This is one of the best X-Files episodes of the entire run. Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose starred Peter Boyle as a grumpy man who has the psychic ability to see how individuals are going to die and he finds himself stuck in a murder investigation of a serial killer who is targeting psychics.
One of the greatest lines of the entire series was in this episode.
From IMDB:
Clyde Bruckman: You know, there are worse ways to go, but I can’t think of a more undignified way than autoerotic asphyxiation.
Fox Mulder: Why are you telling me that?
Clyde Bruckman: Look, forget I mentioned it. It’s none of my business.
Peter Boyle was absolutely perfect in this role, a down-on-his-luck insurance salesman who has been beaten down by life and by the visions of death that he sees. His sarcastic and snide remarks were extremely funny and were delivered beautifully. His chemistry with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson was tremendous.
Though there was some wonderful humor in this episode, it was also one of the darker episodes of the season. It blended the two tones together seamlessly.
Oh, and Bruckman indicated that Scully was not going to die, a quip he made that was carried through the series.
Definitely this is one of the best episodes of the show and one of the best episodes of TV of all time.
The final Saturday of the Genre-ary DailyView brought me the film Fame, from 1980, which inspired a TV show of the same name.
Fame is not a typical musical, but there are plenty of examples of movie where there was suddenly a dance number.
According to IMDB, “At the New York City High School for the Performing Arts, students get specialized training that often leads to success as actors, singers, etc. This movie follows eight students from the time when they audition to get into the school, through graduation. Among these are the brazen Coco Hernandez, shy Doris Finsecker, sensitive gay Montgomery MacNeil, and brash, abrasive Ralph Garcey.”
There was a solid cast including Irene Cara, Paul McCrane, Boyd Gaines, Laura Dean, Anne Meara, Barry Miller, Maureen Teefy, Debbie Allen, Richard Belzer, Lee Curreri, Eddie Barth, Albert Hague, Joanna Merlin, Jim Moody, Gene Anthony Ray, and Antonia Franceschi.
Each of the high school students (who looked like 25-30 year olds) had a story and a character arc. Some were better than others.
This was a decent film but it did have a disjointed feel to it at times. Easily the best number of the film was the title track, Fame, performed by Irene Cara. This was full of energy and easily my favorite part of the film.
Today’s Genre-ary DailyView film is 2007’s Once, an Irish musical/drama that is about as charming and sincere of a movie that you are going to find.
According to IMDB, “An unnamed guy (Glen Hansard) is a Dublin guitarist/singer/songwriter who makes a living by fixing vacuum cleaners in his Dad’s Hoover repair shop by day, and singing and playing for money on the Dublin streets by night. An unnamed girl (Markéta Irglová) is a Czech who plays piano when she gets a chance, and does odd jobs by day and takes care of her Mom and her daughter by night. Guy meets girl and they get to know each other as the girl helps the guy put together a demo disc that he can take to London in hope of landing a music contract. During the same several day period, the guy and the girl work through their past loves, and reveal their budding love for one another, through their songs.”
This was a beautiful film. Simple and well-told, Once had an amazing group of songs performed by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová are wonderful together. Hansard is a more experienced actor than Irglová, but she was every bit as excellent as he was.
The music was a major star of this film. A more modern musical, part of the movie was the creation and recording of these songs but our characters. I found those moments the most intriguing. The relationship in the film between guy and girl was different and surprising.
Written and directed by John Carney, Once is real, gritty and warm. Thoroughly entertaining, Once is a low-budget success that is exceptional to watch.
The Genre-ary is creeping toward a finish as we reach January 25th, and we pull out the Dick Van Dyke musical, Bye Bye Birdie, based on a stage musical.
According to IMDB, “Conrad Birdie is the biggest rock & roll star of the 60’s ever to be drafted. Aspiring chemist and song writer Albert is convinced he can make his fortune and marry his girlfriend Rosie if he gets Conrad on the Ed Sullivan show to kiss a high school girl goodbye. Albert’s mother will do anything to break him up with Rosie. Kim and Hugo, the high school steadies, live in Sweet Apple, Ohio where most of the action takes place“
Certainly, this is loosely based on Elvis Presley going into the army, as Conrad Birdie is very much like The King. Albert (Dick Van Dyke) is desperate for Birdie to sing a song he was trying to write. Rosie (Janet Leigh) hoped that the song would give Albert the ability to get away from his overbearing mother (Maureen Stapleton) and give Albert the strength to ask Rosie to marry him.
