MOVIES: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982, Colin Higgins)

We are still at heart an intensely Puritan nation, and sex makes us uncomfortable. We've made some progress in recent years -- some of us are more likely to use the phrase "sex workers" than the word "whores," and to treat them with at least a little bit more respect than we once did  -- but I don't think we're ever going to fully get over our queasiness about the fact that sex is pleasurable enough that some people are willing to pay for it, and some people are willing to sell it.

And so it is a measure of just how much America loves Dolly Parton that in a movie released in the dark ages of 1982, she plays a madam and has us fully rooting for her in the first five minutes of the movie. Miss Mona might be a prostitute, but by god, she is also Dolly Parton, and that matters more.

The movie's premise is efficiently laid out by our narrator, Deputy Fred (Jim Nabors, doing the full Gomer Pyle voice, and a character only a smidge less dimwitted and naive), who explains that Mona has recently taken over the management of the Chicken Ranch, the bordello on the outskirts of Gilbert, Texas. Local men have been visiting the Chicken Ranch for generations, and it is a beloved local landmark. It has earned that status by hard work on the part of Mona and her predecessors, who use their arguably ill-gotten gains to benefit the community; we see Mona dropping off a check to pay for uniforms for the entire Little League team, and it's clearly not the first time she's done something similar.

Even Ed Earl Dodd (Burt Reynolds), the county sheriff, is willing to ignore the law when it comes to the Chicken Ranch, if only because he and Mona have an ongoing romantic relationship.

But the Chicken Ranch's cozy position is disrupted by TV consumer watchdog Melvin P. Thorpe (Dom DeLuise), who has made it his mission to shut the place down.

I am not familiar with the musical on which this movie is based. About half of Carol Hall's songs have been chopped for the movie; of the surviving songs, the only one I knew (and I suspect the only one anyone else is likely to know) is "Hard Candy Christmas," a melancholy ballad sung by Mona and her girls late in the movie (Parton also recorded a solo version, which did well on country radio).

And the reason you probably haven't heard any of Hall's other songs is that they aren't terribly interesting. "Hard Candy Christmas" is by far the best of them, and even it pales in comparison to the two Parton songs that were added to the film. To be sure, most songs look flimsy next to "I Will Always Love You," but Parton trumps Hall even with the relatively minor "Sneakin' Around," a duet for Parton and Reynolds.

What you remember about the Hall numbers in the movie is not the quality of the songs, but the skill of the performance. "The Aggie Song" is an energetic ensemble dance number for a college football team; "The Sidestep" gives us an unexpectedly nimble bit of song and dance from Charles Durning, playing the Texas Governor.

You may have guessed from the cast list that this movie steers firmly into broad comedy. Parton, Reynolds, and Nabors are skilled comic actors when playing within their comfort zones, but none are given to nuance or understatement. Even by those standards, though, Dom DeLuise is off in a world of his own. It is a performance so enormously flamboyant, so vastly over-the-top, that it is too big for even this movie; I'm not sure any technology exists that is powerful enough to contain what DeLuise is doing here. He struts across the screen dressed as if he'd been invited to the Sgt. Pepper's cover shoot, gesturing so broadly and screaming so loudly that the audience could hear him from across the Grand Canyon. It is painful and unpleasant, and the realization at one point that he is about to break into a second reprise of his song ("Texas Has a Whorehouse in It") is the most depressing thing in the movie.

But the movie survives or fails on the charm of Parton and Reynolds, which is considerable. In her memoir, Parton talks about how unpleasant this shoot was for her, and how poorly she and Reynolds got along. None of that shows.  Their relationship is convincing whether they're flirting, arguing (the audience I saw the movie with gasped audibly when Ed Earl hurled the word "whore" at Mona), or reconciling; and Parton tones down her voice enough to allow Reynolds to keep up in their duet, which is his only singing in the movie.

DeLuise aside, it's a likeable bit of fluffy musical comedy, and I'm grateful to my local AMC for taking the sad opportunity of Parton's death to put it on the big screen for a few shows.

TV: House of Cards (1990) / To Play the King (1993) / The Final Cut (1995)

British trilogy of miniseries, each consisting of 4 one-hour episodes; loosely adapted into an American political context by Netflix beginning in 2013. All three miniseries are streaming in the US at Peacock, with the latter two identified as House of Cards: To Play the King and House of Cards: The Final Cut.

Ian Carmichael stars as Francis Urquhart, fictional Chief Whip (*) of the Conservative Party and a master of political scheming and manipulation. In the first installment of the trilogy, Francis maneuvers his way into becoming the party's new Prime Minister. To Play the King finds him confronting the new King -- never given a more specific name than "the King," but clearly modeled on then-Prince Charles -- who has the audacity to express political opinions in public; even worse, the King's opinions do not align with those of Francis and his Conservative government. The Final Cut begins at the (fictional) funeral of Maggie Thatcher -- in reality, she would live for another 18 years -- as Francis approaches her record as the longest-serving post-war Prime Minister.

(* -- There's no real equivalent to this position in the US government, but it's sort of as if the Speaker of the House was a Cabinet official who had a lot more insitiutional force and tradition behind him to hold members of his party in line on key votes.)

When Michael Dobbs wrote the novel that served as the source for the first miniseries, he had no thought of continuing it; he actually killed off Francis at the end of the book. But the TV version was so popular that Dobbs was forced to ignore that death to write the novels that were adapted as the second and third installments in the series.

When this began airing, 36 years ago, it must have felt like pure escapism. Surely politics wasn't this  viciously nasty and cruel in the depths of its conniving and struggling for power, but there was a naughty thrill in imagining that it might be. Watching it these days, I suspect it plays more darkly than it once did; if there's any escapism left in it these days, it probably takes the form of longing for the good old days when this was as bad as it got.

