September Film Roundup

A League of Their Own (1992): Forgot to review this when we watched it, and that was so long ago I don’t think I can do a really detailed review. This was fun, though. Lots of star power, the look of that distinctively 1990s version of the 1940s… it’s a feel-good classic! Come on, you probably watched this movie before I did, you know how it goes. After Hours (1985): Remember how “computer” used to be a job that people had? Well, Paul, the main character in this movie, is a word processor. You can hear him shout it near the end: “I’m just a word processor!” As such, Martin Scorsese has some pre- Wolf of Wall Street fun lovingly panning through Paul’s midtown office with all of its cool 1985 technology. (I’m guessing those are dumb terminals connected to an on-site mainframe.) But then Paul decides to go out and have some nighttime fun in the Big Apple, and his trouble begins. Overall this was fun; I was thinking it would be a fast-paced picaresque trip through Soho, but it went slowly back and forth between just a few different locations, adding layers of complexity to the characters each time. I’m reminded of Very Bad Things (1998), a comedy that has a similar relentless focus on everything going wrong, which I really disliked when I saw it on a free student preview ticket. After coming out of the theater having enjoyed After Hours I wondered if I just wasn’t in the mental space to enjoy a comedy as dark as Very Bad Things . But After Hours , although dark, isn’t misanthropic. When the worst thing in this movie happens, the community rallies. When someone incorrectly thinks Paul is a burglar, the community rallies again (admittedly, by forming a lynch mob and hunting him down). It’s much more positive. My point is that Very Bad Things still sucks, 27 years later. I’ll never forget! In news of TV Spotlight , Sumana and I have caught up on “For All Mankind”, Ron Moore’s second TV show about how you should never install the software updates. We’re enjoying the alt-history even though its treatment of the Internet got really weird in the fourth season. I will say I like the “this space base is really cramped and we’re starving/going crazy” setups better than the “there are a lot of people on this space base and we’re causing soap opera drama for each other” setups, but they are switching back and forth between them pretty reliably as humanity expands through the solar system.