"His Dark Materials," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.

I've been looking forward to this latest season of "His Dark Materials" for a while, because this is a series where I genuinely have no idea what happens next in the story. While the first season was a little bumpy and lackluster at times, it was also clearly setting up bigger events to come, and I wanted to see where it would go.  Immediately, the second season is an improvement on the first, more focused and smaller scale. Lyra crosses over from the frozen North into the almost empty city of Cittàgazze, where she meets Will Parry (Amir Wilson), who has similarly crossed over from contemporary Earth.  They use Cittàgazze as their secret hideaway that they can retreat to while exploring Will's world and learning more about Dust, Will's missing father (Andrew Scott), and the "Subtle Knife," a weapon that can create portals between the different worlds.  

We also continue to follow Mrs. Coulter, Boreal, and Lee Scoresby, whose storylines are all greatly expanded from the books, but also tighter and more interesting to follow this year. Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) was reportedly also supposed to have an entire POV episode to himself, but COVID cut the production short, leaving the season with a very abrupt ending at seven episodes instead of eight.  Otherwise, the season looks gorgeous, with more screen time for the daemons, more beautiful fantasy environments, and more impossible creatures and concepts brought to life.  Cittàgazze is prowled by sinister spectres who look like living plumes of smoke, and provide some of this season's best visuals.  Several of the characters really gel at last, like Will and Boreal.  Lin Manuel-Miranda is especially good this year as Lee Scoresby, and it may be the best performance I've ever seen from him.  

This is a much more satisfying season to watch than last year, because it pays off its character and plot developments more regularly.  Boreal is no longer hanging around the edges of the story, but becomes a central antagonist.  Mrs. Coulter and Lee Scoresby are able to accomplish major goals and reveal some shades of gray.  The most significant new character is Dr Mary Malone (Simone Kirby), a physicist who Lyra meets in Will's world, which inspires Dr. Malone to go off on her own journey of discovery.  All of these characters' paths intersect in various ways, and the stakes of their interactions are clearer and more interesting.  Two of the season's best scenes involve Mrs Coulter being shown in a more sympathetic light - one where she interrogates Lee Scoresby, and another where she meets Dr. Malone.  In addition to giving Ruth Wilson more opportunities to seethe wonderfully, they have so much impact because they do so much character building, world building, and hammer home some of the series' big themes too.  

Things do get rushed and messy in the final episode, almost certainly because of the lost eighth episode.  The clashes between the Magisterium and the witches mostly fall flat, because the witches continue to be the show's dodgiest players.  Its difficult to parse the rules for their powers, their personalities are awfully stilted, and I had trouble telling them apart because of all the murky action scenes that take place at night.  They're important in setting up the big oncoming conflict that will be central to the next season, so I hope we'll see some improvements as Will and Lyra interact with them more.     

And I do look forward to next season.  "His Dark Materials" had such a big jump in quality this year that I'm thrilled that the creators will have a chance to finish the series on their own terms.  I'm fully convinced that long form television serves the story here much better than the originally envisioned film trilogy, and I'm very attached to these versions of the characters, especially Lyra and Mrs. Coulter.  However, given the complications and demands of the production, I expect it'll be a long time before we get to see the final chapter.

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"The Undoing" Keeps Us Guessing

Mild spoilers ahead.

It's hard to watch "The Undoing" without thinking of the last miniseries David E. Kelly wrote for HBO, "Big Little Lies," which also happened to star Nicle Kidman.  We're back in the world of the privileged elite, who coexist nervously with the less fortunate, and are all too aware of the outsized scrutiny they attract.  This time Kidman plays Grace Fraser, a psychologist married to a celebrated pediatric oncologist, Jonathan (Hugh Grant).  They have a son, Henry (Noah Jupe) who attends a posh Manhattan private school with a boy named Miguel (Edan Alexander).  It's Miguel's beautiful mother Elena (Matilda de Angelis), whose appearance in Grace's world signals the end of her seemingly perfect life.  Soon Elena is brutally murdered, and Jonathan is the main suspect.