Whatever the era and however the story might compare to the politics of the real world, the great constant of the series is Ian Carmichael's magnificent performance. Francis frequently breaks the fourth wall to directly address the audience, commenting on the stupidity of political colleagues and rivals, the ease of manipulating the media, and (of course) his own unparalleled political brilliance. It's a performance of silky smarm and oozing charisma, and remains one of television's towering achievements. 

The supporting players don't quite rise to that level, but there are fine performances among them. Susannah Harker shines in House of Cards as a naive young reporter who trusts Francis too much for her own good; Michael Kitchen finds the precisely correct mix of smug self-satisfaction and genuine concern for his people as the King in To Play the King; and throughout, Diane Fletcher performs her own subtle manipulation as Francis's wife, a Lady Macbeth manque who takes on a steadily increasing role in the scheming, truly coming into her own in The Final Cut.

At heart, this is trashy soap opera, Dallas set in the world of British politics instead of Texas oil. But it's the classiest possible version of trashy soap opera, and it's a grand good time.

TV: Ellis (2024 - ?)

British police/crime drama; streaming in the US on Acorn, where it's labeled as Inspector Ellis. Two seasons, each short even by British standards; season 1 is 3 90-minute episodes, and season 2 is 4 45-minute episodes, comprising two 90-minute stories. Haven't been able to find info on whether a third season is planned.

Sharon D. Clarke stars as DCI Ellis (her first name is never revealed), who is sent by her boss in London to lead murder investigations at smaller police departments that don't have the staffing or experience to deal with complicated major crimes. On her first case, she's partnered with DS Chet Harper (Andrew Gower) who will leave his position in that local department to become Ellis's partner in traveling investigation. 

The "I'm from the city, and I'm here to help" sets up an unusual dynamic, with local departments usually resenting Ellis's presence and the implication that they aren't up to the task; their attitude is often one of reluctant cooperation at best, outright hostility at worst. And in some of those rural departments, the hostility is only made worse by the fact that Ellis is a Black woman.

Clarke is terrific here, and it's a challenging role, because she's not given a large, colorful personality to play. She's reserved, quiet, and actively resists small talk. When she finally, near the end of the first season, tells Chet that she has a daughter (we viewers have known that fact, and gotten some hints that their relationship might be strained, but we don't know any more than that), it's a major step forward in their partnership, the first moment in which she's acknowledging that either of them has a life beyond the job. That daughter is the show's biggest step towards any sort of serialized storytelling; this is firmly a case-of-the-week procedural, which these days, is a refreshing change.

Gower's role is more familiar -- the junior officer, almost puppyish in his eagerness to impress the boss -- and the writers haven't done much to broaden him beyond that trope. (Three of the five stories are written or co-written by the show's creator, Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Barre.) He gets to flirt a bit with the IT officer (Charlotte McCurry) who occasionally joins Ellis and Harper on their cases, but even that slight hint of personality is quickly closed off when he finds out that she's married.

The opaque nature of the lead characters is the most frustrating element for me, and if there is a third season, I hope that Ellis and Harper will be allowed to develop a more relaxed relationship and reveal more, even if only between themselves. But that's my only mild problem with the show. The cases Ellis and Harper are sent to work on are interesting and complex, darker and grittier than the cozies we usually get in rural settings. Each story gives us a large cast of suspects, friends, and relatives, played very well by actors who will mostly be unfamiliar to American viewers; Mark Addy was the only major guest actor I recognized at all, and he's not exactly a household name here.

Not essential viewing, but a good solid procedural, greatly aided by strong casting from top to bottom.

Still trying to get back in the habit of posting here more regularly after watching something. There are a few posts waiting to be written, and I plan to get caught up by the end of the weekend.

MOVIES: Coyote vs. Acme (2026, Dave Green)

Coyote vs. Acme first made news in 2023, when Warner Bros. Discovery announced that they were going to shelve the finished film and take a tax writeoff instead of releasing it. There was great backlash, especially because the few people who'd seen the movie said it was good, and WBD eventually agreed to let the movie be released. Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights; the movie's now in theaters; and whaddya know? It really is good.

It's based on a 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier, and tells the story of Wile E. Coyote's lawsuit against Acme for the many, many defective products he has bought from them in his endless pursuit of the Road Runner. He hires personal injury lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who has generally been content to file petty nuisance suits against Acme, collecting a few hundred dollars at a time for his client, but his niece/intern (Lana Condor) and Wile E. force him to file a much larger suit.

(Kevin is a partner at the firm of Avery, Jones, and Maltese. Those are the last names of Tex, Chuck, and Michael, three of the legendary creators of the original Looney Tunes.)

That puts him up against Acme's lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena), his old law school nemesis, and against the deep pockets of the generally beloved Acme ("we're a family values company that values our family of companies").

The Looney Tunes characters exist in the live-action world, and the mix of the two is beautifully done. The focus is on the classic Looney Tunes; none of the new characters from Animaniacs, Space Jam, or other more recent projects make an appearance. Eric Bauza has been voicing these characters for years, and while it's hard not to miss Mel Blanc, Bauza's imitations are solid. Wile E. remains silent throughout, communicating only through the occasional sign.

All of the major Looney Tunes characters, and a lot of minor ones, are here. Foghorn Leghorn gets an unexpectedly large role as an Acme executive, and in the current climate, the thought of United States Senator Elmer Fudd feels less absurd than it probably should.

Forte and Cena have the bulk of the human-toon interaction scenes, and they deal with that challenge in very different ways. Forte tones way down to let the toons dominate their scenes, playing a sad sack who is just as used to constant failure in the human world as Wile E. is in the toon world. Cena, on the other world, goes bigger than life, essentially transforming his already implausible physique into just one more cartoon character. A conversation between Cena and Acme agent Tweety Bird is one of the movie's comic highlights.

