Monthly Archives: August 2023

Aug 14 2023
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Some Thoughts on the Late Great Paul Reubens/Pee Wee Herman

Paul Reubens/Pee Wee Herman died recently. For Generation X, he was like a zanier version of Mr. Rogers. It was quite a blow because I didn’t realize he was that old, but I suppose if you do the math, it adds up.

Some thoughts:

#1 – I rewatched Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and it amazes me how many phrases this movie coined that people used all the way up to the early 2000s. “I know you are but what am I.” “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer.” “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh.” There are more I’m forgetting, but I know well into adulthood, whenever I was on the phone and people were talking, and if it was a light enough situation I’d do the Pee Wee voice and say, “I’m trying to use the phone!”

#2 – Pee Wee gave Tim Burton his big break. We wouldn’t have Beetlejuice, Batman, etc. without PeeWee.

#3 – I spent my whole life telling myself I can’t do this. I can’t do that. Then here is this guy who made millions pretending to be a hilarious man child character.

#4 – I’m torn on his early 1990s career ending arrest. On the one hand, there are celebs like Weinstein who did way worse and stayed in their jobs way longer. On the other hand, I remember even as a kid thinking that when you’re a popular children’s entertainer making millions, you’d think your number one priority would be to stay out of the porno theater. Even by early 1990s standards, porno theaters were very outdated. Why Paul didn’t just use his PeeWee money to buy himself a big screen TV and a vcr and a box of porno tapes and wank in the privacy of his own home is beyond me, unless doing it in public was part of the thrill. I don’t want to speculate but I wish he’d kept it at home because he was popular and really beloved by everyone – all races, colors, creeds, young and old – he could have gone one and done that Pee Wee schtick for a few more decades if he’d watched his porn at home. Honestly, I think by 2000, if he trotted PeeWee back out in some other format, we would have forgiven him.

#5 – There are old clips where PeeWee was a guest on Letterman and guest hosted for Joan Rivers and crushed it, such that I think he really could have killed doing his own late night talk show as PeeWee if he wanted to. He was just very quick and sharp, always stayed in character and thought of quips and one liners and delivered them as PeeWee that had his celebrity guests rolling with laughter. If he’d been up for it, I think he could have done that in the 2000s or early 2010s.

#6 – Pee Wee’s Big Adventure is the only PG rated movie I can think of that has gut busting laughs. Usually you need the R rating. Maybe a better film buff can point to another PG film I’m forgetting but this stands out in a crowd as a family friendly movie that will leave you rolling over with split sides.

Those are all my PeeWee thoughts. I’m sad he has passed on. I never thought about it while he was alive other than when you think about what he did – that when he was young, he was an aspiring actor and comedian who tried and tried and went to auditions and got passed over and almost got on SNL but got passed over and came close to giving up and then invented a character and put all his money into renting out a theater and doing his own PeeWee show and audiences loved it and word spread and finally he found his path to stardom, it’s really inspirational.

I don’t say this often because sad that I am to see celebrities go, but I love you, PeeWee. You seem like you were a really weird guy who could have just as easily allowed the world to put you on the sidelines as often happens to weird guys, but you fought, and you fought, and you tried, and you tried, and like the human whack-a-mole that you were, whenever the entertainment industry bonked you with its hammer, you kept popping back up until you got to big to whack. Rest in PeeWee Power.

Aug 14 2023
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Movie Review – The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

Hey 3.5 readers.

This is going to be a quick, basic review because this is a quick, basic movie.

Perhaps you horror buffs will remember that in the novel, Dracula, there is some mention of how the titular villain shipped himself to England from Transylvania aboard the ship the Demeter in a box of dirt, said vessel was found run a ground off the coast of England a wreck, the crew all dead and no Dracula to be found.

This is the story of how that happened, how the crew discovered that their cargo was noneother that the world’s most infamous vampire and how they fought bravely (spoiler alert to no avail) to keep him from reaching shore).

All you aspiring writers out there be inspired by public domain fiction for there are all sorts of little tidbits like this to build on.

Liam Cunningham of Game of Thrones fame, David Dastmalchian and Corey Hawkins lead a crew of ne’er-do-wells against the Drac attack. Unfortunately, if you’re familiar with the novel then you already know the ending going into it, and the story is largely confined to the ship. There’s not a lot of room for character development, growth, romance or what have you. They set sail. They discover a vamp in a box. They fight it. They lose. The end.

Still worth a watch. If you feel like the trip to the cinema you could do worse than this but otherwise I’d wait to stream.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Some movies are steaks and some movies are moldy tuna fish sandwiches. This is a solid peanut butter and jelly sammy that will get you through but you’ll forget it tomorrow.

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Aug 06 2023
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Movie Review – Oppenheimer (2023)

Well, that movie bombed. :::rimshot:::

BQB here with a review of Christopher Nolan’s epic historical drama.

The atomic bomb. It was a terrible invention and yet, once science progressed to the point where its invention was inevitable, it became a necessary evil for America to invent it before a more evil power, say, the Nazis, invented it first.

Christopher Nolan, who has often wowed us with his mysterious, edgy, cliffhanger music style brings his usual schtick to this drama. If you came for action, you’ll be disappointed, except for the end where SPOILER ALERT the bomb goes off. I mean, that really shouldn’t have been a spoiler in a movie about the bomb, but there you go. The rest of the movie is a lot of talking – about how to invent the bomb, whether it can be done, whether it should be done, what will happen if the Nazis invent it first and so on. It’s heavy on the dialogue and Nolan makes very liberal use of dramatic music, such that it almost feels like this movie is a historic rock video set to a beat. At various points, you have prominent historic figures debating esoteric points and the heavy music kicks in just in time to remind you to be afraid, very, very afraid.

Cillian Murphy, a frequent star of Nolan flicks, plays the titular scientist – brilliant but flawed, as many geniuses are. So focused on the pursuit of knowledge that he allows his personal life to fall into disarray, chain smoking constantly while cheating on his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) with his longtime paramour Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). To be honest, the film spends a lot of time trying to explain bomb science (we’re all too dumb to figure it out) and even more time on Oppenheimer’s battles with opponents who disapproved of his communist ties (interesting, but eventually the ground was more than covered) – it would have been interesting if the film could have explored what screw in Oppenheimer’s brain went loose that made him become a womanizing sex fiend. Ultimately, the affair makes him, his wife, and his girlfriend sad so why carry it on? Why start it in the first place? What was broken in him that he needed it? If that was explained, I missed it. We do get the general sense that from his early student days, he was very weird and eccentric, that his mind was essentially a glass and when all the milk of physics was poured into it, there was no room left for basic life skills.

Like Nolan’s unintelligible Tenet, time is not linear in Oppenheimer though unlike Tenet, the timeframe is understandable. Jumps are made forward and backward, from committee hearings on the nomination of Oppenheimer’s colleague turned rival Lewis Straus (Robert Downey Jr.) to various points in time in the race to build the bomb.

Oddly, its a three hour movie with a lot of talking but it goes by quick. If you don’t like dialog based flicks, this probably isn’t for you. There’s a lot of meditation on the bomb itself, its significance, how horrible it was yet sadly how once its invention became inevitable, America had to be the first to invent it, how Oppenheimer was torn between the love of the science behind it but the sadness of being responsible of unleashing the nuclear age upon the world.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy

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