"The Undoing" runs for six episodes, directed by Susanne Bier, who does an excellent job of maintaining the tension and ambiguity of the characters through the entire series.  I can think of no better compliment than to admit that I wasn't sure who the murderer was until the last episode.  However, the point of the show isn't figuring out whodunnit, but wrestling with the doubt that keeps rearing its head.  We're put into the headspace of Grace, who is desperate to hold her family together, and is perhaps a little too willing to believe that her charismatic, unstable husband could never do the things he's accused of doing.  And while Nicole Kidman is very good here, it's definitely Hugh Grant who steals the show.  Jonathan Fraser is such a bundle of contradictory information, but it all comes down to Grant's performance.  He's sympathetic and charming and so good at putting on a show that you want to believe him, even when everything he says is improbable.

I like how the show's creators use the common tropes of the mystery genre against the audience.  We've been so primed to expect twists and turns and secrets in these kinds of stories, the red herrings are often irresistible.  Why is Grace's father, played by Donald Sutherland, so adamantly against helping Jonathan?  Surely Elena's husband Fernando (Ismael Cruz Cordova) knows more than he's letting on about the night of the murder.  Or what about Grace's best friend Sylvia (Lily Rabe), who seems to know everything about everyone?  Or what about Grace herself, who has clearly been under a lot of strain?  David E. Kelley only has to make the most innocuous suggestions, and the speculation easily runs rampant.  There are two episodes that end on juicy pieces of evidence being uncovered, which aren't actually what they seem.      

"The Undoing" is highbrow melodrama, and indulges in all kinds of courtroom theatrics  and soap opera logic that wouldn't pass muster in a more grounded kind of legal thriller.  The media scrum is milked for all it's worth.  However, if you can suspend disbelief, it's such fun to see the court battles unfold, and the big name cast getting into these juicy performances.  The Grants hire a lawyer named Haley Fitzgerald (Noma Dumezweni), who is a standout in the later episodes for her no-nonsense, breathtakingly cynical way of operating.  I love how she clearly figures out the truth long before Grace does, but that it wouldn't matter one way or another to her legal strategy.  I love that the POV shifts unexpectedly between different characters, especially in the finale where we finally get inside Jonathan's complicated head.   

Viewers who are expecting a more typical, fast-paced mystery show may be disappointed with "The Undoing," because it's another kind of animal entirely.  It's far more of a psychological thriller, one that gets a lot of its power from an unusual amount of slow, deliberate character and worldbuilding.  So much is implied here without being made explicit - the obvious class difference and power imbalance between Grace and Elena's families, the insular private school culture, and everyone's use of social media.  In hindsight, the first episode is less about introducing Grace than it is about establishing Elena's motives, a woman who desperately wants to be part of the Frasers' world, but is marked as an outsider from her first appearance.

Was six hours really necessary to tell this story, though?  Probably not, but I enjoyed every minute of them.  

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"Wonder Woman" Makes an '80s Movie

 I feel the best way to think about "Wonder Woman 1984" or "WW 1984" is to imagine that it was actually made in 1984, the year that brought us "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," "Romancing the Stone," "Conan the Destroyer," and "Supergirl."  Lots of cheese, lots of winking at the camera, lots of bright colors, and lots of excess.  The usual DC fanboys are up in arms because "Wonder Woman 1984" has very messy plotting, and leaps in logic that often defy gravity, much like its heroine.  As escapist action-adventure fare, however, it works just fine.

Being set in the '80s gives Patty Jenkins and her crew the opportunity to poke some fun at the age of parachute pants and video game arcades.  More importantly, the '80s embrace of shopping mall consumerism and mass media provides some nice thematic context to the story, which involves the discovery of a magic rock that grants wishes.  Diana (Gal Godot) works for the Smithsonian at her day job, and still fights crime in secret.  She comes across the magic rock when her colleague, a nerdy nebbish named Dr. Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), receives it from the FBI as part of a lot of stolen goods that need identifying.  Soon the Gordon Gekko-like entrepreneur Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) shows up, looking for the rock, which he intends to use for his own greedy ends.  The rock's powers soon bring Diana's lost love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back from the dead, and set Barbara on a path toward empowerment and supervillainy.

