Here is what I watched and read last week...
MOVIES
Minions & Monsters (2026), directed by Pierre Coffin, is a very good and funny movie about the minions going to Hollywood. This was my first time watching a Minions movie, and I enjoyed it very much. The references to Hollywood are hilarious, and the animation is outstanding. What struck me was the underlying message about the history of theatrical cinema, which I think is especially important in the age of clip culture and streaming. I’ll have to check out the other Minions films.
Violent Saturday (1955), directed by Richard Fleischer, is a great film about a group of characters who come to a desert-mining town to rob a bank. Throughout the story, we are introduced to a series of characters and their situations leading up to the robbery. The cinemascope is amazing, with many shots filmed on location, giving the film both a spectacle and a realist look. The film is streaming on Criterion’s “Murderous Melodramas.”
Leave Her to Heaven (1945), directed by John M. Stahl, is an excellent noir film about a jealous woman who becomes obsessed with her husband. The technicolor cinematography is amazing, and the set design is beautiful. However, lurking within this beautiful setting is a monstrous figure played brilliantly by Gene Tierney. The film is streaming on Criterion’s “Murderous Melodramas.” Definitely check out Imogene Sara Smith’s analysis of the film, which is also available on Criterion.
TV
I finished the second season of The Wonder Years. There were many great episodes. Highlight were: “Our Miss White,” “Walkout,” and “Square Dance.” The series does a great job of balancing nostalgia, melodrama, and comedy.
We re-watched the first and second seasons of the Stranger Things series. The Duffer Brothers do such an amazing job of weaving together a cast of characters. The first season focused mostly on Lucas, Dustin, and Mike as they searched for Will. However, the second season is structured around a web of narratives, crosscutting between different groups of characters, such as Dustin and Steve; Lucas and Max; Jonathan, Nancy, and Murray; Joyce, Bob and Jim, etc. Arguably, this is why the episode “The Lost Sister,” which involves Eleven and Kali, feels out of place. They should have done a better job of threading that storyline together with the others. Besides that, the second season is really good.
BOOKS
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert A. Heinlein is an excellent novella. I first learned about the story through a chapter in Slavoj Žižek’s Looking Awry, where he discusses the story’s ending in regard to the Real (the thing that disrupts the symbolic order) and fantasy. I finally checked out the book from the library and read it. The story is a good example of the fantastic, capturing the hesitation between reality and fantasy. Heinlein does a great job of holding the reader’s interest until he finally reveals Hoag’s profession.
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