🎬 "What kind of bird are YOU?"

Thank you so much to everyone who read last week’s issue and told their friends to subscribe. I loved seeing all the new names roll in and will do my best to make this worth your time.

(If you know someone else who’d like this newsletter, tell them to sign up at bit.ly/esjmovies).

For the new folks: I may write the reviews around here, but you are absolutely invited to reply to my newsletters with your own takes. And I’m always looking for recommendations for what to watch next, so just hit reply to this email to share those.

- Eric

The Philadelphia Story is a fast-paced, fast-talking 1941 rom-com with one of the best leading casts you could create in the golden age of Hollywood: Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Cary Grant.

When the movie starts, Hepburn is a wealthy old money socialite preparing to remarry a new money climber after a previous marriage to Grant failed. Stewart is sent to secretly report on the marriage for Spy Magazine, along with a photographer played by Ruth Hussey, who I loved — she would have been my favorite character if Hepburn weren’t so good.

Some ostensibly comedic lines are problematic by today’s standards, such as Grant cavalierly joking about spousal abuse, but there’s still a lot to like here: The whole cast ping-pongs off each other beautifully, and Hepburn is written with a complexity that few female rom-com characters before or since have received. Recommended.

I watched The Philadelphia Story on HBO Max, and it’s also currently streaming on DirecTV.

Bringing Up Baby is a delightful screwball comedy with a terrible title, which sounds so hokey and run-of-the-mill on its face, two things this movie is decidedly not. 

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star as a troublemaking heiress and a troublephobic paleontologist who are, for complicated reasons, forced to spend time with each other … and a Brazilian leopard named Baby.

Every single scene with Grant and Hepburn is a winner, particularly the ones with only the two of them playing off each other; the film’s supporting cast is an odd lot of wacky characters, some of whom work and some of whom don’t, and you can feel the momentum of the movie shift into a lower gear when we have to spend time away from the main couple for the sake of the plot. Recommended.

I watched Bringing Up Baby on DVD, but it’s currently streaming on HBO Max and DirecTV.

Moonrise Kingdom was the second Wes Anderson movie I ever saw, and I wasn’t sure I was going to see it because I was lukewarm on Fantastic Mr. Fox (which, incidentally, every other person alive seems to love, so you and I both should probably give it another look).

Anyway, I will always be glad I took a chance on this movie, because I love it. It’s a near-perfectly crafted cocktail of sweetness and bitterness, set in an idyllic Norman Rockwell-esque vision of 1960s New England. And it somehow balances a charming, sweet script with heavy themes like escape mental health, trust, loneliness, and exclusion.

There are several laugh-out-loud scenes and quirky Andersonian touches, but what really elevates this movie from good to great is that undercurrent of darkness and believable characters at its core. And as if that weren’t enough, Alexandre Desplat‘s score is extraordinary. Highly recommended.

I watched Moonrise Kingdom on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on Peacock, DirecTV, and fuboTV.

I love how incredibly good John Cusack is at being unlikable in High Fidelity — as Rob Gordon, he’s one of the top 5 detestable rom-com protagonists who, improbably and annoyingly, you kind of like by the end of the movie.

Leaning into fourth-wall-breaking monologues about his love life that mostly serve to reinforce his own cluelessness, Cusack sloooowly inches toward a more mature outlook on life while circling the drain of a quarter-life crisis. He’s backed up by a supporting cast that’s stacked with good actors, including Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lisa Bonet, and (in blatant “this guy is going to be a movie star” mode) a young Jack Black.

Although there are some pretty good needle drops, I do wish this movie about an obsessive music fan who owns a record store had a better soundtrack. And especially knowing now how charismatic Jack Black would be in movies like School of Rock, I sometimes wished that his manic energy was leading the story, rather than Cusack’s depressive self-pity. Still, recommended.

I watched High Fidelity on DVD, but it’s currently streaming (in standard-def, with ads) on IMDb TV.

Let me get this out of the way up top: I love John Williams’ score to Home Alone.

The rest of the movie is … pretty good! But nothing about it is quite as singularly special as the score. Its second-strongest attribute is the cast: Macaulay Culkin is cute but not cloying, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern are genuinely funny-scary villains, and Catherine O’Hara gives the movie a lot of heart as she races back to the Chicago suburbs where her family left Culkin behind.

I remember being a kid and loving the really famous part of the movie — Kevin’s booby-trapped showdown with the burglars — but now, I could take it or leave it. The absolute killer scenes for me, a boring adult, are Kevin’s heart-to-heart with Roberts Blossom in the church and John Candy’s brief but hilarious scenes with O'Hara as the “Polka King of the Midwest.” Recommended.

Also, here’s a relevant tweet from Wednesday:

I watched Home Alone on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on HBO Go/Now/Max and DirecTV.

(new additions in bold)