Today’s June Swoon 5 film was on Netflix and it was directed by Ron Howard. It was entitled Eden and it is based on a true story.
According to IMDB, “Based on a factual account of a group of outsiders who settle on a remote island only to discover their greatest threat isn’t the brutal climate or deadly wildlife, but each other.”
The cast was remarkably strong and their performances were all exceptional. The cast included Jude Law, Daniel Brühl, Sydney Sweeney, Ana de Armas, and Vanessa Kirby.
These actors brought what they could to the film, despite that their characters were not written with much depth and were basically surface level.
There were some solid scenes and watching these characters back stab each other was a fun watch.
Ana de Armas was tremendously intriguing as the Baroness. She was very manipulative and used her sexuality in some very creative manners.
Eden was a mixed bag. Great actors with solid performances, but the story and characters were lacking at times. It was not a terrible watch, but it could have been so much more than what we got.
Last year when the Academy Award nominations came out, there was one film among the Best Animated Feature category that I had never heard of before. It was a French film called Arco. I placed it on the list for the June Swoon 5 immediately.
I found it streaming on Hulu and watched it this morning with the English dubbed version. I typically am not a fan of the dubbed version, preferring the original voices. However, since it was an animated film, I decided it would not be as jarring as a live action dubbed film would be. Plus, the voice cast seemed very impressive with Will Farrell, Juliano Krue Valdi (who played young Michael Jackson in the biopic film, Michael), Mark Ruffalo, Natalie Portman, Andy Samberg, Flea, and America Ferrera.
According to IMDB, “In 2075, a girl witnesses a mysterious boy in a rainbow suit fall from the sky. He comes from an idyllic far future where time travel is possible. She shelters him and will do whatever it takes to help him return to his time.”
The voice of Iris, the young girl who discovered Arco, was done by Romy Fay, a talented voice actor and singer-songwriter.
The film has several underlying themes in the story that kind of take a back seat to the lost in time aspect for Arco and iris. Some of the characters do not have the depth that they required, but they do seem to work together to form a tapestry of color and creativity. The imagery of the rainbows are lovely and the friendship between Arco and Iris is sweet, even if the backdrop of the world is horrific.
The oddball trio, led by the voice of Will Farrell, feels like something right out of anime. In fact, this reminded me of a Studio Ghibli film, only considerably shorter.
Arco was an enjoyable enough film that had a good message with some amazing visuals. I can see why it received an Oscar nomination.
I repeat what I said earlier this week, I wish there were more examples of films like this. Not just adaptations of Broadway plays into film versions, but the actual play recorded live and put on the screen.
Earlier in the June Swoon 5, I watched Good Night, and Good Luck: Live From Broadway, which was starring George Clooney and it was awesome to see it in the way that it was shown on the Broadway stage. Today, I added another stage play filmed as it was to the list.
Merrily We Roll Along was a Tony-winning Broadway musical from Stephen Sondheim, including Tony-winning performances from Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe. It was available on Netflix and it has been waiting on my queue for June to begin.
According to IMDB, “Spanning three decades, the turbulent relationship between a composer and his two lifelong friends, a writer and a lyricist and playwright.”
The story is told in reverse chronological order, as we start at the point where the relationship between Franklin (Groff), Charley (Radcliffe) and Mary (Lindsay Mendez) was collapsing and we travel back over two decades through the play. It was a remarkable technique as it would make every scene from the past both hopeful and sad at the same time.
Jonathan Groff was sensational as the lead role of Franklin Shepard. His voice, as we have known from his roles in Frozen and Hamilton, is sublime. I did not know, however, that Daniel Radcliffe, our forever Harry Potter, could sing like he does here. In fact, one of my favorite songs was early in the play and I thought to myself, “Well, there’s why he won the Tony.”
The story itself was woven together beautifully, as it is not just writing the story normally and then reversing it. The foreshadowing from the scene of the past take on a new life in this order, meaning even more to the audience than if it were told in a typical structure.
I want more Broadway plays to be shot on film and shown nationwide, and with the proliferation of the streaming services out there, I wouldn’t think that there would be a lack of a forum for presentation.
I have had a pretty good run with the 2026 June Swoon 5. Ten really good, enjoyable movies so far. It is sad that had to come to an end, but I kind of expected it.
