🎬 "I am not throwing away my shot"

Almost Famous is a charming, albeit shaggy, story about young love, rock n roll, and why Frances McDormand is the most underrated actor of our lifetimes.

Based on writer/director Cameron Crowe’s real life experience, it follows a teenage music journalist, played by Patrick Fugit, who tags along with a rising rock band’s cross-country tour in 1973. Along the way, he develops intense relationships with the band and their groupies, who are led by a woman named Penny Lane (Kate Hudson).

I’ve seen this movie a couple times and never totally bought the relationship between Fugit and Hudson, which ripples outward through the movie, dampening some of the bigger dramatic story beats. But I can and do eagerly latch onto the journalism story here, and the colorful world of the 1970s music scene, which of course is scored with contemporaneous hits.

I watched Almost Famous on DVD, but it’s currently streaming on fuboTV, Showtime, and DirecTV.

Hang ‘Em High is a competently-shot western starring Clint Eastwood that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to say.

It variously argues for and against vigilante justice, and for and against the necessity of cruel, corrupt capital punishment, before awkwardly shoehorning in a passionless romance in the final act.

Eastwood’s strong silent type doesn’t work anywhere near as well in this film as it does in the Dollars Trilogy, and the only scene I found really compelling was a public execution scene that damned public executions and the supposedly pious masses who treat death as a sporting event.

The score also pales in comparison to Ennio Morricone’s work in the Dollars films; it’s written with all the subtlety of a TV soap opera and deployed throughout the film at bizarre, awkward moments.

I watched Hang ‘Em High on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on Starz.

I’ve been obsessed with Hamilton since the fall of 2016, but the filmed version of the show that hit Disney+ a few weeks ago — shot earlier that year — far surpassed my lofty expectations.

I knew that I would love seeing the original Broadway cast doing their thing, and a chance to see the show’s choreography from several angles, but I didn’t anticipate just how well-directed the final product would be. It’s more than just a filmed stage show, with a huge variety of angles, including close-ups and a top-down view that shows off the Hamilton stage’s iconic turntable.

Watching this musical time capsule, I repeatedly caught myself thinking or saying “she/he is so talented,” because this cast was stacked. Lin-Manuel Miranda captured lightning in a bottle here, and I can only hope that the proper film adaptation of In the Heights that’s supposed to come out next year will be as entertaining.

Hamilton is currently streaming on Disney+.

Despite a breakout performance by Zach Galifianakis and its reputation as “the good one” that preceded two disappointing sequels, I found most of The Hangover to be pretty tedious.

I’m sure it’s more enjoyable with a group because of the nonstop chaos (the operating theme of this movie is “wait, what the hell is happening?”) but watching a movie like this by myself really forces me to confront its weak points.

The characters are scantly drawn (a jerk, a cuckold, and a weird guy); there’s an over-reliance on “hey, it’s that guy!” cameos masquerading as jokes; and some sequences, including one of Rob Riggle as a taser-happy cop, are just hard to watch in 2020.

There are some good parts too: Galifinakis has some great lines, Ed Helms brings his all to a barely-written character, and the conceit of reconstructing a wild, forgotten evening in Vegas is fun in concept, if not always in execution. But before you ask, no, I’m not going to watch the sequels.

I watched The Hangover on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on DirecTV, Sling TV, TNT, and USA.

Hannah and Her Sisters is a compelling, but uneven, dramedy about the intersecting love lives of three siblings, played by Dianne Wiest, Mia Farrow, and Barbara Hershey.

That story would be more than enough for a great movie, but writer/director Woody Allen inserts himself into the movie with a funny but disconnected subplot about hypochondria and religion, and Michael Caine gets too much focus as the “protagonist” of one of the stories, as his character is married to Farrow but is actually in love with Hershey.

There are several excellent scenes, and all three of the female leads are believable as real sisters who know each other so well that they can anticipate what the others are going to say — and say just the right thing to really hurt them. More than anything, I wish the movie had carved out more time for Hannah herself (Farrow), who is denied a real dramatic arc but is instead acted upon by Caine and Allen.

I watched Hannah and Her Sisters on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on Vudu Free (with ads) and DirecTV.

Happy Gilmore gets something right that later Adam Sandler works got very, very wrong. Although all of his trademarks are on full display here (yelling, immature humor, blatant product placement), this is one of the movies he’s made where those things all, amazingly, work.

Like early seasons of The Simpsons, the oddball crudity is delivered in service of an ultimately likable character with a sympathetic goal: He needs to make a lot of money quickly to save his grandmother’s home from foreclosure.

How he gets that money — climbing the ranks of the snobby pro golf circuit while refusing to play by its rules — is an excellent container for Sandler’s hijinks, which hit more often than they miss here. As Gilmore, he is barely tolerated by people his own age, much less golf pros like the unctuous Shooter McGavin, played by the perfectly cast Christopher McDonald.

Oh, also, Bob Barker is in a couple scenes. He’s great:

I watched Happy Gilmore on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on Max Go and DirecTV.

Oops, forgot to include my Parasite rewatch when I made this list. Fixed!

(new additions in bold)