Fun songs throughout the film included “Put on a Happy Face,” “Kids,” and “Bye Bye Birdie.”
This was quite a fun little movie that was sweet and silly. It works as a family film, but its not the most compelling ever. It was fine.
It’s late in the day and I needed a film for the Genre-ary DailyView. The scheduled film for the day was Earth Girls are Easy.
According to IMDB, “Three furry (and funny) aliens travel around the universe in a spaceship and receive a broadcast showing human females. They are fascinated by these shapely creatures and discover that the broadcast came from Southern California on Earth. Meanwhile, Valley girl Valerie Gail feels her cold fiancé Dr. Ted Gallagher is slipping away and decides to seduce him. Instead, she catches him cheating on her with a nurse, throws him out, smashes his things and refuses to see him again. The aliens’ spaceship crash lands in Valerie’s swimming pool – putting a decided damper on her future wedding plans in Las Vegas. She brings them into her home; and the aliens prove to be quick learners and absorb American popular culture and language through television“
The movie had a surprisingly great cast including Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, Michael McKeon, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, Charles Rocket, Larry Linville, Rick Overton, and Julie Brown.
Julie Brown was introduced to me from the Dr. Demento Show with her classically inappropriate song, “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun.” Brown co-wrote this movie and performed several of the songs, the title track “Earth Girls are Easy,” “I Like ’em Big and Stupid,” and “Cause I’m A Blonde.”
This film is really simple and pretty stupid. It has some funny moments, but it is so crazy that it has a hard time keeping a consistent tone.
This is harmless, but just really dumb. Jeff Goldblum is always great. Jim Carrey was great here. Otherwise, it is a basic B movie with some funny songs.
I have made an adjustment to the Favorite Comic Cover of the Week. Starting this week, I will place a Top 3, giving a Bronze, a Silver and a Gold Medal for my favorite cover of the week.
BRONZE MEDAL WINNER
Boom! Studios
Slow Burn #4
Cover Art: Matt Taylor
Another great use of color gold and silver.
SILVER MEDAL WINNER
Image Comics
Bone Orchard: Tenement #8
Cover Art: Andrea Sorrentino
Love the design of the maze ahead of the face on the cover. The colors are a great blend too.
GOLD MEDAL WINNER
Marvel Comics
Resurrection of Magneto #1
Cover Art: Stefano Caselli & Jesus Aburtov
Variant Cover
Virgin Cover
This is an absolutely beautiful cover, using the negative space to show the red Magneto suit. This is the cover B of the new mini series from Marvel Comics.
I have really enjoyed this new series of the Percy Jackson shows on Disney +. Episode 7 has found Percy, Annabeth and Grover entering the Underworld, and in search of Hades in order to find the Master Bolt and save Percy’s mother.
It wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded.
Who knew, but the Master Bolt was inside Percy’s bag. However, it was not Percy’s bag, but Ares’s. Ares had some kind of manipulative reason that he needed Percy to bring the bolt to the Underworld. We don’t know why yet, but I always love to see Adam Copeland.
We see some flashbacks to Percy as a child with his mother trying to get him into schools. The schools kept turning her down because of the way Percy was. (I have to say… every time I have tried to type the word Percy, in my head, I think Harry. I wonder why…)
When Percy and Grover came face to face with Hades, they discovered Ares’s lies. Of course, Hades isn’t going to help them without something on the line.
We get a cool sequence with Cerberus too. The three headed dog that guards the Underworld chased our heroes around. The CGI looked really good for a TV show.
Percy and Ares faced off at the very end of the episode, setting up a huge showdown next week.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians has been excellent all season long. It does feel as if the show is a touch rushed, but it is a lot of fun.
Giovanni Ribisi and Jack Black showed up as guest appearances on the X-Files episode “D.P.O.”
Ribisi is Electro, who loved video games at the arcade, attracted to his former special needs reading teacher.
Okay, he’s not actually Electro, but he may as well be. He was struck by lightning and survived and somehow gained some electrical powers.