I have three movies I am going to today at Cinemark and so I needed a shorter movie. I just did a short yesterday and I wanted to avoid another right now. I found a film on Peacock that was only 1 hour and 20 minutes, that would work for the schedule. Unfortunately, it was Bambi: The Reckoning.
I have seen several of these movies. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, and Screamboat. Of those, I did not hate Screamboat as much as I hated the Winnie the Pooh movies, but it was not good by any stretch.
I gave it my best shot to come into this movie with an open mind, but that was wiped away early on.
According to IMDB, “A car wreck strands a mother and son in the deep woods where a mutated, vengeful deer stalks them. As local hunters and an obsessive grandmother converge, the forest becomes a bloody arena for a grieving creature’s primal rage.”
The writing on this is atrocious. I’m not sure that there is one redeeming character in the film. I was openly rooting for Bambi to kill these miserable excuses for human beings. Funnily enough, Bambi did not directly kill several of them.
The dialogue was basically yelling other characters’ names.
When most of these kills are funnier than scarier, you know you’ve got a problem. My favorite was the guy who got dragged behind a van as they were trying to escape from Bambi. What a completely random death.
There are some unintendedly funny moments and so little made sense. I could not bring myself to give this the “So Bad, It’s Good” ranking because there was just nothing good about it. Maybe if the RiffTrax crew would riff this, there might be something worth the time.
This may not sink to the depths of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey or its sequel, but it was nowhere near Screamboat. That is saying something.
Wednesday brought us another live action short film from 2025 for the June Swoon 5. This one I found on a list of the best short films of 2025 and it sounded the most interesting of the list. It was called Dirty Towel and it was a film by Callie Carpinteri.
A mother lectured her young daughter about sex, using the towel as a metaphor. She told her young daughter that having sex was like dirtying a new, clean towel and that you could never get it clean again.
Flash forward about 12 years and the girl, named Charlie, was having her first sexual encounter with a boy named Jack. After having sex, Charlie thought back to the words her mother spoke and had to deal with the feeling of shame.
At just over 12 minutes, Dirty Towel does a good job of displaying the inner shame people feel when they have done something that triggers that emotion. Charlie’s mind played tricks on her as she went through her normal routines and her own opinions were rough. They kept that dirty towel metaphor going throughout the short.
Emma Parks played Charlie and did a lot with the limited time.
The short was a solid film, with both humor and a strong message of self-acceptance.
It is interesting when a film about a stand up comedian is not really funny.
Is This Thing On? is more of a character study than a comedy. I would go as far as to say that there is less comedy in this movie than you would see in most films. Because it is not really about the comedy. It is about the relationship between Alex and Tess (played by Will Arnett and Laura Dern) than anything else.
According to IMDB, “As their marriage unravels, Alex faces middle age and divorce, seeking new purpose in the New York comedy scene. Meanwhile, his wife Tess confronts sacrifices made for their family, forcing them to navigate co-parenting and identities.”
Both Arnett and Dern do a great job with their individual characters, showing the cracks and frustrations of their marriage.
It is a slow burn of a movie, but it takes time to develop these two main characters and, because they do, the conclusion of the film works so much better.
It is directed by Bradley Cooper and he appeared as a supporting character in the film. In fact, Cooper’s character, Balls, was an odd character, bringing some levity to the film.
I was surprised with the tone of this movie. I expected more comedy than I got, but the film is still a very well written and acted movie. Arnett and Dern are great together and the film popped when they were sharing the screen. It was an unexpected tale.
Today’s June Swoon entry was a wild monster/thriller that I had never heard about before. It was entitled Dust Bunny, and I saw it on HBO Max.
What helped me pick the film out was seeing Mads Mikkelsen as the lead and Sigourney Weaver in a supporting role. Who knew that this was going to be a wild flick.
According to IMDB, “After losing her foster parents to a bedroom-dwelling beast, young Aurora hires her reclusive neighbor, a professional assassin, to hunt it, unknowingly thrusting him into a war against both human killers and supernatural terrors.“
The little girl, Aurora, was played by Sophie Sloan, who does an excellent job of presenting this little girl with a dark past and a serious attitude.
