Winter 2024 Movie Roundup

We are inching closer to spring, so I think it’s time for my Winter 2024 movie review roundup!

I got a Paramount+ subscription to watch the FRASIER reboot, and since Paramount owns STAR TREK and the FRASIER reboot was only ten episodes long, I ended up watching a chunk of modern STAR TREK this winter.

This was a new-ish experience because the last new STAR TREK I watched was STAR TREK BEYOND waaaaaaay back in 2016. That was only eight years ago, but it’s been a very eventful eight years, you know?

I did watch a lot of STAR TREK back in the 90s. If you held a gun to my head and demanded to know if I considered myself a Trekkie, I would say no, because I think Gene Roddenberry’s socialist/utopian vision for the Federation that he put into STAR TREK is fundamentally kind of goofy. The shows and movies were at their best when they stayed away from it or subverted it, like how the Federation can only be a utopia because Starfleet seems to have an black ops section that both does all the dirty work and regularly runs amok. Or how Starfleet has an actual Mad Science Division that cooks up all kinds of nasty stuff.

So, anyway, these are the movies and shows I watched in winter 2024.

As always, my ratings are wholly subjective and based nothing more upon my own opinions.

NOW YOU SEE ME (2013)

Last year I compared Adam Sandler’s MURDER MYSTERY movie to a C- student, but a fun C- minus student who everyone likes, throws great parties, and goes on to have a successful career as regional sales manager. By contrast, NOW YOU SEE ME is the sort of moody art student who always wears a black porkpie hat and thinks of himself or herself as deep and complicated when in fact they’re just confusing.

This is an apt comparison for this movie.

Anyway, the plot centers around four sketchy magicians who are recruited by a mysterious organization called The Eye to carry out a series of high-profile heists using stage magic. I have to admit that concept sounds even more ridiculous as I typed out the previous sentence. Anyway, after their first heist, the magicians become fugitives from the FBI but keep carrying on shows, somehow staying ahead of law enforcement.

The trouble is nothing they do makes much sense and falls apart if you think about it for more than two seconds. Additionally, the movie overall feels very choppy since they rush from scene to scene very quickly. The actors all gave good performances and were entertaining to watch, but that was about the only thing the movie had going for it.

Overall grade: D-

THE MARVELS (2023)

Logically incoherent, but actually rather charming and funny. It kind of reminded me of a sort of 70s or 80s style SF movie that doesn’t make much sense, but lighter in tone.

This movie got a bad rap because it didn’t remake its budget (and apparently Disney rather shamefully threw the director under the bus), but to be fair, the budget was an enormous $274 million dollars. To put this into context, the top three movies of 2023 – BARBIE, SUPER MARIO BROTHERS, and OPPENHEIMER – combined had a budget of $350 million dollars, and together they grossed something like 15x more than THE MARVELS.

Anyway, the plot picks up from the end of MS. MARVEL, when Kamala Khan, Captain Marvel, and Monica Rambeau discovers that their superpowers have become entangled. That means if two of them use their powers at the same time, all three of them switch places. This makes for a rather excellent fight scene earlier in the movie when the three characters don’t know what’s going on and are randomly teleporting between three different battles, much to the frequently amusing confusion of all the participants. Once things settle down, Captain Marvel and her new friends realize that an old enemy of Captain Marvel’s is harvesting resources from worlds she cares about. So it’s up to them to save Earth from this old enemy’s vengeance.

I have to admit the plot didn’t actually make sense, but it was much funnier than ANT-MAN 3 and SECRET INVASION. The best thing about the movie was Kamala Khan and her family. Kamala, Monica, and Captain Marvel also had a great dynamic together. The Planet of Space Musicals was also hilarious.

I think the movie’s biggest, unconquerable weakness was that it was the 33rd Marvel movie. Like, there are all sorts of theories of why the movie didn’t perform at the box office – superhero genre fatigue, everyone knew it would be on Disney+ eventually, the lasting effects of COVID on movie theaters, Disney throwing the director under the bus, Disney inserting itself into the US culture wars, etc – but all that is subjective and subject to personal interpretation.

What I think it objectively quantifiable is that THE MARVELS is the sequel to a LOT of different Marvel stuff – the AVENGERS movies, WANDAVISION, CAPTAIN MARVEL, the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movies, SECRET INVASION, and THOR: LOVE & THUNDER. That’s like, what, 40-50 plus hours of stuff to watch to fully understand the emotional significance of all the various characters? That almost sounds like an entire semester’s worth homework assignments at this point.

As someone who has written a lot of long series, I know that you lose some of the audience from book to book. I think that’s ultimately why THE MARVELS didn’t make back its budget – the Marvel movies as a series have just gone on too long and are too interconnected. Ultimately, I am grateful to THE MARVELS – realizing Marvel Lockout Syndrome helped me decide to write something new that wasn’t a sequel or even connected to anything else I had written, which eventually led to Rivah Half-Elven and HALF-ELVEN THIEF.

