This is such a delight! It’s an Esther Williams vehicle, and it’s just perfect. Everything is super-silly, and it’s got one good gag after another (the recurring “England sure is foggy” bit is really fun), and a bunch of one-lines.

It’s all so… frothy.

Well, that was a lot of fun. I think the actual tense final scene was kinda… not really necessary? It would have been better without it?

But still. The funny bits are really funny.

Dangerous When Wet. Charles Walters. 1953. ⚄

That’s so Norway. That’s practically my house. We all live in… er… silver… triple wide? trailers? Not in a trailer park, but in a forest somewhere….

I KNOW! I’m complaining about realism in a Marvel movie.

Sorry; won’t happen again.

Man, these fight scenes are kinda… not very good? The greenscreen work is horrible! The compositing is barely adequate — the all-CGI bits look so fake.

Heh, OK, that car chase scene was pretty amusing.

Heh heh heh. That’s a good joke. I guess it’s a burn on Whedon.

But it’s… it’s kinda charmless?

This was really tedious. But there was a couple of jokes that landed, and there was one action scene that wasn’t totally boring, so it’s not a ⚀.

Black Widow. Cate Shortland. 2021. ⚁

Nooo! This is a documentary about The Catherine Wheel? I thought it was gonna be the ballet? Boo! I hate documentaries! So much!

I wanted to see the ballet!

Perhaps we’ll get the performance after this horrible documentary? This DVD is 90 minutes and hopefully they can’t do a 90 minute documentary…

Well, as documentaries go, that wasn’t bad. I was just disappointed that this wasn’t the show.

But there’s also the show!!!!

Oh my Emacs. I’ve listened to this album so many times…

… since I was a teenager. It’s such a beautiful album by David Byrne…

Oh! This isn’t just a ballet! It’s a whole technological thing!

It’s got all the video fades available at the time!

I love this, but isn’t this more like… er… pantomime than ballet? I mean, they aren’t dancing much? But they’re like acting a lot?

OK, now there’s more dance.

The dancing doesn’t reference the music much at all. Was this originally choreographed in complete silence? And then David Byrne was brought on to score the dance after it was filmed or something?

Well!

That was something. The first … two thirds? weren’t very ballet at all, but seemed to track the music somewhat. The final half hour (ish) was totally ballet, and it was so weird — the songs changed, and the dancing didn’t alter at all.

I loved all of it, but it was very strange.

I also wonder how it was filmed — this DVD looked very smudged, but I couldn’t see any video artefacts — was this filmed on film (like 16mm)? Or was is high grade video? If it was film, I wish somebody would make a blu ray release of this, because I’d totally buy it again and watch it again on blu ray.

The Catherine Wheel. Twyla Tharp. 1982. ⚄