Autumn 2024 Movie Roundup: Crimes of Time Travel & Space Magic!

It’s time for the review roundup of the movies and streaming shows I watched in Autumn 2024! I was going to do a combined Autumn/Winter 2024 one, but it was getting a bit too long, so Winter 2024/2025 will be its own post in a few months.

I seemed to watch a lot of time travel ones this time around, and quite a few with Space Magic.

As ever, the grades are totally subjective and based on nothing more than my own thoughts and opinions.

Now, let’s take a look at the movies and streaming shows from least favorite to most favorite!

ESCANABA IN DA MOONLIGHT (2001)

A surrealist comedy about hunting traditions set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

42 year old Reuben Soady is the only man in his family who has never shot a buck. So when he complains about this to his Native American wife, she casts a spell to help Reuben bag his first buck, which results in a very bizarre nighttime journey/vision quest. This includes UFOs, visitations by nighttime spirits, and a Department of Nature Resources officer having a mental breakdown.

This was funny, but it was definitely a bit weird, and very specific. If you’re at all familiar with the hunting culture of the upper American Midwest, you’ll get the humor. If you’re not familiar with it, this will be like watching a movie from another planet.

Overall grade: C

LOOPER (2012)

I didn’t actually like this very much, but it was quite well-done.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a type of assassin called a “Looper” living in the US in 2044. About thirty years after 2044, time travel is invented, but is immediately outlawed. Since it’s difficult to get away with murder in 2074 due to advanced technology, crime syndicates have taken to sending people they want eliminated back in time to 2044, where the “loopers” immediately execute the target in exchange for a big fat payout. Loopers can live like kings, but there’s a price – eventually the “loop is closed” and the looper’s future self is sent back to be killed by his past self. Failure to comply results in an extremely grisly fate at the hands of the syndicate.

Joe, being a hardened killer and drug addict, is fine with all of this, and even helps turn in a fellow looper who failed to close his own loop. Then Joe’s future self arrives. Joe is about to kill Future Joe (played by Bruce Willis), but Future Joe escapes, and Present Joe has to hunt down and kill Future Joe if he wants to survive. In the process, Present Joe stumbles across the farm of a woman named Sara (played by Emily Blunt) and her young son Cid. Present Joe realizes that Future Joe has traveled back to kill the child Cid, who will be responsible for the death of Future Joe’s wife in the future. Despite everything he’s done, Present Joe is not okay with this, and gears up to help Sara defend Cid from Future Joe.

The movie was on the very dark side of noir filmmaking – no good characters, essentially, only various degrees of bad people trying to find their way through the maze of Time Crimes.

I did strongly dislike how fundamentally nihilistic the movie was, and the addition of telekinesis did seem like kind of a plot crutch. There was also some unnecessary nudity.

Rian Johnson is actually a good director, (KNIVES OUT and GLASS ONION were both excellent) but I cannot imagine how someone could watch LOOPER and think “hey, this guy is a good choice for a STAR WARS movie!”

Overall grade: B-

AGATHA ALL ALONG (2024)

Extremely well-written and well-acted. You almost have to watch it twice just to admire how well put-together the plot was.

I wasn’t expecting to like AGATHA ALL ALONG, but it is an excellent example of writing a show with a Villain Protagonist and actually pulling it off.

The show is also is a good example of something I’ve talked about before on the podcast and the blog – characters can be likeable, emotionally sympathetic, or both, and it’s sometimes tricky to write a character who is unlikeable but emotionally sympathetic.

Agatha Harkness is an excellent example of a character who is both likeable and highly, highly unsympathetic. AGATHA ALL ALONG is indeed a show with a villain protagonist, but Agatha is charismatic enough to remain likeable even though she is unquestionably an absolute monster who deserves every bit of suffering she endures. Actress Kathryn Hahn deserves major credit for making someone as evil as Agatha so charismatic. She retains just enough of a sliver of sympathy to keep the audience from turning on her, but even when she shows flashes of humanity, beneath it there are even more layers of monster. She also does a very “modern Doctor Who/Sherlock” type thing where she talks very fast and puts up a flippant and silly facade, but she’s actually calculating things several steps in advance and manipulating things to her final goal.