Overall grade: B-

MY MAN GODFREY (1936)

This is considered the progenitor (or one of the progenitors) of the screwball comedy genre.

A homeless man named Godfrey is living in a trash dump in New York, though despite his circumstances Godfrey remains sharp and quick on his feet. One night a wealthy woman named Cornelia approaches him and offers $5 if he’ll come with her. Godfrey is naturally suspicious, but Cornelia assures him that she only needs to take him to a hotel to win a scavenger hunt by finding a “forgotten man”, which was a term President Roosevelt used to describe people had been ruined by the Great Depression and then forgotten by the government.

I have to admit Cornelia immediately reminded me of the way the more obnoxious YouTubers and TikTokers will sometimes pay homeless people to participate in dance challenges and suchlike. King Solomon was right when he said there is nothing new under the sun and what has been done before will be done again.

Anyway, Godfrey is offended by Cornelia’s imperious manner, but after he sees Cornelia bullying her kindly but none-too-bright younger sister Irene, Godfrey decides he’ll go with Irene so she can win, and a grateful Irene offers him a job as the family’s butler. At his first day at work, Godfrey soon realizes the reason the family has gone through so many butlers – they are all certifiably (and comedically) insane, and Cornelia is harboring a massive grudge against Godfrey for losing the scavenger hunt and wants payback.

Wacky hijinks ensue! Fortunately, Godfrey has some hidden depths that he will need, which include being smarter than his employers. Admittedly, this is not hard.

1936 was towards the second half of the Great Depression, so obviously the movie has more than a bit of social commentary. The characters joke that “prosperity is just around the corner” and wonder where they can find that corner, and the rich characters are uniformly portrayed as some combination of frivolous, clueless, or malicious. I think the movie was pretty funny, if sharply so, but the big weakness was that the male and female leads were so clearly unsuited for each other but got together at the end of the movie simply because it was the end of the movie. Still, it was definitely worth watching because see you can see how it influenced many movies after it.

And I definitely recommend watching it with captions if possible, because while human nature has not changed in the last 90 years sound technology has improved quite a bit.

Overall grade: B

CHARADE (1963)

This is a sort-of romantic comedy sort-of thriller that has Audrey Hepburn playing Regina, an American living in Paris who is in the process of getting divorced from her husband. When she returns to Paris, she learns that her husband was murdered, and it turns out that he was in possession of $250,000 he stole from the US government during World War II. Regina had no idea about any of this, but the US government thinks she has the money stashed away somewhere. It turns out that her late husband also betrayed the men he worked with to steal the money, and they’re convinced that she has the money as well.

And they’re going to get it from her regardless of what they have to do.

Regina’s only ally in this mess is a mysterious man calling himself Peter Joshua (played by Cary Grant), who may or may not be one of the other thieves operating under an assumed identity.

I liked this movie, but I think it had two problems. First, Regina wasn’t all that bright, though she did get smarter as the movie went on. Second, it had some severe mood whiplash – it couldn’t decide if it was a romantic comedy or a gritty thriller, though it finally snapped into focus as a pretty good thriller in the last third. Amusing tidbit: Cary Grant only agreed to do the movie if Audrey Hepburn’s character would be the one chasing him in their romance, since he thought their age gap would be inappropriate otherwise since Hepburn was so much younger.

Overall grade: B+

FRASIER (2023)

I had very, very low expectations for this, but it was considerably better than I thought it would be. My low expectations came partly because the original show was so good – some seasons were stronger than others, of course, but the show had some absolute masterpieces of sitcom comedy throughout its entire run. Some of it was because the 2020s a much more humorless and dour age than the 1990s, so I had my doubts that the new show could be funny at all.

Fortunately, my doubts were misplaced – the new FRASIER is actually pretty good. It’s interesting that the show’s generational dynamic has been flipped on its head. In the original show, the pretentious Frasier lived with his working-class father. Twenty years later, it’s Frasier who now lives with his son Freddy, who dropped out of Harvard to become a firefighter and consciously rejected his father’s love of intellectualism and cultural elitism. The inversion of the original dynamic works quite well and has some moments of great comedy, because like his father before him, Freddy is more like his father than he realizes.

The show also avoided the pitfall of bringing back legacy characters that Disney/Lucasfilm stumbled into with STAR WARS and INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY. Disney brought back legacy characters like Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones, but made them into Sad Old Losers. Frasier, by contrast, while frequently an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist who brings his misfortunes onto his own head, is most definitely not a Sad Old Loser. He’s famous and wealthy enough that he can buy an apartment building in Boston at the drop of a hat, though he remains the same well-meaning buffoon that he always was, the sort of man who, as a colleague says, “always goes that extra, ill-advised mile.”