The jokes are funny; in particular, kudos to writer Samy Burch for finding the perfect way to slip in a joke about Pepe le Pew, whose womanizing is significantly less charming these days than it might have seemed in the Looney Tunes' heyday. The climax of the movie, an unexpected meeting between Coyote and Road Runner, hits with an emotional punch I wasn't expecting.

I was happy to see that the movie had a strong weekend at the box office, and I hope that word of mouth will keep it in theaters for a while.

TV: Minx (2022-2023)

Comedy; two seasons/18 episodes. Streaming on Netflix.

It's the early 1970s, and Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond) wants to start the first magazine devoted to the growing feminist movement. She heads to the magazine publishing convention to make her pitch to publishers. The only taker is Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), whose Bottom Dollar Publishing is devoted to cheap porn magazines with titles like Naughty Nurses; he sees Joyce's magazine as a vehicle to target a still untapped market for porn: women.

The era is right for both ideas. The first issue of Ms. was published in 1971, and the first issue of Playgirl in 1973. What would have happened, this show asks, if the two had been combined in one magazine?

Joyce and Doug are optimistic as they launch Minx, but even they are taken off guard by its success, and it causes problems for both of them. Joyce isn't used to being in the spotlight, and isn't really prepared to be a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. Doug is used to scraping by, barely meeting budgets each month; keeping up with the demand for Minx is a logistical nightmare. And while the success is a thrill, neither of them knows how to cope with the controversy the magazine is generating.

Lovibond and Johnson are a solid pair of leads, and the show gets a lot of crisp comic energy from their  contrasting personalities, as her slighly prissy academic feminism clashes with his cruder street smarts.. Elizabeth Perkins joins the show in the second season as a wealthy widow who provides financial backing for the magazine, and the rest of the supporting cast is terrific. Jessica Lowe was the standout for me, playing Bambi, the centerfold coordinator for all of Doug's magazines, whose intelligence and people skills are too often overlooked by co-workers who only see a perky bimbo. 

The show was originally made for cable/streaming; HBO Max was the original home for season one, and after they cancelled the show, Starz picked it up for the second season. But even by cable/streaming standards, there is a lot of nudity here -- the show is set in the porn industry, after all-- including full frontal male nudity, still a rarity on TV. You'll see more penises in the first episode than you've probably seen in your last decade of TV watching.

For the cliffhanger-averse among you, the end of the second season does leave the next step for most of its characters somewhat up in the air, but the major plotlines of that season are pretty well wrapped up. The suspense is more in the nature of setting up stories for a potential third season instead of leaving second season stories unresolved.

Cheerfully raunchy, with memorable characters, witty dialogue, and a few thoughtful ideas hiding beneath it all.

TV: You're Killing Me (2026- )

One six-episode season is currently streaming on Acorn, with a second arriving sometime in 2027.

In a quaintly charming Maine village, a 60-ish mystery writer uses her professional skills to help solve the shockingly large number of murders that take place around her. You could be forgiven for thinking of Murder, She Wrote; it's an obvious inspiration for this show. Our heroine, though, is not Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher, but Brooke Shields's Allison "Allie" Chandler, and our quaint village isn't Cabot Cove, but Founder's Cove.

(Take a moment to picture Angela Lansbury at the beginning of Murder, She Wrote. Now picture Brooke Shields today. Shields is about three years older than Lansbury was.)

As the first episode opens, the annual mystery awards convention has come to Founder's Cove to honor Allie for her many (many, many, many) award-winning romantic mysteries. The convention is disrupted by the murder of one of the other authors, one of Allie's dear friends. Allie is drawn to investigate, as is Andi Walker (Amalia Williamson), a local true-crime podcaster some decades younger than Allie. They reluctantly team up to solve the crime, and agree to continue their partnership to write a true-crime book about the case.

Murders keep coming to Founder's Cove, and Allie and Andi keep investigating them, to the annoyance of the town's new sheriff, Jack Kerrigan (Tom Cavanagh). Lurking in the background is the mystery of Andi's mother, who mysteriously abandoned Andi and her dad 15 years ago and hasn't been seen or heard from since.

Everything is gentle and cozy and comfortable. The bickering banter between Allie and Andi is entertaining enough, as is the tastefully polite flirting between Allie and Jack. The audience is likely to have more success spotting the murderer than most murder shows allow, as the cases aren't that complicated.

No one's going to be surprised or blown away by anything that happens on You're Killing Me. It's not an exciting show, and it's content to rework familiar territory. But if you like that territory, this show will take you there and give you precisely what you're looking for. The acting and writing isn't likely to win any awards, but it's a notch or two above mere competence.  It's a good enough light comic murder-of-the-week show; it aspires to nothing higher than that. That may not be the most ambitious target, but the show hits that target squarely in the bullseye.

TV: I, Jack Wright (2025- )

Family drama/murder mystery. One six-episode season, with a second in the works. Streaming in the US on BritBox.

Jack Wright (Trevor Eve) has died, in what initally seems to be a suicide. The officer assigned to the case (Harry Lloyd) is suspicious, though; "very few people shoot themselves in the chest," he notes.

And his family is large enough to provide plenty of suspects. First wife Rose (Gemma Jones) has cancer, and the inheritance she's expecting could pay for top-quality treatment. Her older son, Gray (John Simm), is an addict who's deeply in debt to some violent thugs; second son John (Daniel Rigby) is tired of playing second banana at the family business. Gray's daughter, Emily (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), could use some extra money for the tech business she's trying to get off the ground.

Third (and current) wife Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is two or three decades younger than Jack. She claims they were entirely devoted to one another, but might she be more interested in the dashing French businessman (Jalil Lespert) who's been negotiating some sort of deal with Jack? Her son, Josh (Samuel Small), is so grumpy and sullen a teenager that nothing seems too extreme as a possible expression of angst.