He was out to gain the love of his former teacher, played by Karen Witter.
It was a pretty decent episode because you were never sure what Mulder and Scully could do against Ribisi. Because of that, the intensity of the episode was high.
Today, for the Genre-ary DailyView, I went to Vudu and rented Shrek: The Musical. It is a recorded version of the stage show that was based on the Dreamworks movie, Shrek.
The story was fairly consistent with the Mike Myers movie. The costumes and designs of the characters and setting was fantastic and really took the stage show into an awesome look. It’s amazing with the creativity of the set designs that were able to bring this animated movie to life.
Brian d’Arcy James played Shrek the ogre and Sutton Foster played Princess Fiona. Both did an excellent job making these iconic characters their own.
The play had a whole new list of songs written for the show, although it did end with the I’m a Believer, just as the original movie did. The music was fun and clever, working very well for the story.
Daniel Breaker had a difficult job, trying to fill the shoes of Eddie Murphy as Donkey. He did a decent job in a role that was always going to be a challenge.
I really do like this type of film, showing a Broadway play as it is on the stage, much like they did with Hamilton and Kinky Boots. I would love to see more of these.
A school delay has given me the chance to do the Genre-ary DailyView this morning and the scheduled film today was the 1953 classic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.
There were not as many songs as I thought there might be, but the most famous one is clearly “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” as performed by Monroe.
The pairing of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell really worked well in this movie, as the entire bit depended on the chemistry between the two of them as unlikely friends. Marilyn Monroe’s character, Lorelei, loves diamonds and Russell’s Dorothy has a sarcastic head on her shoulders. The duo are the backbone of the movie.
There are some funny moments in the film, as they played the situations into fancy.
According to Rotten Tomatoes, “Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) is a beautiful showgirl engaged to be married to the wealthy Gus Esmond (Tommy Noonan), much to the disapproval of Gus’ rich father, Esmond Sr., who thinks that Lorelei is just after his money. When Lorelei goes on a cruise accompanied only by her best friend, Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell), Esmond Sr. hires Ernie Malone (Elliott Reid), a private detective, to follow her and report any questionable behavior that would disqualify her from the marriage.“
Director Howard Hawks provides a lavish production that can just barely stand up to the power of its two leading women. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell are so great together and they are absolutely the reason to see this movie.
So, after the weird and supernatural feel of the first episode last week, this week’s True Detective is a lot of procedural investigations, questions (both the right and wrong questions) and interactions among characters.
At the end of last episode, a ghost had led his former wife to a group of bodies frozen in the ice. Turned out they were scientists working at a station out in the Alaskan night.
How they wound up in a frozen pile, naked, with their clothes folded neatly in piles nearby.
I must say that when the hand broke off and the body screams, I jumped. One of them survived!
And it looked as if the scientists have some kind of connection to the case of Annie’s murder from six years before. There is a spiral tattoo that plays a prominent part this the mystery. Danvers and Evangeline (and a throwback to season 1).
Raymond Clark was not among the mass of frozen bodies, indicating that he might still be alive and out there.
Another week and the mystery is becoming bigger as we go. I enjoyed the characters quite a bit and I look forward to seeing where this goes next.
I wanted to finish off season two of the X-Files with the final two episodes. However, episode 25 “Anasazi” left off on a cliffhanger and dropped the old TO BE CONTINUED signal. So I decided to go ahead and watch season 3 episode 1.
Then, that episode did the same thing. It was so tense and anxious, that I had to go on to epside 2.
“Our Town” was a creepy small town that were killing people and eating them to keep themselves young. This was a truly weird episode with some frightening ideas in it. The masked fellow with the giant axe.
Meanwhile, the next three episodes all focused on the series’ underlying mythology and the governmental conspiracy about aliens and the projects that were being run on abductees. It was three episodes of intensity and a huge reminder how much I absolutely HATED Cigarette Smoking Man. Not just as hate him cause he is an awesome villain, but HATE him- please put a bullet in his head.
These three episodes saw the deaths of Mulder’s father and Scully’s sister. We also found out that Mulder’s father was involved in the projects from the 1950s. It is implied that he chose Mulder’s sister as an abductee.
