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A return to the early 1980s: The End of Oak Street and Wet Hot American Summer, the 25th Anniversary

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The End of Oak Street  will be burnished forever in my heart as one of the most fun experiences I’ve had in a movie theater, ever. David Robert Mitchell has written and helmed what, for me anyway, is the best movie with dinosaurs since Spielberg’s  Jurassic Park  (I had to put Spielberg’s name in front of that because if there’s a franchise I really don’t care for, it’s the entirety with exception of that first film…okay, I actually kind of liked the second one and I enjoyed the third one as a regressive child at heart, but are they worthy successors? Nope.) Mitchell’s work grounds the action in the Platt family fraying at the seams with Denise having written a first draft of a novel based on their lives and Greg taking part-time gigs to cover for having lost his job weeks before and the simmering contempt Denise seems to hold Greg in for not looking at the situation and admitting that it is unmanageable because of this. Consequently, Greg hid his job loss in order to not...
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I’ll take a dozen boxes…Cookie Queens is a treat

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For Kaci Alysa Nahmias’ documentary focusing on four enterprising Girl Scouts during the Girl Scout cookie-selling season is one of the most charming, funny, and yes, I’ll say it, life-affirming docs I’ve seen.  Its stars are Olive, a twelve year old cookie selling machine who is articulate without being precocious; Nikki, from Chino, California, at nine, whose two older sisters are cookie queens of legend; Shannon Elizabeth, a First Nations girl from El Paso, Texas, whose specific story had me a little stressed as her parents, supportive though they be, were banking their mortgage payment on her; and Ara, a five-year-old diabetic who had me wrapped around her little finger. All four are what a bygone generation would call “plucky”, but to stop there renders a disservice. I’ll admit that I was expecting something more hard-boiled. I thought there would be more of a critique of late-stage capitalism and how it’s infected even the youngest among us or maybe even how these kids are ex...
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A Little Body Horror and Back to Street-Level Action for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man

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Best MCU movie in years without grading on a scale. Seriously,  Spider-Man: Brand New Day  has delivered. If I had any faith in the MCU as a whole, I’d say that  Thunderbolts *  and  Fantastic Four: First Steps  were moves in the right direction and that SM:BND is a full-on course correction, but the Marvel Beast has grown into an unwieldy animal, misshapen, clumsy, and sporting more wrinkles (in development and execution) than any critter its age should.  That said, those previous two films, for all their faults and honestly, there aren’t that many, delivered a semblance of why Marvel flicks are worth going to. Sure, there is some serious plot-armor, motivations that don’t always make sense, relationships that feel more contrived than organic, but they delivered overall in the areas that matter.  The previous two films had well-developed characters and reasonable but not-Earth-shattering stakes (sorry, but Galactus is still not getting the role h...
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