And what are we to make of the occasional references to a deceased second wife, and the daughter who no one has seen or heard from in years?

The family drama gets kicked up another notch at the reading of the will -- and we're still in the setup phase of the first episode! --when Rose and her sons get pittances, Sally and Josh get nothing, and the bulk of the money goes to Emily, along with the top job at the business. All of the family's buried resentment, anger, and jealousy come roaring back to life.

Each episode begins and ends with a few short moments of the characters addressing the camera, apparently being filmed for a documentary (a true-crime series, perhaps?) sometime after all of this drama has played out. We can get some clues from those moments -- one of the characters appears to be wearing a prison uniform -- but they are mostly cryptic teases that will only really make sense in retrospect.

It's a grandly over-the-top soap opera, with performances precisely calibrated at just the right level of too much-ness. Amuka-Bird, the closest thing to a lead character in the large ensemble, is a standout as Sally, whose inherent icy reserve makes it difficult to believe her protestations of love, even if they are sincere. Jones does lovely work as the self-sacrificing Rose, and Simm is an impeccable sniveling weasel as the man trapped by his own vices and addictions.

Be warned, if you are wary of such things, that the first season ends on a giant cliffhanger, resolving very little. The answers to the mysteries of who killed Jack, why he changed his will, and whether he was of sound mind when he did so will have to wait for season two.

MOVIES: The End of Oak Street (2026, David Robert Mitchell)

We open in a Michigan suburb in 1982, where the Platt family is under a lot of stress. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is writing a novel, obviously more autobiographical than she'll admit, about a woman trapped in an unhappy suburban marriage; Greg (Ewan McGregor) hasn't told the family that he's been fired, and that his "side job" of pizza delivery is actually his only job. The kids aren't much happier. Audrey is realizing that her dream of going to Cornell to study with Carl Sagan is financially out of reach, and Brian is a second-tier bully who's recently broken another kid's arm, and now lives in fear of that kid's big brother, the neighborhood's first-tier bully.

But the family's going to have to work together when they wake up after a strange electrical storm to find that a two-mile chunk of their neighborhood has somehow been transported back to the age of dinosaurs, and there are killer beasts everywhere. It's an inverse Jurassic Park; instead of bringing the dinosaurs to our world, the movie sends modern people back to theirs.

Mitchell does a terrific job of building suspense in the opening of the movie, hinting at the lurking monsters in clever ways before finally revealing them to us. The movie is a tight 99 minutes, and there's not a wasted minute in it. Deaths are both gory -- this one is definitely not for the smallest kids, or for the most squeamish adults -- and funny; action sequences and chase scenes are thrilling; and the characters are more rounded and better developed than you expect from this sort of movie.

We already know that Hathaway can cry on cue, and she gets plenty of chances to do so here; what is less expected is what a great scream queen she makes. She delivers perfectly calibrated terror and determination, and it is Denise who is the most practical and realistic about what it will take to survive this ordeal.

This is a excellent family adventure thriller. The jump scares work, and never feel as cheap and desperate as jump scares often do. There are enough jokes to leaven the suspense and fear. There is one narrative choice late in the movie that I thought didn't work; it cheapens the most consequential moment in the movie. But that's a small flaw in an otherwise delightful movie.

And for those who particularly worry about such things, the family dog will be just fine.

TV: Line of Duty (2012- )

I've recently added BritBox and Acorn to my roster of streaming services, so I'll likely be catching up with a lot of British TV over the next several months.

This is an excellent crime drama, with six seasons (36 episodes), and a seventh due in 2027. It's streaming in the US on both BritBox and Acorn, though BritBox is missing season 5. That's an important season to the show's overarching story, so if you're a BritBox subscriber, you will want to do a free trial subscription to Acorn in order to binge that season there.

The setting is AC-12, one of several offices in the London police department devoted to investigating cases of possible police corruption. (I think in the US, we'd more often refer to it as an "internal affairs" department.) Our central characters are officers Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) and Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), and their commanding officer Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar). 

Each season features a fourth top-billed actor, playing the officer who's being investigated that season; not all of those actors are well-known in the US, but they're well-known to British TV audiences, and they are surely a big draw. They are, in order: Lennie James, Keeley Hawes, Daniel Mays, Thandiwe Newton (still using the name Thandie back then), Stephen Graham, and Kelly Macdonald.

Over the course of the six seasons, there's also a larger throughline being developed. We come to realize that the individual investigations into these possibly corrupt cops are tied into the same organized crime group, and the officers of AC-12 find themselves in search of the officers even higher up the ladder who are running the network of organized crime and corrupt cops.

There have been a lot of TV shows -- Burn Notice comes to mind -- that have gotten too caught up in an overly elaborate backstory that came to dominate the show, slowly strangling it to death. Line of Duty avoids that peril, doing an impeccable job of balancing each season's primary investigation with the increasing revelations about the identity of the ringleader(s).

The show does everything you want a police drama to do, and does all of it well. Chase scenes and heists are thrilling; office politics feel realistically frustrating; the dangers of the job are neither exaggerated for melodrama nor downplayed to make the audience feel comfortable.

Best of all are the show's interrogation scenes. Dunbar particularly shines in these scenes, especially at the end of a season, when it's all that Hastings can do to keep his anger in check as he faces down the officers who have betrayed their duty to the public, which Hastings views as a sacred trust. And when Hastings himself comes under suspicion in one season, it's a delight to watch him on the other side of the interrogation. (Guest star Anna Maxwell Martin is terrific as the officer tasked with questioning him, a coldly collected bundle of passive aggression, always offering precisely the amount of polite respect that is required of her, but no more than that.)