Anyway, the plot of AGATHA ALL ALONG is that Agatha finally breaks free from the spell the Crimson Witch placed upon her at the end of WANDAVISION. However, Agatha doesn’t have any magic left, which is a major problem for her because she has very many enemies who very much want to see her dead as soon as possible.

But then a mysterious teenager turns up and asks for Agatha’s help – he wants to walk the legendary Witches’ Road, and it is said that someone who walks the road and survives to the end will receive their heart’s desire. Since Agatha doesn’t have any other options and she has some major enemies, she agrees.

Agatha, the teenager, and the Witches’ Road itself all have very dark secrets, and their reveal makes for some major drama.

As I mentioned, the show was very well-written and acted. I suspect that may be the secret for movie/TV success in the 2020s economic climate: 1.) good actors, 2.) an excellent script, and 3.) keep your costs down!

Overall grade: B

FIELD OF DREAMS (1989)

A Iowa farmer discovers he’s a very specific kind of necromancer! Like, you know how Sports Medicine is a specific field of study? Maybe Sports Necromancy is a specific subclass for evil wizards or something.

Anyway, Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) is walking his cornfield and he hears a mysterious voice telling him “if you build it, he will come.” Ray builds a baseball field in one of his cornfields, and begins speaking to the ghost of Shoeless Joe, a popular baseball player who died in 1951. Soon a lot of other ghosts arrive and start playing baseball as well. The mysterious voice starts urging Ray to “ease his pain”, and Ray concludes this must mean Terence Mann (played by James Earl Jones), an activist writer from the 1960s who dropped out of the public eye and is living in seclusion. So Ray starts on a cross-country trip to persuade Mann to come to his baseball field.

This movie is perhaps the ur-example of the Feel-Good Eighties Movie. Like, the characters speak with near-religious reverence for The Sixties (groovy, maaaaaaan), baseball is the Great American Pastime, and Ray really wants to heal his relationship with the father he rebelled against in The Sixties. The best part of the movie was unquestionably James Earl Jones’s character, and his performance as he resigns himself to Ray’s craziness and then starts to believe in it was great.

Overall grade: B

HOLIDAY (1938)

A romantic comedy from the 1930s. Cary Grant plays Johnny Case, who has fallen in love with Julia Seton, the daughter of a wealthy New York banking family. However, his more individualistic outlook soon puts him at odds with Julia’s more traditionalist family, though this draws the attention of Julia’s elder sister Linda, played by Katherine Hepburn.

It felt a bit like watching a play, and a little research revealed that it was indeed based on a play from 1928. Which might be why the film didn’t do well when it originally came out, though it is regarded as a classic today. Viewers in the Great Depression era would probably find it difficult to sympathize with a man who wanted to turn down a well-paying job at a bank. The Seton family is played as eccentric and somewhat troubled, but not as buffoons or villains as rich people were often portrayed in other 30s movies.

Good performances, and worth watching as a classic, though sound technology has improved quite a bit in the last 90 years so you might want to watch it with the captions on.

Overall grade: B

TWISTERS (2024)

This is basically the same movie as TWISTER from back in 1995, but with some of the plot of PRIDE & PREJUDICE added on.

Kate Carter (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones) is an Oklahoma storm chaser with her boyfriend and best friends. One day one of their storm chases goes horribly wrong, killing Kate’s boyfriend and most of their friends. Five years later, Kate is working for the National Weather Service in New York, when her old friend Javi, the other survivor of that storm, asks for her help testing a new radar tracking system. Kate reluctantly agrees, and when they return to Oklahoma crosses horns with storm YouTuber Tyler Owens (played by Glen Powell) who makes videos his truck shooting fireworks into tornadoes. Naturally, Kate and Tyler immediately misunderstand each other in the same way as in PRIDE & PREJUDICE, but are forced to work together when it turns out that Javi’s company might have ulterior motives.

A thoroughly enjoyable summer popcorn flick. Given how both COVID and the 2023 writer’s strike hit this movie’s production like two successive freight trains, it’s astonishing it turned out so well.

Overall grade: A-

THE RINGS OF POWER: SEASON 2 (2024)

I have the same attitude towards this as I do with STARFIELD – I really like it, but I get why some people do not.

