Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

I used to be the kind of person who never left a movie no matter how bad, who always finished a book no matter how painful. Sometimes that was a professional duty, sometimes just a matter of stubbornness, or a feeble hope that whatever was watching would get better. I have been thinking about this somewhat often with The Flight Attendant, the HBO Max thriller starring Kaley Cuoco, which has been picked up for a second season. I have gotten through three episodes of the first season so far, but keep asking myself why.  Sure, there are plot twists I am mildly interested in following, but everything feels so stretched out, the scenes of Cuoco's character's excesses so repetitive, that I am weary of it. My wife and I have a two-episode rule for most series -- that if you don't have us after two, you won't get us back -- so there's some reason for me still in there for three. But it could just be that old stubbornness, And that is not the only time recently when I have g...

Here is what happens after months of varied degrees of isolation: there's never enough digital content. My streaming music library has expanded, now including Pandora, SiriusXM, Spotify (the free version), Amazon Music (whatever comes with my Prime subscription) and the international channels I can reach with my Como Musica. My video streaming options include Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access and, most recently, Apple TV+. Getting that last service finally gave me a way to watch "The Morning Show," the drama with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. It is at times marvelous and other times just a drag, but it caught me up especially short when an episode found the morning-show team setting up in the Safari Inn, pictured above. "I stayed there," I said to my wife, and the memories came rolling back.  It was 1999. The Cleveland-set "Drew Carey Show" was making its 100th episode, and I had gone to L.A. to cover the event, appear as a back...

Just about the only live sporting on TV these days is discussion of Tom Brady's contract. No argument here -- there are too many risks in the world right now to take unnecessary chances. But the absence of sports creates the opportunity to revisit some great sports movies and TV shows. More than one writer has offered up a list. Below is mine, with minimal notes since you should know most of these. Some are flawed, a few are perfect, but all are worth killing time with. Enjoy the search, and the watching. All American (CW series) Any Given Sunday  (pictured above) The Bad News Bears (the first one, only the first one) Bend It Like Beckham Blue Chips Brian's Song (the James Caan/Billy Dee Williams original) Bull Durham Cinderella Man Creed (see Rocky, below) Draft Day Fighting With My Family Friday Night Lights (movie and TV show) Hoosiers (as if anyone would omit it) The Hustler and  The Color of Money (watch them back to back) Last Chance U (Netflix series)...

The latest version of "Little Women," written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is a lovely adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's much-adapted novel, one made especially so by its emphasis on what it meant to be a woman in a world run by men. The options left to women are few: marriage is the main path to solvency, and writers of fiction must have young women married or dead by the end. That life turns out all right for most of them is appealing, but it's built on the idea that "Little Women" is a romance, and that in the real world sometimes you have to sell out a cherished idea in one area to achieve what you need elsewhere. And even though "Little Women" is set in the past, the idea of What Women Must Do is also part of the contemporary "Bombshell," as well as Margaret Atwood's novel "The Testaments." These are all blending in my head because I saw "Bombshell" and "Little Women" on consecutive days re...

The above title comes from James Agee, who used it for short takes on several movies he had not yet gotten around the reviewing. In a previous column he had lamented, "I should review several of the films mentioned below at some length, and I hope that at length I will. But I have left so many films unreviewed, some of them weeks or months old by now, that I can begin to catch up only be reviewing them now, somewhere near as briefly as possible." I know the feeling. While I have posted some full reviews below, I've had a long list of other movies I've been meaning to get to. This is the peril of trying to see a lot of films (more than once, Agee wrote round-up columns) and then to find the right words -- or the right energy -- only to never get around to it. So here, in short form, are other films I've been seeing. Judy. Grade: B plus. Yes, Renee Zellweger is spectacular as Judy Garland in this portrait of the singer-actress after her career had largely wan...

Joker, the disturbing origin story of the character from director (and co-writer) Todd Phillips and actor Joaquin Phoenix, is the bleakest of comedies.  Late in the film, Arthur Fleck, who will become Joker, says that he has long thought his life is tragedy only to realize it is a comedy. But his life, and the film, are comedies only in the sense that the Joker sees the word -- one daring everyone else to admit that they don't get the joke. That Phoenix is brilliant cannot be argued, and with an impressive resume already he may become the second actor to win an Oscar playing the best known of the Batman villains. But the movie overall, as watchable as it may be, is a too-familiar consideration of the connection between private madness and public heroism, of the rage of the disenfranchised against the unfeeling elite, of Bernhard Goetz, of the themes evident in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and King of Comedy . It's no accident that Robert De Niro plays a talk-show host i...