Like most recent superhero films, "WW 1984" is built around its fancy action set pieces, loosely connected with a semblance of a story.  So Diana gets a big sequence in Egypt, beating up a convoy of trucks and tanks, a brawl with Barbara in the White House, and a big climactic clash at a mountain stronghold wearing a new set of shiny golden armor.  How we get from point A to point B to point C is not particularly elegant.  However, what "WW 1984" does manage fairly well are its character arcs, and using the action scenes to emphasize character progression, even if the plot is full of obvious holes.  We open with a pricey-looking flashback scene to Diana as a child, competing with the Amazon warriors on Themyscira and getting an early lesson in why cheaters never prosper.  There's also a fun bit involving Wonder Woman's famous invisible jet - though it's best not to think too hard about how she got the jet or how Steve figured out how to fly it.

I came away from "WW 1984" satisfied, because I felt that it did right by its four major characters - Diana, Steve Trevor, Maxwell Lord, and Barbara Minerva.  None of the actors are very especially good in the movie, with Chris Pine's WWI vet discovering the '80s schtick easily the best performance of the lot, but everyone is trying very earnestly to good effect.  Kristen Wiig and Pedro Pascal both have flimsy, evildoer characters who they nonetheless manage to imbue some genuine pathos into.  Gal Gadot, unfortunately, is less successful this time around at making Diana interesting to follow, but she still handily delivers on the action and spectacle scenes.  As for Chris Pine, it may have been an outrageous cheat to bring him back, but the movie benefits significantly from his comic timing and charm.  

Moreover, I liked what the movie wanted to say and wanted to be, even if the execution was often awkward and clunky.  The twist on the monkey's paw scenario is interesting.  The messages about upholding truth against wishful thinking and self-delusion are timely and well-considered.  There are some tonal issues, and the two and a half hour runtime is excessive, but when the movie is leaning into the camp and the humor, it's as good as anything DC has made in the last few years.  It's not remotely as good as the first "Wonder Woman," despite the heftier price tag, but it's perfectly suitable for all your superhero blockbuster needs. 

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"The Witches" and "The New Mutants"

Okay, continuing the HBO Max binge, I guess I should write something about "The Witches," since it was one of my most anticipated titles for last year.  This is a new film adaptation of the Roald Dahl book, directed by Robert Zemeckis, with a big list of great creative people both behind and in front of the camera.  The cast includes Anne Hathaway as the evil Grand High Witch, pitted against Octavia Spencer as our young hero's wonderful Grandmother.  The screenplay is credited to Zemeckis, Kenya Barris, and Guillermo Del Toro.  So I think I can be excused for having some high expectations for this film.

To their credit, the filmmakers make some good and interesting choices.  The action has been moved from Scandinavia to the American South circa 1968.  The heroic young Boy (Jahzir Kadeen Bruno) and his Grandmother are African-American, and there are some lovely early scenes of the two bonding in the wake of tragedy.  However, the filmmakers also make some regrettable choices.  There are the wraparound scenes with Chris Rock that are awful.  There is the heavy, heavy emphasis on CGI imagery and broad slapstick once the witches enter into the picture.  Maybe I've been watching too much "Lovecraft Country," but you'd think the film would do something with the new racial dynamic of the characters and the Southern Gothic setting.  This version keeps Dahl's original, bittersweet ending, but then promptly undercuts it with goofy antics. 

This feels like a film that was intended to be dark and strange and unsettling - and you occasionally see hints of that here and there in "The Witches."  However, this impulse has been totally subsumed by more kid-friendly, pandering elements that trade in real scares for humorous grotesquerie.  I like Anne Hathaway's campy Grand High Witch performance very much, but she's not frightening.  The transformation sequences look silly instead of alarming.  While the CGI enables some impressive visuals, the design choices leave a lot to be desired.  There are mouse characters in the film, voiced by Codie-Lei Eastick and Kristin Chenoweth, who are far too anthropomorphized.  The film ends up looking and sounding very much like every other overly bright,  overly colorful, overly cartoonish fantasy adventure aimed at small children of the past decade.  I hesitate to be too harsh, since I'm clearly not the target audience for this one, but it's a disappointment all around.  Even Stanley Tucci as an unwitting hotel manager looks lost here.

Now, on to the long-delayed "The New Mutants," which takes place in the "X-men" universe, and follows five troubled teenage mutants who have been sent to a specialized hospital facility overseen by the mild-mannered Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga).  A good collection of young actors have been assembled to play the mutant kids.  Our lead is Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt), a Cheyenne girl whose entire reservation was wiped out by some unseen force.  She's quickly befriended by Rahne (Maisie Williams), who can turn into a wolf and hybrid wolf-girl, and bullied by Illyana (Anya Taylor-Joy), who can teleport and grow a sword out of her arm.  Rounding out the group are Sam (Charlie Heaton), a literal human cannonball, and Bobby (Henry Zaga), an entitled Brazilian who overheats in destructive ways.