This is police drama at its finest, and unless you are allergic to the genre -- some are these days, and I can't say I blame them -- it's absolutely worth the time.

MOVIES: The Rivals of Amziah King (2025, Andrew Patterson)

Patterson's first movie, The Vast of Night, had the bad fortune to be scheduled for release in the spring of 2020, so like a lot of movies that year, it wound up with a graceless dump onto streaming and never found the audience it deserved. Not that it would have been a massive box office hit, but it was a smart take of 50s SF paranoia that did a lot on very limited resources. (Sadly, it doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere at the moment.)

Six years later, he's back with a bigger budget and a couple of actual movie stars. Matthew McConaughey is Amziah King, a widowed Oklahoma beekeeper. As the movie opens, he and some friends are jamming in the parking lot of the local fast food place when a state cop asks for his help. They've intercepted a shipment of stolen honey, and they hope Amziah can help them figure out whose honey it might rightfully be.

The first half of the movie is shaggy and rambling, never sticking to any particular plotline or moment for very long. Amziah is reconnected with Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass, making an impressive film debut); fifteen years ago, she was one of many children for whom he and his late wife served as foster parents. He has more jam sessions with friends; there's a good amount of music here, all of it great fun in a sort of amateur Mumford & Sons style.

But the long chain of digressions is entertaining, and a couple of them are spectacular set pieces. McConaughey has a delightful monologue (Patterson also wrote the film; he's credited under the pseudonym "James Montague") in which he introduces Kateri to her new neighborhood by explaining the backstory of every casserole at the church potluck, and a bee emergency at the local elementary school is the movie's comic highlight.

A sharp narrative turn brings the back half of the movie into tighter focus, and moves Kateri into the spotlight. It also introduces Kurt Russell (with an unnerving resemblance to Steve Bannon) as the local industrial agriculture tycoon.

This is McConaughey's first on-screen role in six years (he's done some voice work), and Patterson makes impeccable use of his laid-back charm. It's a strong enough performnce to carry us through the meandering first half of the movie, and when the turn comes, we realize just how sharply he's used those seemingly random scenes and moments to define Amziah's character. LookingGlass matches him at every turn, and as Kateri is forced to draw upon the strength that Amziah helped her to find, LookingGlass gives a performance of sly resilience and determination.

Russell isn't asked to do much more than be a hissable villain, but he does that with enthusiasm and crisp comic timing. The assorted locals to whom Amziah and Kateri turn for friendship and aid are played by a fine assortment of character actors -- Scott Shepherd, Cole Sprouse, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori.

Currently in limited release; opens wide on the 21st. Well worth the time if it's playing near you.

MOVIES: Six: The Musical Live! (2026, Liz Clare)

The musical proshot seems to be turning into more than just an occasional novelty; this is at least the third one to play in theaters in the last year (Merrily We Roll Along came out at the end of 2025, and Hadestown just a few weeks ago). It was filmed in 2022, and reunites the 2018 West End cast.

The show begins with the entrance of six women, who announce that they are the wives of Henry VIII. They wear magnificent costumes, designed by Gabriella Slade, that fuse the style of a Renaissance royal court with the sparkle and short skirts of a modern pop diva. At the back of the stage are Ladies in Waiting, their four-woman band. The wives are getting ready for a tour, and they want the audience to choose their lead singer by deciding which of them had the worst marriage.

From there, Six becomes essentially a rock concert, with each wife getting a solo number (the other women sing backup) telling her story. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss have written pop songs, each loosely inspired by one or two specific divas; Catherine of Aragon (Jameia Richard-Noel) is a Beyonce/Jennifer Hudson type, Katherine Howard (Aimie Atkinson) is a mix of Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, and so on. (I am mildly surprised, given the success of the show, that the producers have never put together some sort of EP in which the songs are sung by the pop stars who inspired them; it'd be a terrific charity fundraiser.)

Most of the songs are tightly tied to each character's history, which makes it difficult to imagine them having any sort of independent life outside the musical. The exception is "Heart of Stone," a ballad for Jane Seymour (Natalie Paris). Seymour tells most of her story in pre-song dialogue, and the song is an emotional response to those events.

Marlow and Moss wrote the show while they were still university students, and there's an "aren't we clever young things" attitude throughout, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That sort of winking attitude is entertaining for a while, but it can wear thin; they were probably wise to keep the show short, coming in just under 90 minutes.

The history is often framed in very contemporary terms. Anna of Cleves (Alexia McIntosh), for instance, explains that Henry sent for her from Germany after being impressed by her portrait, but he was disappointed when she arrived, as the portrait had exaggerated her beauty. In her song, "Get Down," Anna explains that "you thought that I tricked you / cause I didn't look like my profile picture." McIntosh is terrific in this number, a Nicki Minaj-inspired rap/song hybrid, and it's the highlight of the film.

By the end of the show, it's clear that Marlow and Moss are less interested in getting all of the historical details precisely right than they are in using the wives as a way to explore the broad (and limited) types into which women are sorted, both by history and by musical theater. The final moments pound the feminist message home with a little too much clunky enthusiasm, but there's a sense of humor that is strong enough to keep that message from derailing the show.

Is Six an important musical that's likely to endure for decades? No, I don't think so. But the cast is superb, the songs are skillful pastiches of modern pop styles, and it's a terrific calling card that marks Marlow and Moss as composers to watch. Not a movie you need to rush right out to theaters to see, unless you're a massive fan of the show or of musicals in general, but worth watching for when it comes to streaming.

MOVIES: One Night Only (2026, Will Gluck)

Alternate titles: The Sex Purge; After Hours: Fascism Edition.