There’s a story that when Ricky Gervais was advising the creators of the American version of THE OFFICE one of his chief pieces of advice was that Michael Scott could not be as incompetent as David Brent was in the original UK version of the show. American culture, Mr. Gervais said, was generally much less forgiving of incompetence than British culture. I thought of this as I watched FRASIER because all the characters were in fact extremely competent at their jobs. Even Frasier himself, when he gets out of his own way, is a very good psychiatrist and teacher.

Anyway, the show was funny and I think it deserves a second season, though we’ll see if that happens or not.

Overall grade: A-

STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS SEASONS 1-4 (2020-2023)

I ended up subscribing to Paramount+ for a month after I watched FRASIER, so I decided to watch STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS since I’m forever seeing clips of it turning up on social media.

LOWER DECKS is a pitch-perfect Affectionate Parody of STAR TREK from the point of view of four relatively hapless ensigns on the Cerritos, one of Starfleet’s somewhat less prestigious ships. We have the self-sabotaging rebel Mariner, the insecure and ambitious Boimler, the enthusiastic Science Girl Tendi, and the cheerful engineer Rutherford who nonetheless has a Dark & Mysterious past that he can’t remember. Season four also adds T’Lyn, a Vulcan whose mild expressions of carefully measured annoyance make her a dangerous loose cannon by Vulcan standards.

The show is hilarious because it makes fun of STAR TREK tropes while wholeheartedly embracing them. The ensigns run into a lot of Insane Computers, Random Space Anomalies, Rubber Forehead Aliens, and other STAR TREK tropes. (Including the grand and venerable STAR TREK tradition of the Insane Admiral – Starfleet officers always seem to go off the deep end when they get promoted to Starfleet Command.) The senior officers are also varying degrees of insane and drama generators. Starfleet, from the point of view of the Cerritos crew, is a vast bureaucratic organization that veers between ineffective idealism, blatant careerism, and whatever crazy project the Insane Admiral of the week is pursuing. Yet since American sitcom characters have to be competent (like we just talked about above with FRASIER), when the crisis really kicks into high gear, the Cerritos crew can pull itself together and save the day with the best of them.

And the show grows from an Affectionate Parody to become its own thing, with all the characters experiencing struggles and growth.

I liked it enough that when the fifth season comes out I’ll subscribe to another month of Paramount+, assuming Paramount+ still exists and hasn’t been bought out by Warner Brothers or Skydance or something.

Overall grade: A-

PREDATOR (1987)

When Carl Weathers died in early February, I realized I had never actually gotten around to seeing PREDATOR. So I did, and I’m glad that I watched it. PREDATOR was an excellent blending of thriller, science fiction, and horror.

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Dutch, who commands a team of operators who do black ops work for the CIA. Since it’s 1987, the CIA is up to its traditional shenanigans in Central America, and Dutch is dispatched to help out his old friend Dillon (played by Carl Weathers), who has been ostensibly assigned to rescue a pro-American cabinet minister from rebel guerillas in the jungle. Since this is the CIA, naturally there is more to the mission than is apparent on the surface. However, the mission quickly becomes irrelevant when Dutch and his team realize they are being hunted by an unknown creature with capabilities unlike anything they have ever seen before.

Turns out, the creature is the titular Predator – an alien hunter who comes to Earth to take human skulls as trophies. Soon the movie turns into a deathmatch between Dutch and the Predator.

The movie did a very good job of showing the Predator’s capabilities (stealth, heat vision, shoulder laser, etc) without explicitly spelling them out for the audience. It was a very well put-together piece of storytelling, and it is, of course, the source of the famous Internet meme of a muscular white arm gripping a muscular black arm. And also of Schwarzenegger’s famous line of “get to the choppah!”

Also, to quote a famous Internet meme, if you had a nickel for every future governor of a US state who was in this movie, you would have two nickels. Which is not a lot, but even two is pretty weird, right?

Overall grade: A

Now, the best thing I saw in winter 2024!

The honor goes to:

STAR TREK: PICARD SEASON 3 (2023)

Honestly, this was so much better than I thought it was going to be. I thought I would watch like one or two episodes and give up, but instead I watched the whole thing in like two days over the New Year’s holiday.

I watched the first episode of PICARD Season 1 waaaaaaay back in 2020 when it was free on YouTube, but I didn’t like it enough to subscribe to CBS All Access or whatever the heck it was called back then. The first episode also seemed more ponderous and dour and the sort of 21st century nihilistic Prestige Television snoozefest than I really wanted to watch. But season 3 of the show got high reviews from people I respect when it came out in early 2023, and since I had Paramount+ for a month because of FRASIER, I decided to give it a go.