This is essentially very elaborate Tolkien fan-fiction. Like, THE LORD OF THE RINGS movie trilogy, despite the changes from the book, was still recognizably THE LORD OF THE RINGS. The RINGS OF POWER is almost entirely its own thing.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this for a couple of reasons and hope it continues.

First, it’s nice to have an epic fantasy TV series that’s not a nihilistic pornographic torture-fest like GAME OF THRONES/HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, and is more competently executed than Disney’s ill-fated WILLOW series.

Second, all things must be taken in their context. What do I mean by this? Perhaps a food comparison will illustrate the point. The book THE LORD OF THE RINGS is like Kobe beef prepared by the finest chefs in the world, the sort of experience you get maybe once or twice in your life if fortune smiles upon you. THE LORD OF THE RINGS movie trilogy is like a high-quality supermarket steak grilled in a backyard by someone who’s pretty good at it. THE RINGS OF POWER is like McDonalds – but there are times when you really want some McDonald’s. I kind of want a Big Mac just after typing all of that.

But it’s really good McDonalds. Like the kind of McDonalds you have after driving in the car for 250 miles without stopping across one of America’s flatter and less populous states, and the only place to eat for like a hundred miles in any direction is this McDonalds in the same building as a gas station, so you stop and don’t expect very much, but it turns out the fries are crisp and salty and the nuggets are just right.

I don’t think it’s surprising that the RINGS OF POWER had such a mixed reception. The Venn diagram of “enjoys THE LORD OF THE RINGS” has some wildly divergent circles to it. It is a testament to the fact that THE LORD OF THE RINGS is such a great work of literature that so many people from so many very different ideological identity groups enjoy and identify with the book. Even ideological identity groups that are mortal foes agree on their approval of THE LORD OF THE RINGS! So, naturally, each different group has its own strong opinion of what an adaptation should look like.

That said, I liked season 2, and thought it was an improvement over season 1. A lot more narrative tension. Season 1 perhaps spent too much time setting the table and building context, but Season 2 works well in making Season 1 better in hindsight – RINGS OF POWER’s version of Galadriel is improved in Season 2 because she was one of the few characters able to throw off Sauron’s mental domination and seduction.

The highlight of the season was the toxic dynamic between Sauron and Celebrimbor. Actors Charlie Vickers and Charles Edwards did an amazing job portraying the slow-moving disaster that Sauron’s and Celebrimbor’s collaboration would create – two intellectual equals working together to create something great, but nonetheless Sauron twists everything to his own ends. Their final scene together was just astonishingly good, and the portrayal of Sauron is both very modern and true to Tolkien – a destructive narcissist who actually believes whatever lies he’s speaking at any given moment. He really, truly believes he’s going to “heal Middle-earth”, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it. The scenes with Prince Durin, his father, and one of the dwarven Rings of Power were great as well – it had the same sort of feel to it as a child watching with horror as a beloved parent succumbs to a drug addiction.

The best new character the show created, in my opinion, is Adar, one of the progenitors of the orcs. Tolkien himself could never really decide on the origin of the orcs and came up with different thoughts throughout his lifetime, and when editing THE SILMARILLION Christopher Tolkien settled on the “corrupted former elves” version, which seems to be what his father had been leaning toward anyway. RINGS OF POWER takes that to its logical conclusion. Adar wants his orcish progeny to live free of the Dark Lords Morgoth and Sauron, which makes sense, because in the books the orcs hated Morgoth and Saruon and only served them out of fear. (Indeed, in THE LORD OF THE RINGS Sauron seemed to have secret police and informers among the orcs to keep track of their loyalties.) And since the show displays how twisted and cruel Sauron really is, it makes sense that Adar is willing to go to any lengths to stop Sauron, no matter how extreme. The orcs are still monsters, including Adar himself, but they are monsters who want to be free of an even greater monster than themselves.

And since if you’ve read the SILMARILLION or THE LORD OF THE RINGS, you know all the characters’ efforts are doomed to failure, especially Adar’s and Celebrimbor’s, which lends an air of inevitable tragedy to everything that happens.

I know some people were mad that Tom Bombadil was basically Wizard Yoda, but I thought it worked. Tom Bombadil is so inscrutable of a character than he can really do whatever he wants. It was also great how composer Bear McCreary wove in variations of Sauron’s theme throughout the show. The soundtrack was A+ work in my opinion.