Opening titles tell us that three years ago, the Mandate was panned, banning premarital sex. All Americans now wear implanted wrist monitors that measure vital signs and hormone levels; whenever two people are in the same place and their levels both spike in just the right technobabbly way, the sex police are alerted and sent out to make an arrest. But for one night every year, twelve glorious hours, the Mandate is suspended and all of the singles get to go wild and fuck like rabbits. This movie takes place on that night.

As the night begins, pizzeria owner Owen (Callum Turner) is planning to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke, in a role so underwritten that I didn't know the character had a name until I checked IMDB), who cuts him off by announcing that this year, she thinks they should screw other people. That sets Owen off on his quest for Ms. Right Now, during which he keeps running into Allie (Monica Barbaro), a studio singer whose career is made up almost entirely of singing old pop songs that have been rewritten as pharmaceutical jingles. (That's a pretty good running joke; sadly, it's the best one you're going to get.)

Allie and Owen keep running into one another as increasingly contrived circumstances keep them from acting on their obvious mutual attraction, and we cut back and forth between the two as they have a long series of pathetic/desperate/ostensibly comic encounters with potential sexual partners.

Considered only as a rom-com, this is a B-minus at best. Barbaro is charming, and I look forward to seeing her in better movies, but as hard as she's working, she does not have the power to singlehandedly drag any personality out of Callum Turner, who has all the warmth and charisma of a used bar of soap. The supporting cast is poorly used; they're unkindly used in some cases, notably Molly Ringwald and Levar Burton, playing Owen's mother and her boyfriend, who are trotted out for a few "old people have sex? Eww, gross!" jokes.

But we can't consider this solely as a rom-com, because its premise is so preposterous, and because the movie refuses to deal with what the world would actually look like if the Mandate had been posed. Some of the questions that came to mind as I watched the movie:

• Where are the anti-Mandate protests? If the government banned premarital sex, there would be riots in the street that would make January 6 look like a Sunday school picnic. And they wouldn't stop after a week or two, either. They'd still be going on, even three years later. This movie gives us a few listless chants of "fuck the mandate," an occasional bit of graffiti, and some halfhearted "Repeal" signs in windows. (Those signs are in the exact shades of blue and pink that are now associated with the trans rights movement, which is oddly distracting.)
• This movie takes place in a future near enough to be essentially our present, so I assume that it's our current right-wingers who have passed the Mandate. And the current sexual obsession of the right wing (at least as far as heterosexuals are concerned) is decreasing birth rates; they wouldn't be imposing restrictions that are going to decrease the number of pregnancies.
• We're supposed to believe that the federal government was able to install wrist monitors in every American in only three years? The government can't do anything that efficiently. And given the massive freakouts at the thought of getting a COVID vaccine, you think everyone's going to line up peacefully to have a piece of machinery implanted?
• How many people are required to monitor everyone's monitors for signs of unlawful sex, and how many new police officers had to be hired to make those arrests? And honestly, given typical police response times, you could probably get in a quickie and be out the door for brunch before the cops get there.
• There's a scene fairly early in the movie in which characters are trying to buy a condom (Oh right, condoms are mandated, too, which raises another whole batch of questions...), and all of the stores are sold out. On free sex night? The one night when you know there's going to be a huge demand for condoms, and none of the stores have stocked up with enough condoms to get them through the night? And it's not like this scene is at 6:45 am, when the clock is about to run out; it's pre-midnight, with hours to go yet.
• What about tourists, visiting the US from other countries? Surely the government isn't installing these expensive high-tech gizmos in every visitor. Every tourist is an opportunity for unmonitored sex. They're going to be the most popular people at every singles bar in the country. (They're also likely to be the victims of a vastly increased amount of rape and sexual assault.)

But even more than its minimization of its own enormous premise, what really drags the movie down is how conservative and anti-sex it ultimately is. Every attempt that either Owen or Allie does make to have sex goes horribly wrong, usually in humiliating fashion.; we don't actually see anyone in this movie having a happy night of sex. (Ringwald and Burton are as close as we get; they do seem to be enjoying themselves, but in ways that make them the butt of the joke.) We hear more than one character suggest that the pro-Mandate folks were right, and everyone really is better off waiting until marriage. Supporting characters are depicted as crass, disgusting lechers for being eager to have sex on the one night they're allowed ot do so.

It's anti-romance and it's not very funny. By my count, that makes it a flop on both halves of rom-com. Avoid at all costs.

MOVIES: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun)

As the opening credits play, Schoenbrun lays out in impressively concise fashion the history of the Camp Miasma slasher franchise: The unexpected success of the movie in the mid-80s led to cultural ubiquity – board game, video game, lunch boxes, magazine covers – and a long string of successively less successful sequels before the franchise faded into irrelevance. But recenly, film scholars and gender theorists have begun to reclaim and reevaluate the movie, despite its deeply problematic elements, and now the studio that owns it thinks it’s ripe for a reboot. A lesser filimmaker would have spent the first act laying in that 40-year history; Schoenbrun does it in a brilliantly edited sequence of about three minutes.

The studio is in talks with Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) to direct the reboot. She’s up for the job based on the strength of her first film, a Sundance smash (“it’s Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain”), and all she needs to land the job is a good pitch meeting.

What they’re hoping for is a straightforward prequel, laying out the story of the franchise’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven). Kris has something more complicated in mind, and is especially eager to confront the transphobia of the original. She’s arranged a meeting with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, in hopes of casting her in the reboot. Getting that meeting was an accomplishment in its own right. Billy turned down roles in the sequels and left acting. She now lives in seclusion at the same abandoned summer camp where the movie was filmed.

Kris and Billy are instantly drawn to one another, and as they discuss the movie – complete with a viewing of Billy’s own print, on film – a complicated psychological and sexual relationship evolves between them. The lines between reality and cinema begin to blur. As the two walk across the campground, the landscapes are occasionally replaced by obvious matte paintings, and Kris begins to get the sense that someone is watching them.