Fox originally sold this film as a merging of the superhero and teen horror genres, but chickened out in the execution.  For a horror film, this is  very tame and plays like a PG-13 installment of "Nightmare on Elm Street."  However, I like it as a superhero film, though one that's leaning hard on teen movie cliches.  It's good to see the usual origin story formula shaken up a little, and it makes it all the more upsetting that Disney's merger with Fox means the end of the cinematic "X-men" universe, and this kind of experimentation.  I mean, Disney is never going to be gutsy enough to have one of their Marvel films lead by a LGBT Native-American teenager.  Or heavily imply trafficking and sexual abuse in the backgrounds of other characters.

That said, the film clearly went through a shaky production, and seems to have spent the vast majority of its budget on effects.  The cast is limited, and mostly stuck in a single location for the entire film.  There are sequences where footage appears to be missing, and awkward edits abound.  The performances are also uneven - bad accents are endemic - and unfortunately the greenest actors get the most screentime.  That said, for all its deficiencies, I found the film an easy and enjoyable watch, and I'm sad the planned sequels will not be forthcoming.

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"Raised by Wolves" Raises the Bar

The premiere episode of "Raised by Wolves," which was directed by Ridley Scott, is one of the best pieces of high concept science-fiction media I've seen in ages.  Most of the hour follows two androids, the white-skinned, strong-willed Mother (Amanda Collin), and the dark-skinned, more good-natured Father (Abubakar Salim) as they arrive on the planet of Kepler-22b with a group of precious human embryos who they have been programmed to protect and nurture.  The youngest of the children they raise is a boy named Campion (Winta McGrath), who is roughly aged eleven by the end of the episode.

It was a canny decision by creator Aaron Guzikowski to make the androids the main characters of "Raised by Wolves."  They speak and behave in a very detached, alien way, and are able to approach all kinds of moral and philosophical quandaries with a certain analytical distance.  They have emotions, and they're very sympathetic and even lovable at times, but there's a pronounced otherness to them that the show maintains all the way through to the end.  Though the production values are wonderful, most of the effectiveness of the show comes down to the excellent performances of Collin and Salim.  Mother in particular is an instantly iconic character, merciless and rigid when it comes to fulfilling her directives, but also warm and open-hearted when she's interacting with the children.  

Little by little, more and more is revealed about the group's circumstances.  We learn that the androids left a war-torn Earth where most of humanity was destroyed.  We learn that they were sent by one group, the Atheists, and reached Kepler-22b in advance of the religious Mithraics, who worship a god called Sol, and decided to send their survivors aboard a larger, slower-moving Ark.  We learn that Mother has certain hidden capabilities that are revealed upon the arrival of the Ark, and that Kepler-22b has its own mysteries to unravel.  A second major narrative emerges involving Caleb (Travis Fimmel) and Mary (Niamh Algar), a pair of Atheist soldiers who found a way to sneak aboard the Ark in disguise.  We also follow some of the children from the Ark, including the son of the ship's captain, Paul (Felix Jamieson), and a teenage girl named Tempest (Jordan Loughran), who secretly hates the Mithraics.

As the first season rolls on, the show falls into the more typical pattern of cat-and-mouse games as the androids and the Mithraics engage in hostilities, while the kids are caught in the middle trying to sort out complicated allegiances. Some of the conceits are very old hat, like a Mithraic prophecy of a chosen one that might refer to Campion, or Paul, or Caleb.  There's a lot of business with mysterious voices and visions in the second half of the season, when the pace slows down.  I appreciate that the show aims to be respectful of religious impulses, but few of the spiritual elements in the show work very well, aside from some of the broader symbolism.  None of the Mithraic true believers are given much depth, and the Caleb storyline drags considerably.

On the other hand, "Raised by Wolves" is willing to tackle some pretty wild material that no other science fiction program has ever gotten near, and I like how it handles difficult subjects.  There's a lot of violence in this show and some sex, but little of it is graphic.  Children are constantly put in danger and die, but we never see them harmed directly.  The body horror is constant, and very tactile, but when it's happening to the androids, that softens the impact just enough.  The show is very good about showing what it needs to show, and getting the wow factor from the great effects and environments.  However, it also knows when to pull back and let the viewer's imagination fill in the blanks.  