Overall, I enjoyed it and would like it to continue. If you know the difference between Fëanor, Finwë, Finrod Felagund, Finarfin, Findulias, Fingon, and Fingolfin (without having to look it up), and in fact have everything about them from THE SILMARILLION memorized, you’ll hate this show. But I think it’s worth watching.

Overall grade: A-

CASA BONITA MI AMOR (2024)

Way back in the 1990s, I saw an episode of FRASIER where Frasier and his brother Niles decide to buy a restaurant. A series of hilarious cascading disasters result. At the time, I decided I never wanted to own a restaurant, and every piece of both factual information and fictional media I have consumed since has not changed this determination.

CASA BONITA MI AMOR definitely will not challenge that decision! Apparently, Casa Bontia was a beloved theme restaurant in Colorado that went out of business during Covid. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, decided to buy the restaurant themselves and reopen it. They budgeted 3.6 million dollars for the restoration of the building.

Costs soon swelled to 40 million dollars, and the problems were only just beginning.

This is an excellent and entertaining example of the “rich man buys restaurant, soon finds himself over his head” genre of documentary filmmaking.

Overall grade: A

Finally my two favorite things I saw in Autumn 2024:

FREQUENCY (2000)

Another variant on a time travel story. I liked this one better than LOOPER.

Frank Sullivan is a firefighter and devoted family man living in New York circa 1969. His son John is a police detective living in the same house thirty years later, with emotional problems because he never got over his father’s tragic death in a dangerous fire thirty years earlier. When the son of a friend stumbles across his father’s old ham radio, John lets the kid goof around with it. Later that night, John starts talking to someone on the radio, and to his astonishment realizes that he is talking to his father from thirty years ago. Desperate, John tries to warn Frank about the fire that kills him.

And it works – Frank survives the fire, and instead of dying in 1969, he instead dies in 1989 from lung cancer due to a pack-a-day smoking habit. The scene where history changes and John suddenly remembers it was pretty great.

But this scene is only forty percent through the movie!

John successfully managed to Put Right What Once Went Wrong. However, in doing so John accidentally Put Wrong What Once Went Right. His mother is a nurse, and in the original timeline was on bereavement leave the day after Frank’s death. In the new timeline, she goes to work and saves a patient who would have otherwise died in a medical error, and the patient happened to be a deadly serial killer known as the Nightingale. To his horror, John realizes that the Nightingale is now free to continue his murders, and his new target is John’s mother and Frank’s wife…

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not really a fan of time travel stories, but this one was quite well done. Interestingly, the plot structure was similar to Avengers: Endgame – the Avengers go back in time to steal the Infinity Stones and undo Thanos’s Snap, but Past Thanos figures out what’s going on and follows the Avengers back the present and attempts to make things even worse. John manages to save Frank from the fire, but this means the Nightingale serial killer survives and might create a worse present than the one John already has.

Amusingly, this shared FIELD OF DREAMS’ reverence for baseball as the Great American Pastime, and John manages to convince Frank he’s telling the truth by accurately predicting the outcome of baseball games.

Overall grade: A

THE GRAND TOUR: ONE FOR THE ROAD (2024)

I admit when I started self-publishing in 2011 I knew absolutely nothing about the contemporary UK. Like, I couldn’t have even told you whether the UK used the pound or the Euro, and when I started getting book royalties from Amazon UK let’s just say I learned about currency conversion rates real fast. But as UK book royalties fluctuated, I started reading the UK news since when there’s an election or a major news event in the UK, book royalties tend to drop for a few days after the same way they do when something similar happens in the US.

Because of that, I saw the news article when Jeremy Clarkson was fired from Top Gear in 2015 for punching out a producer. At the time, there were some seasons of Top Gear on Netflix, so I was curious and started watching, and was thoroughly entertained. When GRAND TOUR started on Amazon, I started watching that as well and was thoroughly entertained.

But all good things must come to an end, and Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May go on one last road trip adventure across Zimbabwe. The usual hijinks ensure for one last time, and it was a fitting end to TOP GEAR/THE GRAND TOUR. I’ll miss the show, but I’m grateful for over a decade of entertainment from TOP GEAR/GRAND TOUR and the various spin offs like CLARKSON’S FARM and James May’s travel show.

Overall grade: A

-JM