The monster is done very well too, keeping it fairly under wrapped for much of the film. It is not until the third act where we start to get a better glance of the monster. It did seem fairly practical of an effect too, which was a welcome bit for Hollywood today.
Mads Mikkelsen and Sophie Sloan were great together, elevating this movie’s script above a typical movie. They worked well together, showing some serious chemistry and some good laughs too.
This was a really weird movie. Think “Leon the Professional” if written by Roald Dahl and R.L. Stein. Hitmen and monsters do not necessarily go together, but this somehow fits wonderfully.
Today’s June Swoon 5 film was a documentary on Amazon Prime from last year that looked at the life and career of one of the most beloved actors/comedians of the past forty years, John Candy.
The doc started off with Bill Murray trying to come up with something bad to say about John Candy, and wishing the producers luck in their investigation to find some dirt on the man. It was a real funny kick off to the show and did a great job of pointing out how universally beloved men John Candy was.
There were a litany of stars who had nothing but amazing things to say about John Candy including Tom Hanks, Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Macaulay Culkin, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Andrea Martin, Steve Martin, Conan O’Brien, and Mel Brooks.
The doc does a great job of outlining how the death of John Candy’s father (when John was 5 years old) affected him as an adult, and how his behavior of drinking, smoking, eating led to his early death at 43.
It also showed what a lovely human being John Candy was and how much success he had as an actor, starting off with SCTV and ending as a movie star.
The doc also talked with John Candy’s family, his wife, his brothers, his son, and his daughter. They talked about the close relationship John Candy had developed with John Hughes, and how Candy wound up in 9 films from the director.
I liked John Candy, but I would never say that I was a huge fan of his, but I found myself tearing up at the end of the documentary, which tells you how well director Colin Hanks and the rest did with this doc. The story of them closing down a freeway in LA for John Candy’s funeral procession was amazing.
The doc is available on Amazon Prime and it moves at a brisk clip, moving through his way-too-short life and career. It is wonderful when you can look back on a person’s career and see only the good.
The Secret Agent was an Academy Award nominated film, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor , Best Casting and Best International Feature Film. Though it did not take any Oscars home, the film was an international success.
According to IMDB, “Amid the political turmoil of 1977 Brazil, a technology expert is forced into hiding and seeks help from the underground resistance as he tries to flee the country with his young son.”
Wagner Moura played Armando, a former professor who was involved in political bedlam during the Brazilian military dictatorship. Set in 1977, Armando traveled to Recife to see his son Fernando, and research his late mother, whom he did not remember.
There were assassins sent after him and there were several local problems he faced as well.
I had a difficult time following some of this movie as it was in Portuguese and the complex story kept me as the viewer off-center. I’m not ashamed to say that I was confused at time with what was going on. The film flipped time periods a couple of times and I was not sure what had happened,
There was a weird section of the film featured on a severed leg that had been found in a shark. This surreal scene was strange, but brought some levity to a difficult story. It sounded as if the scene had a deeper meaning.
The ending of the film was excellent and shocking. I was not expecting it. Wagner Moura was great in his role and certainly deserved his Oscar nomination.
This was originally a live broadcast of the Broadway play, Good Night and Good Luck on CNN and CNN International. I wish that there were more examples of this form, movie recorded as the Broadway play, so we could get more of an exposure to this type of entertainment.
I have been excited to see this since I put it on the Netflix queue and i figured the June Swoon 5 would be a perfect place for it.
This play showed the lead up and eventual confrontation between the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy and CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, as well as the journalists and news people behind the scenes at CBS.
I found this to be completely enthralling and totally thrilling. The play used videos of Joseph McCarthy as well as other important people of the time to help illuminate the story.
George Clooney starred as Murrow and he was excellent. A personal favorite of mine was also here, Clark Gregg, who was well known as Agent Coulson in the MCU. He played newscaster Don Hollenbeck. There was a scene in this play between Clooney and Gregg that was just amazing and showed off Gregg’s skills tremendously.
Glenn Fleschler played Fred Friendly and his relationship with Murrow was another part of this story. It was some of the best dialogue you will hear and consistently was both funny and poignant.
The only thing that was distracting for me was that fact that every time the character of Joe Wershba, played by Carter Hudson, spoke, it sounded like John Ratzenberger. That did not take away from his strong performance in the play, but it was something that I thought of every time he spoke.