I'll add a warning that the series looks like hard science fiction, but it's not.  As it goes on, the show becomes more fantastical, nothing about the alien planet makes any sense, and the religious allegory becomes far more pronounced.  However, I can't help but love that the show goes so big, that it's about ideas and conflicts with some real weight behind them.  "Raised by Wolves" has plenty of faults, but its operating in the realm of the old school science-fiction stories I grew up with, and have been waiting far too long to see onscreen.  So, let's see where this goes.      

      

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Exploring "Lovecraft Country"

I have never seen a show like "Lovecraft Country" before.  It's a genre program that is very aware of its status as a genre program, full of the occult, ghosts, magic, demons, and time travel.  However, it is also very deliberately a story about African-Americans inhabiting roles within those genre stories that are usually reserved for white protagonists.  There's a ton of pointed commentary about the history of African-American oppression, and the show often contrasts the supernatural monsters with the even more frightening monsters of real life racism and bigotry.   

Taking place in the 1950s, we follow Tic Freeman (Jonathan Majors), recently returned to Chicago from the Korean War, his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), and Tic's childhood friend Leti (Jurnee Smollett) as they take a cross country road trip into hostile areas where Jim Crow laws are still in effect.  They discover that Tic has a mysterious heritage connected to a group of cultists, including the sinister Christina Braithwaite (Abbey Lee) and her minion William (Jordan Patrick Smith).  This sparks a series of adventures that affect all of Tic's family and friends.  Each episode highlights different characters, including George's wife Hippolyta (Aunjanue Ellis), and daughter Diana (Jada Harris), Leti's sister Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku), Tic's long estranged father Montrose (Michael K. Williams), and Ji-Ah (Jamie Chung), a Korean nurse Tic met during the war.

There's a season-long storyline about Tic and Leti trying to learn more about magic and the Braithwaites, culminating in a big final standoff.  However, that's probably the least interesting part of the show.  "Lovecraft Country" functions as an anthology of different kinds of genre stories.  One episode features a haunted house, another is a body horror romance, one is a cosmic adventure, and one involves time travel.  The creators prove to be wildly ambitious and never afraid of taking big swings.  Sometimes the show falls on its face.  Sometimes the results are only so-so  However, roughly half of the episodes are flat-out fantastic television, a potent combination of genre tropes, unblinking examination of the history of American prejudice, and some deep dives into the scarred psyche of Black America.  There is nothing subtle about this, with the repeated use of anachronistic music, civil rights speeches, or even snippets of interviews paired with the action.  We get loads of references to figures from Black history of the era, including cameos from Jackie Robinson, Emmett Till, and Josephine Baker.  A rousing version of "Sinnerman," sung by Alice Smith, plays over the closing credits.

The show was developed by Misha Green, based on a novel by Matt Ruff.  H.P. Lovecraft fans may be disappointed to find that Lovecraft's work has little to do with the series directly.  Instead, "Lovecraft Country" borrows elements from his works, including some of the famous monsters, to tell its own story, subverting some of Lovecraft's notoriously racist narratives in the process.  And thanks to the involvement of HBO, the series looks absolutely gorgeous, and can be as R-rated as it wants.  There's a lot of beautiful gore in this show, healthy amounts of sex, and very out-of-this world imagery. The cast is stellar, with Jurnee Smollett standing out as the fiery Leti.   It's so heartening to see major resources being committed to a show like this, which is vehemently about the Black experience on its own terms.  It's not afraid of being too angry or too aggressive in its views, and it's wonderful.      

The anthology format does make for a rather disjointed season, and occasionally the creators bite off far more than they can chew, cramming too many concepts and characters into too little time.  The show raises the issues of the black LGBT experience, and colorism, for instance, but doesn't really have the time to explore them in much depth.  I'm glad that Ji-Ah was part of the show, but outside of her spotlight episode she's an odd presence in the story.  Nonetheless, there is so much passion and so much wild creativity on the screen, and the themes are so potent, when the material does work, it's magic.   It's my sincere hope that "Lovecraft Country" doesn't end up being a fluke, and we get more media in this vein for years to come. 

