviews with its subjects, including Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding, Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly, And Allison Janney as Tonya’s mother, LaVona Harding. The cast is all excellent, especially Robbie and Janney, and the script is precariously perched between comedy and drama without teetering too much in either direction.

My girlfriend observed that much of Harding’s life before “the incident” that made her infamous is so sad that this could have been a played-straight Oscar-bait misery-porn story; she endured years of physical and psychological abuse in her first 23 years, only to become a caricatured villain in the early days of 24-hour news. The deliberately mixed tone makes the movie’s thesis — that truth is subjective and judgment is easy — land that much harder, and the story itself is grippingly acted and edited. Recommended. ★★★★

I, Tonya is currently streaming on Hulu.

🎄 The Muppet Christmas Carol

The Muppet Christmas Carol is a short and sweet adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel that ever gets old for me, and I admire the degree to which the filmmakers sought to borrow as much from the book as they could, which was certainly not a requirement for a kids’ movie.

For instance, The Great Gonzo (performed by Dave Goelz) is cast as Dickens himself, narrating the story with sections lifted verbatim from the text, while also slapsticking around with his frequent sidekick Rizzo the Rat (performed by Steve Whitmire). The latter is the one part of the movie that feels overdone to me; I understand the need to hold young children’s attention, but the antics are so much less creative than the rest of the film.

Michael Caine is an outstanding Ebenezer Scrooge, certainly the best I’ve seen in any adaptation of this story, and the rest of the cast is cleverly filled out with both humans and muppets, to great effect. The songs, too, are better than they have any right to be, and it is an insult to this film’s legacy that “It Feels Like Christmas” has not been covered in every pop star’s obligatory Christmas music album. Recommended. ★★★★

The Muppet Christmas Carol is currently streaming on Disney+.

🚔 The French Connection

I knew, vaguely, that The French Connection had a famous chase scene in it, and now that I’ve seen the movie, I see that that fame is well-deserved. This is a hugely influential cat-and-mouse crime movie, depicting New York City at its dirtiest and most corrupt.

From the first scene, we’re told not to fully empathize with our heroes — Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider — as we see them abusing suspects, extracting false confessions, and letting their hunches trump common sense. And yet, as it turns out, Hackman has a good hunch about an international heroin-smuggling ring, and will go to any means necessary to bust it.

Although I’ve yet to see his most famous role, in The Conversation, this is my favorite Hackman performance to date, and he’s backed up by a fine supporting cast, particularly Fernando Rey as the big bad Alain Charnier. Although I loved the famous chase scene and the very end of the movie (no spoilers!), I wish the script had delved a little deeper into Hackman and Scheider’s characters, to give some shading around why they do the things they do other than because it’s their jobs. Nevertheless, recommended. ★★★½

The French Connection is currently streaming on Starz and DirecTV.

🔢 Every Movie I’ve Seen in 2020, Ranked

(new additions in bold)