I wish there were more of these type of films. Not just adaptations of stage plays, but actual stage plays as they are presented on Broadway. I would definitely go see something like this in a theater.
So the June Swoon film for the day is Rental Family, a film featuring Brendan Fraser. It was one that I thought about going to the theater to see, but it did not work out. I decided that I would save this one for June Swoon.
According to IMDB, “An American actor in Tokyo struggling to find purpose lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese “rental family” agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers. He rediscovers purpose, belonging, and the beauty of human connection.”
I am torn on this movie. Not because I did not enjoy it, because this was a beautiful movie filled with emotion and lovely exteriors and great performances. The problem I had was with the central concept of the idea of rental family, not the movie but the business that Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira) was running. He would send actors into situations to play relatives or friends or whatever to people who are emotionally challenged.
For example, in this film, Brendan Fraser played an actor named Phillip who was struggling with his career. He moved to Japan several years before and he joined in the company where he is sent into a situation where he was pretending to be the absentee father of a little girl, Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman). He was hired by her mother to help her get into a specific school.
The problem is they do not tell Mia that he is pretending and they pretend that he is her long, lost father, and they told Phillip that he needed to not get close to her. How is he supposed to do that, get to know her and not get close to her.
It just felt gross. I felt that these characters were so emotionally manipulated in this that it, as I said, felt gross.
However, so much of the movie is so wonderful that I kind of held my nose and moved along. To be fair, I think that it is gross is meant to be part of the themes of the film.
There is another storyline where Phillip is pretending to be a journalist interviewing a big time former actor Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto) which was a beautiful tale of friendship and life.
I loved the relationships Phillip developed with both Mia and Kikuo, which made his constant lies all the harder to watch. You can tell from Fraser’s excellent performance how the lies were affecting him as well.
While I had trouble with the concept of the film, everything else was amazing. I loved the story, the characters, the performances, the relationships and the chorography. Rental Family was an outstanding movie that made me feel icky at a few times.
I thought we’d start off day 3 of the June Swoon with some tears.
Wednesdays are always a challenge during the June Swoon because it is “new comic book day” and I head out to spend time at the two comic shops that I patronize. So I have to look for a movie that can fit into the time frame available. Many times that means I use a short.
In this case, I pulled up the 2026 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Short Film on Netflix, entitled All the Empty Rooms.
In this doc, we follow CBS newsman Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they travel around the country, documenting bedrooms of victims of school shootings.
In the short, we see the final four children’s bedrooms and hear from the families of the victims.
The four kids involved in this doc were Hallie Scruggs, Dominic Blackwell, Gracie Anne Muehlberger and Jacklyn Jaylen Cazares. According to Wikipedia, there were several others involved in Hartman’s project that were not shown in the doc.
The doc was directed and produced by Joshua Seftel.
This documentary was poignant and truly showed the pain and the love of these surviving family members and how much their loss affected their lives. It also showed how their love is everlasting, even years after the death of their children.
The second film in this year’s June Swoon is a comedy that combines the feel of Wuthering Heights and Downton Abby with Airplane! and Naked Gun.
According to IMDB, “A new porter forms an odd bond with the youngest daughter of a well-known UK family. As the Davenport family, headed by Lord and Lady Davenport, deals with the epic disaster of the wedding of their eldest daughter to her caddish cousin.“
While I compared this to Airplane! and Naked Gun, I think the comedy and writing in this is a little more subtle at times, and does not have the real, over-the-top type jokes of those two, which I liked quite a bit about this.
I will say that it took a bit of time to get the story going, but it was always very funny.
The cast was led by Thomasin McKenzie and Ben Radcliffe as Rose and Eric. They made a nice pair together and gave the odd cousin-thing a surprise twist. Other cast members included Damian Lewis, Hayley Mills, Tom Felton, Katherine Waterston, Jason Done, Emma Laird, Adam Woodward, Ramon Tikaram, Lily Knight, and Erin Austen.
The film was lightweight, but funny and funny can overcome plenty of flaws.
The June Swoon kicked off this year with a documentary that I watched for free on YouTube that I had heard about from film critic William Bibbiani. He had it as one of his favorite movies from 2025, which sounded strange considering it was a documentary about birdwatching.