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My Top Ten Films of 1961

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

Breakfast at Tiffany's - Audrey Hepburn was a star before this, but "Breakfast at Tiffany's" made her an icon.  Frankly, the story is wildly outdated and sometimes in very poor taste (ahem, Mr. Yunioshi), but Hepburn's Holly Golightly is one of the greatest cinematic characters who ever existed, the template for all future  winsome manic-pixie-dream creatures.  And writer Dalton Trumbo and director Blake Edwards ably manage the balancing act of turning a fairly dark story into an utterly effervescent romance.      

101 Dalmatians - One of the best of Disney's '60s features.  It looks simple and uncomplicated on the surface, but was responsible for a whole host of technical innovations behind the scenes.  However, it's the charm and well-observed performances provided by the animators that really make the picture.  Those who make jabs about absent Disney parents clearly never met Pongo and Perdita, and who could ever forget the funniest, most outrageous Disney villainess in the pantheon, Cruella DeVil?

Yojimbo - And so it begins.  This was the Akira Kurosawa film that was so memorable, it spawned multiple copies and imitators that went on to be classics themselves, including "A Fistful of Dollars" and "Django."  Toshiro Mifune shines in one of his signature roles, the ronin who plays both sides walks away from the carnage alone in the end.  As with many of Kurosawa's samurai films, the storytelling is so clear, and the filmmaking so strong, the film easily transcends culture, language, and history.

La Notte - The second of Michelangelo Antonioni's trilogy on "modernity and its discontents," is about a disintegration marriage between characters played by Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni.  However, what the picture is really remarkable for is its alienating portrayal of the modern world mirroring his characters' emotional lives.  Antonioni creates all these environments full of absences and ambiguities.  Boredom, doubt, and distance have rarely been evoked so skillfully.

The Children's Hour - The filmmaking is fairly sedate, and the material doesn't have the nerve I wish it did, but I love the performances.  The adults, lead by Shirley McClaine, are very good, but it's the two girls played by Karen Balkin and Veronica Cartwright who I thought were really interesting.  Children on film were rarely portrayed with so much candidness and complexity.  Balkin's Mary is especially upsetting, a bully and manipulator whose destructive behavior is uncomfortably true to life.   

Judgment at Nuremberg - A big screen dramatization of the military tribunals convened against the Nazi regime.  It was one of Stanley Kramer's big social justice pictures, full of big names, showstopping monologues, and grand ideals.  It's about as subtle as a hammer, but the scale of the filmmakers' ambitions and the willingness to tackle sensitive material is very admirable.  I find it also works better if you treat the players as allegorical representations of certain ideas, rather than specific individuals. 

Through a Glass Darkly - A small, intimate family drama about madness and faith, introspection and guilt, from Ingmar Bergman.  We spend a day with the characters on a remote, bleak island, where a schizophrenic woman sees visions and threatens to drag other family members into her delusions.  The film is minimalist and simple, but the symbolism is endlessly fascinating and evocative.  Even relayed secondhand, some of Bergman's most effective nightmares are found here, just offscreen.    

A Woman is a Woman - This has been described as Jean-Luc Godard's take on the Hollywood musical form, using many playful filmmaking tricks and conceits inspired by song and dance numbers.  It's his first film in color!  He uses widescreen!  However, in most ways it's still a French New Wave film, about a trio of young people being irreverent and playing love games with each other.  Fortunately Anna Karina, Belmondo, and Brialy are all terribly endearing here, and easy to love.  

Pocketful of Miracles - I'm a sucker for a good Cinderella story, and I found I couldn't resist the charms of Frank Capra's very last film, a remake of his 1933 picture "Lady for a Day."  The Cinderella in question is an elderly peddler, played by Bette Davis, who is  made up into a wealthy socialite by her street friends to impress her future in-laws.  Most critics and audiences of the time disliked it, but I was charmed by Peter Falk's exasperated hoodlum or Davis's heartwarming transformation.

The Absent Minded Professor - Disney has been making big effects spectaculars longer than you'd think, and one of their most delightful is this Fred MacMurray comedy.  It's full of funny ideas and set-pieces, using old school special effects for great visual gags.  My favorite scene is the flubber-ized basketball game, which sends the players into the rafters.  This and its sequel, "Son of Flubber" were childhood favorites, which I remember for their sweetness as much as their silliness.    

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