The space scenes in the movie Ad Astra are almost unbearably gorgeous, possessed of the kind of chilly, silent beauty also evident in space films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gravity. They are further served by the lead performance by Brad Pitt as someone also capable of a chilly silence, only to reveal torment as his walls break down. It's tempting to say this performance tops his engaging one in Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood  but it's better to argue that he's just having one of those stretches where the Oscars should grade not for single works but for the cumulative effort in a year. It would be an even more rewarding performance for audiences if the movie itself was something more. At times it seems like a science-fiction variation on Apocalypse Now, an episodic journey toward disaster, or one of those fat adventure novels that, having carried the reader along for hundreds of pages, abruptly wraps things up before a second volume is required. The film, directe...

This is a long catch-up on movies I've watched since late June. As you can see, the emphasis has been on commercial fare but that's what has drawn me to theaters. These are arranged mainly in reverse chronological order, from "Angel Has Fallen" back to "Spider-Man: Far From Home." Angel Has Fallen continues the adventures of president-saving Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), previously seen in "Olympus Has Fallen" and "London Has Fallen." This time around, Banning is accused of masterminding a massive attack on the president (Morgan Freeman); of course, he is being framed, and the framer is both clear early in the movie and given away in "Angel" trailers. It's up to Mike, then, to clear his name and to keep the president from further harm -- with help from his estranged father (Nick Nolte, who may be the best thing in the movie). There are fights, shootouts and explosions, almost all of them ridicu...

Notes from some recent screen adventures ... Shaft. Not only do I remember seeing and liking the original Richard Roundtree "Shaft" in college when it was new, I also saw Roundtree performing in a Virginia dinner theater several years later. (He was good, though sketchy about his lines, and not helped by his co-star, better known as a TV news anchor.) I have no real memory of the two Roundtree sequels, or of the '70s TV series, except that Roundtree as always was cool. The Samuel L. Jackson "Shaft" sticks in memory for its "what's my name" scene, Busta Rhymes's yelling "Shaft" and having one of the great screen villains, Peoples Hernandez, played by Jeffrey Wright. So I had ample reason to see the new, three-generation "Shaft" with Roundtree, Jackson and Jessie Usher ("Survivor's Remorse"). It's not great, there are significant plot holes (and one huge early clue), but it passed the time well enough, es...

Regular readers know of my fascination with Christmas movies. That even extended at one time to planning a course on the films -- a demonstration that even some of the cheesiest of holiday films merit academic consideration. The course hasn't happened but you might be interested in the argument I made for it. So here ... Christmas Movies: Ideas and Issues, Text and Subtext Description Where holiday films are often discussed in terms of familiar themes such as faith and family, a closer consideration of them finds meditations Race in America is underscored in Tradi on power, media manipulation, depression and other issues buried under the more obvious them. ng Places, This Christmas and The Preacher’s Wife , the last of which is a story first done in 1947 with a white cast and then retooled for African-American stars. Holiday Inn, which introduced the song “White Christmas,” also had what one historian called “a breathtaking medley of Hollywood’s most infamous racial ster...

  I have read, and re-read, and re-re-read, Nora Ephron  a lot, in the copies I have of three of her books:   Wallflower at the Orgy, Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble. This should give you an idea of how long I have had those books. Just look at that price tag on one of the paperbacks: These books hold such Ephron gems as "A Few Words About Breasts," one of her most famous works; her scathing consideration of Deep Throat, which included a can't-you-see-this observation I have never forgotten; "The Making of Theodore H. White"; "A Rhinestone in a Trash Can," which argued convincingly that Jacqueline Susann's "trash is better than it has been made out to be." And more. You should read them, and later collections such as I Remember Nothing, and I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, or dive into the selections from all of the above in the massive The MOST of Nora Ephron, released after her death in 2012. Of c...

-- This is the first year I can remember where I have seen all the best-picture nominees on the day the nominations were announced.* That may be an indication that the academy, following the brouhaha over the announced-then-dropped "popular film" category,  still saw fit to nominate a lot of movies that the mass audience has seen. Only not everything. I've been searching for ways to see some of the nominees in other categories; "At Eternity's Gate" has a best-actor nomination for Willem Dafoe and, according to Box Office Mojo, was in less than 200 theaters nationwide at its peak distribution, and that was a month ago. -- The academy's expanding the best-picture category will never really work until, at the very least, the directing and writing categories are also expanded. There are eight nominees for best picture this year, but only four of those movies were also nominated for best director. (The fifth directing nomination is for "Cold War,...