I’m glad I did!

Back in summer 2023, I watched the BATTLESHIP movie. BATTLESHIP is a bad movie, but it does have one interesting subplot that would make a good movie all on its own. When space aliens imprison most of the United States’ navy, a bunch of retired veterans take a decommissioned battleship out to war to save the day.

This, basically, is the plot of PICARD season 3.

The plot kicks off when Dr. Crusher contacts Admiral Picard after they have not spoken for twenty years. Apparently, Picard had a son named Jack with Crusher that she never told him about, and mysterious assailants are trying to kidnap Jack. On the original show, Picard and Crusher definitely gave off the vibe that they got amorous whenever they were alone in the elevator together, so the fact that Dr. Crusher got pregnant with Picard’s son is not all that surprising. Picard had always been adamant about his desire not to start a family, and given that any son of the legendary Captain Picard would be a target for his equally legendary enemies, Crusher decided to keep the boy a secret.

Picard, understandably, is shocked by the news, but teams up with his former first officer Captain Riker to rescue his son. Jack has an extensive Robin Hood-esque criminal history, so it seems that his misdeeds might have caught up to him. But it turns out that a deadly weapon is locked in Jack’s DNA, and the people pursuing him aren’t merely criminals but powerful enemies intent on destroying Starfleet and the Federation…and Jack Crusher’s DNA will give them the means to do it.

Which means it’s up to the crew of the Enterprise to save the galaxy one last time.

This was ten episodes, but it was very, very tightly plotted with not many wasted moments. Sometimes movies seem like they should have been streaming shows, and sometimes streaming shows seem like they really should have been cut down to movie length, but PICARD SEASON 3 does a good job of telling a tense story that would have been impossible either in a movie or the old days of network television. The show very quickly plunges into the crisis and keeps moving from new tension to new tension. The gradual reveal where Picard at first feels guilty that he has to ask his friends to help to rescue his estranged son and ex-girlfriend (like he’s living his own personal version of some trashy daylight TV show) only to slowly realize that something much more dangerous and much, much bigger than his personal problems is happening was put together well.

This show was another good example of how to bring back legacy characters right. All the characters are older and have been knocked around by life or suffered personal tragedies, but none of them are Sad Old Losers like in a Disney/Lucasfilm project (or, apparently, PICARD seasons 1&2). The new and supporting characters were also great. Seven of Nine returns as the first officer to Captain Shaw, a by-the-book officer who thinks Picard and Riker are dangerous mavericks (he has a point), but Shaw turns out to be extremely competent in a crisis. Amanda Plummer was great as Vadic, a scenery-chewing villain who has very good reasons to hate Starfleet and the Federation. (Vadic’s love of spinning dramatically in her command chair was a great homage to Amanda Plummer’s late father Christopher Plummer, who played a villain with a similar tic way back in STAR TREK VI in the 90s.) It was also great how the show wrapped up some of the dangling plot threads from the 90s, like Picard’s strained relationship with his former mentee Commander Ro, or the brief return of Elizabeth Shelby, Riker’s former first officer.

A few people have complained that Worf is now a pacifist, but he’s a Klingon pacifist, which basically means he’ll attempt negotiation before cutting off your head…but he’s still probably gonna cut off your head. Less Conan the Barbarian, more serene warrior monk. I think Data had an excellent ending to his character arc which started with his character’s very first appearance waaaaay back in the 80s, and actor Brent Spiner did a good job of portraying Data’s fractured personalities and then how they achieved unity.

I’d say the weakest point of the show is how consistently dumb Starfleet Command is. The plot hinged around Starfleet gathering its entire fleet together for a celebration and then putting all those ships under a remote control system, which seems both exceptionally stupid and very convenient for the bad guys. But, to be fair, this is Starfleet, an organization whose high command regularly spits out Insane Admirals and also has an unsanctioned black ops organization/mad science division that it can’t control, so it definitely fits within the overall context of STAR TREK. I mean, that’s like half the premise of LOWER DECKS. And if you’ve ever worked for a large governmental, military, health care, or educational institution, you understand. We all know that working in a large institution under leaders who are either insane or dumb isn’t exactly an anomaly in the human experience. (I mean, the Roman Empire circa 190 AD was the most powerful institution on the planet, and the empire’s Maximum Leader liked to spend his time LARPing as a gladiator in the Colosseum.)

The emotional payoff at the end was very satisfying, and how the show wrapped up lot threads from NEXT GENERATION, DEEP SPACE NINE, and VOYAGER was pretty great.

It’s like the people who were in charge of Season 3 watched the STAR WARS sequel trilogy and thought “you know, we can do better.”

And then they did!

Overall grade: A