I did not enjoy the spiritual visits Mulder had in this few episodes as they felt very clichéd. Plus, they did not look very good. They reminded us all that this was a 90s show.
The conspiracy felt so gigantic in this episode, but there were some small victories, such as Skinner telling CSM to “pucker up and kiss my ass.” The return and subsequent attempted killing of Krycek was very good too.
One has to feel for the families of Mulder and Scully as they are constantly in the line of fire or into the troubles up to their ears.
There was also a scene that got downplayed here, but leads to big things. It was when Scully discovered the chip in her neck. If I remember correctly, the removal of that chip is what triggered Scully’s bout with cancer.
Lots of great stuff here as the X-Files heads into their third season.
Because I felt as if I was cheating with the musical this morning (Ray really was not a musical), I decided to watch some short movies on YouTube to cover the bases. I did three of them.
“Taylor Swift-All Too Well: The Short Film” (2021)
“Incest! The Musical” (2011)
“Zombie Musical” (2011)
The Taylor Swift short was basically a song with a story being told over top of it. It is a music video. However, Sadie Sink did appear in the video as one of the main characters. I did enjoy the song, but, again, it most likely not a musical. The story of this collapsing relationship was sad and engaging. Sadie Sink is an excellent young actor.
Incest! The Musical was really fun, which I know it is an odd thing to say. A brother and a sister sing about their attraction for one another and how they don’t care what the world says about their relationship. This has some really clever lyrics on the songs satirizing a subject that everybody considers queesy.
Then, in 2011, in the middle of the zombie craze, Zombie Musical appeared. Basically the same idea that you have seen all over the place with zombie shows/movies, but with songs. This short was remade into the film “Anna and the Apocalypse,” which was fun and I watched during the first DailyView.
I watched Ray, the biopic of Ray Charles, starring Jamie Foxx, which lead to Foxx winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. However, it absolutely falls into the category that I spoke about at the beginning of the Genre-ary DailyView. It is not a musical.
It did have musical listed on the summary for the movie, but it is one of those movies that has music in it, is even about music, but is not a musical. I did say at the beginning of this month that I might not follow that rule as I was going through it and so I have broken it.
According to IMDB, “The story of Ray Charles (played by Jamie Foxx), music legend. Told in his adult life with flashbacks to his youth we see his humble origins in Florida, his turbulent childhood, which included losing his brother and then his sight, his rise as pianist in a touring band, him writing his own songs and running his own band, and then stardom. Also includes his addiction to drugs and its affect on his working life and family life.“
Jamie Foxx is sensational as the legendary performer. He seemingly brought back to life the larger than life character of Ray Charles Robinson, better known to the world as just Ray Charles.
The biopic sections of this movie are the best parts. Watching Foxx develop Ray through his relationships, his struggle to find the right sound, his drug habit and other problems was the standout of this film.
The music was used well, but I could have used more of it. It seemed to only give a flavor of the songs in the film. Again, another reason why I would not consider this a musical, necessarily.
I thought the weakest part of the movie were the daydreams/delusions that Ray would have flashing back to the traumatic event of his brother’s death. The appearance of water in his suitcase or on the floor were too cartoony for what the movie was trying to go for. This felt way too artsy for the story. The straight up flashbacks were considerably more powerful and more effective than that.
I do appreciate that the film did not shy away from some of the negative aspects of his life. Many of these types of musical biopics leave out major issues in favor of a more positive spin. We see Ray Charles and his drug addiction, which led to his arrest, and his extra-marital affairs, one which even gave him a son.
Along with Jamie Foxx, the strong cast included Regina King, Kerry Washington, Clifton Powell, Sharon Warren, Richard Schiff, Larenz Tate, Terrence Howard, Wendell Pierce, Bokeem Woodbine, and even Moonlighting’s Herbert Viola, Curtis Armstrong, himself. I was able to get past my dislike of that actor because of his Moonlighting role. Being fair, he did a solid job here.
This was a movie with a lot of good and some areas where I would have liked something different. Jamie Foxx is tremendous as are the rest of the cast (shout out to Kerry Washington for her role as Charles’s wife, Bee). Ray is a touch long and, not really a musical, but it is a solid film overall.
EYG- Embrace Your Geekness 