| 00s Rom Com Faves | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Serendipity, Prince and Me, Failure to Launch, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. | ||||||||
| 4 Christmas Classics | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes The Bells of St. Mary’s, White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Scrooge. | ||||||||
| 5 Films of Faith Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Samson and Delilah, The Ten Commandments, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, King David, and Noah. | ||||||||
| 90s Rom Com Faves | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Beautiful Girls, Runaway Bride, Boomerang, and Sabrina | ||||||||
| Action Shows on the 1950s | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| American Buffalo: A Film by Ken Burns | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| American Graffiti | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Animal Crackers | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Beast Tamer | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Anime series about a guy who was part of the party sent to defeat the demon lord in a standard Anime Fantasy world, and who ends up forming a new party with various monster girls he forms contracts with. | ||||||||
| Bells of St. Mary’s | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Black Hawk Down | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Blue Beetle | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Buster Keaton Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Three Ages and Our Hospitality | ||||||||
| Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Casino | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Chester Morris Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Double Exposure, No Hands on the Clock, Tornado, Gambler’s Choice, and Tomorrow at Seven. | ||||||||
| Classroom of the Elite | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Clerks I-III Premium Box Set | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Cocoanuts | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Coming Attractions: The Classic Cliffhanger Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Corpse Grinders Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Contains The Corpse Grinders (1971) and The Corpse Grinders 2 (2000) – both directed by Ted V. Mikels. | ||||||||
| Creepshow | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| David Niven Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Eternally Yours, Happy Go Lovely, and The Lady Says No. | ||||||||
| Deep Fear | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Dick Foran Movie Serial Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Duck Soup | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| East Side Kids Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Eddie Murphy Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Coming to America, Harlem Nights, Norbit, and Boomerang | ||||||||
| Eugene O’Neill Classics Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, and Anna Christie. | ||||||||
| Familiar of Zero | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Isekai anime series about a teenager from modern Tokyo who gets summoned to a magical world by a student at a magical academy who is trying to summon a familiar – and gets this schmuck instead. | ||||||||
| Fargo (1996) | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Frank Buck and Clyde Beatty: Bring Em Back Alive Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Front Page Detective Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | 12 episodes of the old Dumont network series | ||||||||
| Frontier Doctor | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Gran Turismo | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Guns of Navarone | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Horror TV Rarities Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Lost Will of Dr. Rant, and ,em>The Fall of the House of Usher. | ||||||||
| Horse Feathers | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Hot Dog: The Movie | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Hotel Portofino | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Superstar (Criterion Collection) | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, Spiritual Kung Fu, The Fearless Hyena, Fearless Hyena II, The Young Master, and My Lucky Stars. | ||||||||
| Jayne Mansfield Double Feature | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Too Hot to Handle and The Fat Spy. | ||||||||
| Joe Pickett | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Johnny Mack Brown Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes 8 titles | ||||||||
| Joysticks | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Ken Maynard Western Classics | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| King Vidor Silents Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Last Bumblebee | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Laurel and Hardy – Early Silent Classics | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Lock-Up | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Mabel Normand – Queen of Comedy | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Raggedy Rose, The Extra Girl, Mickey, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, Queen of Comedy. Alex: Normand was profiled in an episode of You Must Remember This during the Hollywood Babylon season. | ||||||||
| Man Behind the Badge | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Miracle Club | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Monkey Business | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| More Than a Married Couple, but Not Lovers | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Romantic comedy anime series about a high school project which semi-randomly pairs students together as faux married couples, where the protagonist and one of the more popular girls in his class are paired together, while their respective crushes are also paired together. | ||||||||
| Mrs. Sidhu Investigates | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| My Dress-Up Darling | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Alex: Romantic comedy anime about an teenage introvert with a background sewing costumes for Hina dolls who meets a fashionable classmate who wants to do cosplay but has no knowledge on how to sew clothes. We previously covered this on the Anime Explorations Podcast. The limited edition comes with art cards, two art booklets (one regular, one as a calendar and cosplay planner), and a sticker sheet. | ||||||||
| Office: Complete Christmas Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Patsy Kelly Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes Broadway Limited, Road Show, My Son, the Hero, The Gorilla, and Danger! Women at Work. | ||||||||
| Pinky Lee Show | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Pola Negri Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Includes The Eyes of the Mummy, One Arabian Night, Passion, and Gypsy Blood. | ||||||||
| Power God (1925) | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Scrooged | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Sleepless Nights | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Small Soldiers/Explorers | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| South Park | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| South Park: The Streaming Wars | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Star Trek: Picard | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Comments | Contains the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the TNG movies, all 3 seasons of Picard, magnetic badges of each kind that Picard wore (outside of the classic movie era badge from flashbacks), and a set of Chateau Picard coasters and playing cards | ||||||||
| Strays (2023) | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Texas Rangers Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Tod Slaughter Vintage Terror Collection | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Trading Places | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Trouble with Father | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| V/H/S/85 | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Veil | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Violent Night | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Weird: The Al Yankovic Story | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| Witness | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
| World of Giants | |||||||||
| Amazon | |||||||||
Finally, the picks of the week. Alex says, “We all generally enjoyed My Dress-Up Darling on the Anime Explorations podcast, enough so that I’d consider it my anime pick of the week. Otherwise I’m going with the Criterion Collection set of Jackie Chan movies (I wouldn’t mind if Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow was in there – as it’s from the same era, but My Lucky Stars and Half a Loaf of Kung Fu more than makes up for it.” Blaine says, “I would go with either Star Trek: Picard or Weird: The Al Yankovic Story this week.”
Fargo is brilliant and American Graffiti a classic time capsule peopled with future stars. Its runaway success, which the studio did not anticipate, led to Fox greenlighting Star Wars and ABC undoing their rejection of Happy Days.
Speaking of time capsules, a lot of the collections available this week likely qualify. And while it would be fascinating to watch some of Pinky Lee and the various Action Shows of the 1950s to see how they hold up, I don’t imagine that I would want to own either.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story was surprisingly good for a joke of a movie.
As overwrought and self-congratulatory as most musician biopics are, I found it delightfully refreshing.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bells of St. Mary. I should add that to my queue this holiday season.
I’m sure I’ll be forced to watch the Grease series. I’m in the minority in my house that Grease is a mediocre musical with a bad message. Oh well. I’ve probably subjected my wife to worse.
I would heartily agree– although the stage musical, before everyone started reshaping it to resemble the movie, was equal parts nostalgia and irony, which mitigated things quite a bit. The only one of the “series” I’ve seen is Grease 2, and I wish I could get those minutes back, with interest. I didn’t like the first movie, and the sequel makes it look like one of cinema’s crowning achievements.
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies was fun, I enjoyed it, but I also enjoyed the Grease movie. (I didn’t catch Grease 2, because… well, you folks summed it up.)
The original movie could be salvaged with a rewrite of the last few minutes. Sandy’s desire to transform for Danny got much more screen time, but he was changing for her too. The gender dynamics make sense for Sandy to be more open about it than he was.
It’s when we get to the end, find out that they changed for each other, and then his immediate response is to change back while she keeps her new persona that things collapse. That’s the worst of at least four options, with three preferable options:
1) They both change back, and realize they were already what each other wanted, or why would they have changed?
2) They both stay changed.
3) They meet half way.
Notice that in all three of these they are equal partners. They are NOT equal partners in the movie.
I guess that’s a long way of saying I’m on your side when it comes to “Grease”.