Dagwood in Quarantine

Some props must go out to  Stephen Pastis' "Pearls Before Swine" for being the first or among the first comic strips to acknowledge, and satirize the Covid-19 pandemic. I kind of expect a strip as subversive as "Pearls" to tackle  a pandemic, but most cartoonists could be forgiven for pretending it's not going on for the sake of keeping things light on the comics page.

So the Blondie team should be doubly congratulated for keeping the strip's characters home. Think about it, a beloved strip that has kept one foot firmly in 1930 should be given a free pass during a global crisis, but no, Dean Young managed to wring humor out of a crisis without even mentioning the crisis!

They didn't have to do it, but I'm glad they did.

(Addendum: Life is back to normal in the dailies that followed this strip, so I'm hoping they had been done well in advance, but once they've run, the Bumsteads will be in quarantine every day of the week, we'll see.)

Beetle Bailey why have you forsaken me?

Once again, I hate to be one of those negative bloggers. The world doesn't need more negativity. But really what's going on in the Beetle Bailey writer's room?

Have they just given up?

Are they just using a random dialogue generator?

Plato is standing between two women, so Beetle surmises that it "looks like it's a good time to be a nerd."

Based on what? Two women chatting with Plato? That's it. So we set up the faulty premise.

In the next panel, Killer dressed like a stereotypical nerd to pick up women at the library because, you know, that's where nerdy women hang out. And nerdy women love nerdy men.

You can tell he's dressed like a nerd because he's wearing a bow tie and even his sweater has a pocket protector. And plaid pants. And he's carrying a book.

And it's funny because ...

No, it's not funny at all.

Film review: Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

It's another greatest hits package from the Disney/Lucasfilm factory. New characters doing the same thing. Kind of like "Home Alone 2" and 3.

It's the same, just bigger. We get a "I find your lack of faith disturbing," scene but instead of simply the officer getting strangled, he gets thrown into the ceiling. We get the little guy rises up against the big empire scene again, but instead of Ewoks, it's a kazillion little space ships; we also get Emperor Palpatine taunting the hero at his/her darkest moment, AGAIN with Palpatine.

I kept thinking of the commentary track on "The Phantom Menace" where a special effect guy is bragging about how they got a hundred ships passing by the window in the background of a scene, and I'm thinking, y'know, three ships would have been fine.

I'm a little disappointed, I really thought when Disney announced they'd wrap up the Star Wars trilogy of trilogies, they would have planned the whole thing out *before* the cameras started rolling. No, no, they just made it up as they went along with no forethought into foreshadowing or comprehensibility.

Film Review: Little Women

I walked in cold; I had never read the book, nor seen any of the semi-annually made remakes. And granted I should have expected a film entitled "Little Women" to be on the girly side .. but.. this was really really girly.

Would it have killed them to throw a bone to the men in the audience by including a car chase or an Infinity Gauntlet?

As it is it's the most beautifully filmed episode of "The Waltons" ever. Not that that's a bad thing.

Director Greta Gerwig shakes things up by bouncing back and forth in time, and the highlight is her meta ending in which she makes fun of a typical Hollywood ending while still using it. She has it both ways and it's pretty clever.

Beautiful cinematography, great acting, Meryl Streep! It's going to win a ton of Oscars, but when you boil it all down, it's a movie for girls.

Review: The Mandalorian

The "Mandalorian" and Joss Whedon's "Firefely" belong to the same genre. I'm calling it the Look-we're-clever,-you-think-you're-watching-a-science-fiction-show-but-it's-really-a-western genre.
Both shows are so much like westerns I can't help but think, "why didn't they just make them westerns?"

In the case of "Mandalorian," when I say it's a western, I'm not saying movie western, I'm saying TV western, which is really a whole different animal, isn't it?

I kept thinking of those 1960s TV westerns with Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen each playing a brave hero who's reluctant to use his gun, but will do what he has to. There were dozens of westerns like this on TV in the 1960s, they might have burnt themselves out. Movie directors have two hours to tell their story. TV shows have lots of time to fill. Plots were recycled ... a lot.

And that's what I was thinking about while watching the first three episodes of "The Mandalorian." It's not all that different from one of those old TV westerns. With the exception of a few Star Wars characters, it's not a Star Wars spinoff at all.

It's really closer to "Son of Steve McQueen's Character" in "Wanted: Dead or Alive," or "Son of Clint Eastwood's Character" in "Rawhide."

But, the TV western is dead, and the only way to get people to watch them is to  put spaceships in them.

My other problem with this show is: Is the main character really going to keep his helmet on during the whole run of the show? There's a scene with about six people, all wearing helmets conveying exposition, and it slowly became an episode of the "Power Rangers." This is going to go over great in foreign markets.

How do they expect us to get emotionally attached to a protagonist if we never see his face? I'm sure the Lucasfilm people are thinking, "This is a forever character, like C3PO or Chewbacca, we  don't need an actor!" You can get away with that for the movies, but TV is, once again, a different animal.

Update: I finally caught all 8 episodes and must say the last three episodes are very good. There's a 'turn-the-tables moment in "The Prisoner" episode where the whole show turned around for me. Things start moving much faster and plot threads that started in the first two episodes are finally wrapped up in a very exciting manner. Suddenly I started caring about Baby Yoda.

And he takes off his helmet, which he should do more often.

Film review: Knives Out

Just when I was thinking "Knives Out" was the funniest, best written episode of "Murder She Wrote" ever, doesn't Jessica Fletcher appear on the screen. This is Rian Johnson's wink to the audience, he's reminding us to not take this seriously, it's just a really big budget, better written episode of "Murder She Wrote." At one point a detective says the creepy gothic mansion where the murder takes place is like a Clue board and that's exactly the game you're playing.

A rich cranky geezer (Christopher Plummer playing a more delightful J. Paul Getty) turns up dead on the night of his 85th birthday party and as the suspects tell their stories it appears he was going to end all of their allowances. So we have a creepy old mansion (complete with secret entranceways) and a bunch of eccentric family members who'd do anything to keep the family riches. This is an homage to old-timey Hollywood mysteries which would work wonderfully on a double bill with "The Thin Man."

The detective is Daniel Craig having the time of his life as a southern-drawling Hercule Poirot, yes he's a genius detective, but the humor comes in when some obvious clues are playing out right under his nose.

Also playing against type is Chris Evans, trading in the squeaky clean Captain America for the prickish rich grandson

The breakout star is Ana de Armes  as the family maid. As the only suspect who's not a scheming family member, she has no motive, or is that what they want us to think? The character has a unique tell when she's lying and de Armes makes it hysterical or suspenseful. It's an exceptionally clever conceit: A whodunnit character incapable of lying, imagine the possibilities.


To tell anything else would spoil the tightly constructed story, but if you enjoy a good, funny whodunnit, by all means go see it.

Dagwood saves the day

I've been pointing out the disastrous results when Beetle Bailey tries to be hip to what the kids are doing nowadays (mostly technology.) The problem is the creative team doesn't know enough about a new technology to make fun of it; they think that simply mentioning it will be hilarious.

This made today's Blondie doubly hilarious. Dagwood takes his first Uber ride; this could have been a mess if the Beetle Bailey team had done this, but Dagwood saves the day by (literally) pulling the punch line out of his back pocket. I didn't see it coming, yet it's totally in his character.

And I laughed.