Notes on a few recent screen titles: "Boy Erased," written and directed by Joel Edgerton (who also plays a supporting role), is a wrenching look at the effects of kindly-intentioned intolerance. The result, in this case of gay-conversion "therapy," is not kind; in fact, it is devastating in this adaptation of the memoir by Garrard Conley. But what makes it especially horrifying is that the process is abetted by two loving parents (Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman) who want the best for their son (Lucas Hedges) -- but do not believe that the best includes his being gay. They send him off to a gay-conversion program and, as I said, it not only proves unhelpful, it is a horror for the young people forced to endure it. There is no true psychological knowledge at work in the camp, only a sense that Satan and a half-assed distillation of Freudian theory are at work in "choosing" to be gay. It's a fine, infuriating film, at once personal and issues based in...

It's that time of year when people binge on Hallmark's Christmas movies, and the House of Heldenfels is not immune. (There are limits, though. This is an unlikely addition.) That said, the movies are such easy viewing that sometimes the mind wanders. And this mind has wandered toward the idea of ... a Hallmark Christmas movies book. Sometimes the idea morphs into three books: the Christmas movies, the non-Christmas Hallmark Channel/Hallmark Movies & Mysteries films, and the classic, broadcast Hallmark Hall of Fame productions. Not that I have time to do any of these. But I have been thinking about what I would want in a Christmas movies book. Including: 1. A map of America with all those fictional small towns where the movies are set. 2. A list of the Canadian houses used most often for movie locations. 3. A list of noteworthy other roles by actors in the films.  Nyssa al Ghul! The Maytag repairman! 4. The time of the near-kiss in each movie. (The near-kiss, f...

Close to 20 years ago the ACLU released a report, "Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation's Highways."  It's not new. Neither, for that matter, is getting shot just for being black, too many times by police, on the flimsiest of excuses. But for too many people, there's no connection to those victims because the news audience does not see itself in the people who have been wronged. This is where the movie The Hate U Give, and the thematically similar third episode of the CW drama All American, titled "i," become important. Each takes its time to let us know the characters, to see lives, to understand fears -- before we see the terrible wrongs done to them. Although they are fictional, the characters force us to look at the real world. And it does not do it through allegory -- the way, for instance, Supergirl is a prolonged discourse on immigration -- but by direct presentation of incidents which should dishearten any audience. The...

There was a time when Burt Reynolds was, well, the coolest. His masculinity came with self-deprecation that underscored his self-confidence, his aggressiveness made room for some vulnerability. He could pose for Cosmopolitan -- you knew I couldn't leave that out -- and it was just a little romp. Men and women liked him, and -- key to his leading-man appeal -- he came across as someone who really liked women, and not just for a hop in the sack. Women could look at his relationship with Sally Field, onscreen and off, and think, well, if Sally Field  likes him. ... He was, in short, George Clooney before Clooney. And he knew how to reach across demographics: appealing to a Southern, drive-in kind of audience in some films; the action crowd in others, and the people who took movies seriously in a third. I was a southerner who loved action movies and good films, so I saw a lot of Burt Reynolds in the '70s: Fuzz, Deliverance, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex ,...

From a Motion Picture Academy announcement: While remaining committed to celebrating a wide spectrum of movies, the Academy announced today that it will not present the new Oscars category at the upcoming 91st awards. The Academy recognized that implementing any new award nine months into the year creates challenges for films that have already been released.  The Board of Governors continues to be actively engaged in discussions, and will examine and seek additional input regarding this category.  “There has been a wide range of reactions to the introduction of a new award, and we recognize the need for further discussion with our members,” said Academy CEO Dawn Hudson.  “We have made changes to the Oscars over the years—including this year—and we will continue to evolve while also respecting the incredible legacy of the last 90 years.” Changes to the 91st Oscars (2019) include restructuring and shortening the length of the telecast to three hours.  To honor all...

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"Hey, does my being in the foreground hint how this movie should have been?" It's not enough to call some movies sequels, or prequels, when they collectively form an enormous narrative thread, a novel in many parts . Now, those parts may be out of sequence (recalling in a way Julio Cortazar's novel "Hopscotch"). They may also revise the previous narrative (as, for example, the "Star Trek" reboots have done in recycling old characters but reframing the story from the previous series and film; or the past-changing events in the "X-Men" films). But they still demand that the audience be aware of everything that has gone before; I was rewatching "Avengers: Age of Ultron" over the weekend and realized I had forgotten how it brought in the Infinity Stones and Thanos, which of course became central to "Avengers: Infinity War." But, as much as DC and Marvel and "Star Wars" and others ask us to keep trac...