I tell you what…this thing was one of the most entertaining documentaries I have seen in quite a while. I found myself engaged and laughing loudly multiple times throughout the nearly two hour run time.
Two brothers, Owen and Quentin Reiser, with zero birdwatching experience, decided to attempt a “Big Year” by traveling across the USA in a Kia minivan and listing as many species of birds that they could see.
A “Big Year” is a competitive birding challenge to spot as many bird species as possible across the Lower 48 United States in a single calendar year.
During the year, the Reiser brothers met many other birdwatchers along the way and these people were every bit as engaging as the birds that they were following.
Another major aspect of fun in this doc was the inexperience and the reactions of these two men. Their observations were hilarious which came from a place of unfamiliarity.
Several “listers,” which referred to a group of highly competitive birdwatchers who compile a list of the number of species that they see in a calendar year, trying to break the record of bird species seen, appeared on the documentary as Owen and Quentin came across them on their travels.
Some of these included Tammy and David McQuade, a married couple who recorded 700+ sightings in multiple consecutive years, and Ezekiel Dobson, a 19-year old who broke the record of birdwatching with 758 recorded sightings in 2024.
The unconventional manner that they undertook was one of the most enduring parts of the doc. They spoke about things like eBird, an app that helped identify birds, how Cracker Barrel would allow them to sleep in their parking lot for free, and the advantages and disadvantages of playback, recorded sounds of birds intended to attract the birds. It reminded me a lot of the old Squatch calls from Finding Bigfoot.
The Reisers planned on spending as little money as they could, so they even went as far as attempting to build their own boats, to varying degrees of success.
This had no right to be as entertaining as it was, bit Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching was a great film to kick off the fifth annual June Swoon.
I finished off the original Toy Story trilogy tonight by watching Toy Story 3 on Disney +. Toy Story 3 is one of my all-time favorite animated films. It is top 3 for sure, if not number one. It had been too long since I have seen it. After the viewing tonight, I can say with certainty that this remains an all-time classic.
Andy has grown up and is about to head off to college, which means that he has to make a decision about what he is going to do with his toys. When they accidentally get thrown out, the toys decide to get themselves donated to a daycare. However, the daycare turned out to be nowhere near as awesome as they thought it would be.
There are a couple of reasons why I loved this movie as much as I did. First up was the arrival of what I consider one of the greatest Disney villains of all time in Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, voiced by the iconic Ned Beatty. Lotso was such an evil character, but I could completely understand his story. I thought his origin story, which was told in flashbacks, was just perfection. Everything that Lotso did was relatable because of the trauma of being lost and replaced. It turned him bitter and angry, something that he never got over.
The second thing that made me love this movie was one of the most dramatic and suspenseful scenes you are going to get in any movie, let alone a Pixar kids movie. The scene where Woody, Buzz and all of the others were in the incinerator, slowly moving toward the flames. When I first saw that scene in the theaters, I actually couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t see a way out for them and I truly thought that the film was going to send them all to a fiery grave. This time, I saw the foreshadowing with the little aliens on how they get rescued, but when I first saw this in 2010, I was sure they were all goners. It was one of the most effective scenes I had ever scene and one of Pixar’s greatest.
Thirdly, the final scene with Andy and Bonnie was spectacular, filled with real emotions, that couldn’t help but bring tears to my eyes. It was so beautifully written that you just can’t help it.
Another brilliant scene was the escape plan organized by Woody to get out of the daycare. The plan revealed some amazing skills for the different toys involved. Everybody had an important role to play and the ending of it with the confrontation with Lotso was such an amazing moment.
Buzz getting turned back into the Space Ranger and then eventually to the Spanish version was hilarious. Tim Allen does a great job voicing that character. It was wonderful to get the voices back for Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, John Ratzenberger, Wallace Shawn, Estelle Harris, Jodie Benson, Laurie Metcalf, and John Morris.
We got some new voices too. Michael Keaton joined the cast as Ken, Barbie’s boy toy. Blake Clark replaced Jim Varney as Slinky Dog after Varney’s death in 2000.
This is a masterpiece of a film, filled with heart, emotion and a connection to one’s things that everyone can relate to. Toy Story 3 is easily my favorite of all the Toy Story movies and right up there with Into the Spider-Verse and Inside Out.
EYG- Embrace Your Geekness 