This is largely a two-hander for Einbinder and Anderson, and both are excellent. Anderson is having great fun, putting on a massive blonde wig and a broad southern drawl; it’s like a fusion of Dolly Parton and Gloria Swanson. As the women watch Camp Miasma, you can almost hear her thinking “I am big, it’s the sequels that got small.”

In the final act, as those lines separating Kris and Billy from the world of the franchise get even blurrier, the movie stumbles slightly. Its metaphors become overly broad and vague, and Schoenbrun gets carried away with the meta of it all. The movie doesn’t stick the landing as solidly as Schoenbrun’s last film, I Saw the TV Glow (a masterpiece).

But even if the ending falters a bit, this is still a very good movie. Smaller roles are smartly cast with an array of fine actors – Eva Victor, Dylan Baker, Patrick Fischler, Kevin McDonald, Sarah Sherman – largely used to provide sharp comic relief. Cinematographer Eric Yue does an expert job of recreating the look of mid-80s low-budget horror in the scenes from Camp Miasma.

If you’re averse to the gore of slasher movies, I should warn you that there is quite a lot of blood here. But I am also not a slasher guy, and I found that the gore here is so exaggerated, well past the point of plausibility, that it stops being scary. When the neck of a decapitated teen spouts a Bellagio fountain of blood 20 feet into the air, that’s not terrifying. It’s just gross and silly.

Hi!

This blog was active for about nine years, from late 2004 to late 2013, and has lain dormant ever since.

Now I'm reviving it.

I'll be focusing mostly on TV and movies this time around, though there may be occasional posts on books, music, or anything else that happens to grab my fancy.

The blogroll over on the left side of the page has been updated, and new posts will start appearing within the next few days. There won't be any set schedule, but I imagine I'll be posting a few times every week.

Welcome back, if you were a fan of In Which Our Hero 1.0, and welcome, if you're popping in for the first time!

MUSIC: LA Philharmonic, November 10 (Britten/Tovey/Shostakovich)

Bramwell Tovey, conductor
Alison Balsom, trumpet

The program:

• Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra
• Tovey: Songs of the Paradise Saloon
• Shostakovich: Symphony #5 

Tovey's trumpet concerto was not a premiere; it was something even rarer -- a piece of new music getting performed several years after its premiere by a soloist other than the one who premiered it. Songs of the Paradise Saloon is five years old now, and it's a spinoff of sorts from Tovey's opera, The Inventor, about the real-life Civil War-era con man Alexander Keith. One short scene of the opera finds Keith at Manhattan's Paradise Saloon, and Tovey has expanded some of the musical ideas from that scene into a concerto, in which the orchestra plays the role of the saloon's colorful denizens, and the trumpet plays the role of Keith, manipulating and maneuvering each of them. In musical terms, that becomes a sort of theme and variations, with the trumpet soloist bending, twisting, and altering the various melodies presented by the orchestra.

It makes for a fragmented and kaleidoscopic concerto, in which the soloist rarely gets a full-fledged melody, but is instead playing with fragmentary bits and pieces; there are frequent jazz influences, including a lovely passage in which Balsom and the orchestral brass, all muted, sound like a 40s swing band. As in any bar, multiple "conversations" are often happening at once, and they don't always quite mix; there's one striking passage where the oboes are playing a lovely waltz that's not really in the same key as the rest of the orchestra, and Balsom is ignoring them all with a series of frantic military fanfares.

The disjointed nature of the piece makes it hard to fully grasp on a single hearing; it's never unpleasant to listen to, and there are some fine moments, but I can't say that it ever gripped me strongly enough to make me long for a second shot at it.

The rest of the concert reminded me of how spoiled we are here in Los Angeles, where under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel, I've become so accustomed to thrilling performances that the merely excellent is almost a disappointment. Tovey's take on the Young Person's Guide was charming, and all of the Philharmonic's principals made the most of their moments in the spotlight. The Shostakovich was a solid, sturdy performance, but for most of the way, it felt slightly lacking; the Largo, for instance, had me thinking mostly of how heartbreaking it could be with a stronger conductor.

Tovey's interpretation came fully to life, though, in the final movement, especially in the coda, which was absolutely thrilling, and which brought the audience to its feet for a rousing ovation.

BOOKS: Two Boys Kissing, David Levithan (2013)

Over the course of a single weekend, we follow the lives of several high school boys who make up a cross-section of what it is to be a young gay guy today. A pair of exes engaged in a political demonstration; a couple in the comfort of mid-relationship; a couple who've just met; some singles who are coping (or not) with the stresses of being gay and alone.

The narrative voice is in the first person plural, made up of the ghosts of the generation of young men lost to AIDS. For me, one of the surviving members of that generation, that occasionally brought up tears, as I was reminded yet again of just how damned awful those years were, or as random words or turns of phrase would remind me of particular friends.

Levithan's characters capture what it feels like to be young; his narrators capture what it feels like to look back on youth. It's a powerful combination. And that narrative voice is a glorious thing to read, wise and insightful, sad without being bitter, missing their lives in all their joy and pain and confusion. There are thoughts, sentences, paragraphs, that I wish I could have heard at 15 or 16 (even if I suspect wouldn't have understood or believed them at the time). I loved this paragraph, for instance:

The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.

I'm curious to know what the YA audience for whom the book is written will make of that voice and that perspective. Do they know the history of that era well enough to understand it who these narrators are, and will it just come across as old guys preaching at them?

By the end of the book, the narrators are shouting out (to borrow Whitman's words) a "barbaric yawp" in celebration of life, demanding that it be lived and loved and fought for with every ounce of strength.

Stunning book, recommended with the highest possible enthusiasm.

MUSIC: LA Philharmonic, October 20

Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor
Anssi Karttunen, cello
women of the Los Angeles Master Chorale

The program:

• Debussy: Nocturnes
• Lindberg: Cello Concerto #2 (world premiere)
• Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

I have come to the conclusion that Debussy is a composer whose music I'm simply never going to connect to. It's well-crafted, and it's pretty, but for me, it's a very monotonous pretty, like staring at a canvas in eighteen impeccably chosen shades of beige, and it washes over me without making any real impression.

The Nocturnes are a bit more interesting than the other Debussy I've heard, I will admit. There are moments in the Fêtes movement that caught my ear, particularly a long crescendo that begins with timpani, harp, and brass, and the use of the women's chorus in the Sirènes movement is often lovely.

Magnus Lindberg's new cello concerto uses a small orchestra by contemporary standards -- double winds and horns; a single trumpet and trombone; no tuba, harp, keyboards, or percussion. The orchestral writing is dominated by the strings, though the brass have a few nice moments; they have a particularly lovely moment as the orchestra re-enters after the cadenza, playing a series of burnished dark chords.

It would, I think, take two or three more hearings to get a good grasp on how the concerto is put together. Those additional hearings would allow me to understand the piece better, and there are parts of it that I could even come to like; I doubt, though, that it would ever be a piece that I would love.

The highlight of the program was the Bartók, which I like to think of "Sugar Plum Fairies in Hell." It's a piece that mixes creepiness and brutality in fascinating ways, and Salonen brought out both in spectacular fashion. The percussionists were in fine form today, as they so often are, and the opening of the third movement was a highlight; the timpani playing blooping glissandos while the xylophone repeats a single note so insistently that you start to forget it's a pitched instrument and begin to hear it almost as a woodblock.

TV: Reign (Thu 9, CW)

It's 1557, and 15-year-old Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland (Adelaide Kane), is being shipped off to the French court to prepare for her eventual marriage to Prince Francis (Toby Regbo), a marriage which was arranged when they were six. But politics have changed in the last decade, and the French royals are no longer convinced that an alliance with Scotland is in their best interest. Mary is thrown into complicated intrigue and plotting for which nothing in life has prepared her.

The one person who seems to be entirely on her side is Francis' illegitimate half-brother, Sebastian (Torrance Coombs), known as Bash. Despite being a bastard, he is the favorite son of King Henry II (Alan Van Sprang), which is an immense annoyance to Queen Catherine (Megan Follows). Catherine is most definitely not on Mary's side, especially after her counselor, Nostradamus (Rossif Sutherland), tells her that according to his visions, Mary will literally be the death of Francis.

If you're looking to Reign for accurate history, you will be disappointed; Nostradamus was about 20 years older than the dashing young man we see here, and Bash is entirely a fictional creation. And since this is the CW, everyone is young and pretty -- bordering on interchangeably so in some cases, notably Mary's ladies-in-waiting -- and the focus is at least as much on everyone's love life as it is on international politics.

But if you're looking for a swoony, romantic fantasia on the life of the young Mary, Queen of Scots, then this might be just the thing. It's surprisingly well made; costumes and sets are reasonably stylish by broadcast TV standards; and while none of the actors are doing award-worthy work here, no one is embarrassingly awful, and Follows has a few nice moments as the show's reigning bitch/diva.

I have no idea whether this will appeal to the CW's young audience or not, but the CW is a network that doesn't generally produce a lot of backup shows, so it's likely to last for at least a few months.

BOOKS: Talking Hands, Margalit Fox (2007)

Imagine a group of children raised in isolation, whose caretakers do not speak to them, and who have no access to any spoken language. What sort of language would they develop among themselves, and what would it tell us about the way languages are created, or about the innate human instinct for language?

Obviously, this is not an experiment one could ever actually do, which is why linguists jokingly refer to it as "the forbidden experiment." But occasionally, circumstances arise that provide conditions as close to the forbidden experiment as one is ever likely to see, and Margalit Fox's Talking Hands follows a group of linguists as they explore one such rarity.

Al-Sayyid is an isolated village in Israel with a population of about 3,500 and an unusually high rate of genetically inherited deafness; one in 25 residents are deaf (1 in 1,000 is the typical rate). Because of their isolation, the villagers have developed their own sign language, and nearly everyone speaks it, whether they're deaf or not.

It's a new language -- the current generation of children is only the third generation to use it -- which makes it an ideal topic for study into how languages are created and developed. But the team is pressed for time, because the village becomes less isolated with every generation, and bits of Israeli and Arabic Sign Languages are already creeping into the language of those children; it's a bit of a challenge to find kids whose local language is still pure.

It wasn't that long ago, Fox tells us, that studying the sign language of Al-Sayyid would have been considered a waste of time, because sign languages weren't thought to be real languages at all. They were considered merely glorified pantomime, with none of the linguistic subtlety or complexity of spoken language. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that linguists began to realize that sign languages had their own syntax, grammar, and complex rules; and that they were every bit as thoroughly developed as spoken languages were.

Fox alternates between chapters showing the team of linguists at work, collecting data from the people of Al-Sayyid; and chapters on the history of sign language in general, with a focus on how our understanding of such languages has changed and deepend in the last fifty years.

I was particularly fascinated by a chapter on how strokes impact sign language. To oversimplify a bit, we know that language ability is controlled by the left side of the brain, and that dealing with spatial relationships is mostly controlled by the right side of the brain. Given that sign languages are almost always highly organized in space -- a sign made in front of the body might not mean the same thing as the same sign made to one side, for instance -- what happens to the ability to use sign language when a stroke injures one side or the other of the brain?

Fox has degrees in linguistics herself, and does a very good job of discussing the subject in layman's terms. I was fascinated by the history and the details about how sign languages work, and I enjoyed the book very much.