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Four years ago my then 99-year-old grandmother needed a chauffeur for a shopping trip. I was the grandchild who was both in town and not working that day so the honor fell to me. As we shopped I shared some thoughts about her on Twitter.

And I want to keep this someplace a little more permanent. Please remember it was written in real-time as it was happening.

Looking at it now, I see how much is missing and should have been included, but it was written just for fun and I don’t think I want to rewrite it.

Maybe I’ll write something else about her for her birthday.

Also, she’s still going on shopping trips with her usual companion, my now 71-year-old mother. Grandma turns 103 on December 7.

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Today’s mission: take my 99-year-old grandmother to The Dollar Tree.

She’s been through the Great Depression, World War 2, and COVID. And now what she wants is some fine dollar store products.

She weighs somewhere around 85 pounds and often eats a plain vanilla milkshake for dinner.

Currently, the cart has tissues, sweet mate, chicken noodle soup, and a microwave pizza.

One time she took me to a funeral in Georgia. I’m fairly certain she didn’t know anyone. She just wanted to get out of the house.

Her purchases cost $8. But she picked up a penny off the floor on her way out so she’s already back in the red.

Or is that the black? Whatever.

We are now at Chick-Fil-A. Dinner tonight will be one chicken sandwich.

Grandma met granddaddy outside of her little town in Oklahoma. He was in the service and they started courtin’.

When he was in Okinawa she would get two or three letters at a time and then nothing for a week or two. Cause that’s how the mail worked. The postman figured out what was going on and anytime she got a letter he would honk to let her know.

Grandma’s birthday is Dec. 7. She was 20 (according to my math) when Pearl Harbor was attacked. So every year on her birthday we hear the Pearl Harbor story.

The Pearl Harbor story consists of two elements 1. Army men with bull horns came through town to tell all the military guys to go back to the base. Leave was canceled.

And 2. There were two women who lived together who apparently got no news that weekend and found out about Pearl Harbor on Monday. And that was in some way shocking.

My mom is normally in charge of taking Grandma on her daily outing (dollar store, library, and some small amount of fast food) but she had knee surgery so I was drafted.

Grandma paid for everything with ones. That’s probably her aluminum can recycling money.

Anyway, when we were done I walked out and grandma walked along behind me.

“I’m gonna lock the door,” she said. “It will get dark soon.”

Yes ma’am, I thought, but hopefully not for a while.

An update of Pretty Woman for the age of WAP. 

Annie is a stripper, a sex worker and most of all a hustler. In another movie and another time Annie’s activities would be downplayed and her lifestyle would be explained away with a tragic backstory. 

But this ain’t that movie and Annie ain’t a hooker with a heart of gold.

Without giving too much away Annie connects with a man a few years younger than her who appears to be very rich and very persuadable. 

He wants her for sex and she’s happy to be on the market. But things change when Annie allows herself to accept a proposal and marries the man in Las Vegas. 

What happens next should not be spoiled but it is hilarious and riveting. 

There’s a time in your life where you probably attend a lot of weddings. In my part of the world it was small church services followed by dinner. Rarely any dancing and the couples were all somewhere in their mid 20s. 

Usually the brides weren’t showing. 

I’ll never forget when, at one of these happy occasions, my mom leaned over to me and said, “This will be a nice starter marriage.” 

I was so young and naive that it took four or five years and three or four divorces amongst my friends, before I understood what she meant. 

Anora is not a movie about a nice starter marriage. Or if it is it’s a starter marriage from hell. 

But Writer/Director Sean Baker understands all of his characters the same way my mother knew about marriage. He presents them with razor sharp humor, grace and empathy. 

This is one of the best movies of the year.

Do you listen to murder podcasts? 

This movie is a murder podcast come to life. All that’s missing is one woman to narrate and another to say, ‘oh wow, unbelievable.” 

In Woman of the Hour Anna Kendrick plays a young actress who goes on The Dating Game and is wooed by a dummy, a sleazeball and a serial killer.

“Oh wow, unbelievable.” 

The true life, if corny premise, threw me off until it came to Netflix but I was excited to be wrong. 

Kendrick also directs and wrings every bit of tension out the premise. This is a solid debut from a first time director. 

The story splits allowing us to follow Kendrick’s waning acting career and the killers previous encounters. 

You know where each of those scenes is going but Kendrick still finds a new way into the serial killer cliches, either through unique camera work or just by letting each moment find just the right amount hope before she slides the knife in. 

Kendrick and company also use nearly each scene to express how women are vulnerable around every man, even the “nice guys.” 

A movie with a solid theme that pays off in a decent way. 

Ultimately, it’s a modest film with modest goals. But it achieves them all the same. I’m looking forward to what Kendrick directs next.

A Stephen King town is always damned long before the vampires, werewolves, ghosts or cursed cars reveal themselves. 

King — a survivor of small town life — always understood the beating heart of little villages to be cruelty, racism and generational abuse. In his stories these problems exist alongside the few poor souls trying to be righteous in the land of the wicked. 

However, King had pages and pages and ever more pages to show us every sin and crime. He can build characters up, reveal their quirks, announce their fears and then knock them off the board whenever he got ready. 

But movies have limited time and space. A truly faithful translation of Salem’s Lot would require a multipart miniseries and would probably result in boredom. I haven’t seen Toby Hooper’s miniseries version from 1979 so I can’t comment. 

But I can say that the first half of writer turned director Gary Dauberman’s bite at Salem’s Lot is slow. 

It’s not boring, because it’s doing what it needs to do, but any audience member over say 12 already understands what’s going on and doesn’t need the well trod lore around vampires explained. 

But the opening is all plot and lacks character work as it rushes from one scare to the next. 

In the book Father Callahan’s fate seemed like the crux of the story. Here it happens note for note but the results just don’t linger like they should. 

There is also a whole section about the nature of a haunted house that ties into the main character’s past that is dropped as well.

Instead of a deep dive into characters we get … music. There is a harmonica that becomes important and effective use of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown. King always wrote about music and used snippets of lyrics to open his books or at the beginning of each chapter to help set certain moods. The good directors bring that over to his best adaptations too. 

Sundown is a great choice for a vampire movie. I didn’t get tired of it even on the third or fourth go round. 

We also get Alfre Woodard delivering lines about vampires in a way that only Alfre Woodard can. It’s also great to see character work from Billy Camp and William Sadler. 

Hand them a juicy role and you can just sit back and get comfy. I smiled every time Camp lit a pipe or Sadler delivered another line about how all of society is headed down into destruction. 

Jordon Preston Carter is electric as a kid turned vampire hunter who understands the rules of the game and refuses to be bullied or talked down to by clueless adults. 

Lewis Pullman and Mackenzie Leigh do what they can with the bland main characters. But they don’t make much of an impression. 

Neither does Barlow, who is presented here as not much more than a creepy face and special effects. His servant Straker somehow makes even less of an impression. 

I remember King writing that with Salem’s Lot that he obviously wanted to do Dracula but that it was also informed by the gross out vampires he discovered in the horror comics of his youth. 

And I’ll tell you, as I keep considering this movie, I think the worst thing that happened to King is that he became respectable. 

Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption proved to even his harshest critics, that he was capable of high art. And then Frank Darabount made one of the greatest movies ever out of it. 

And then, slowly but surely, Hollywood has made a cottage industry out of tasteful adaptations of King’s novels. 

But there is a fine line between tasteful and bloodless and this movie just doesn’t have enough fangs

This is a mild movie with mild thrills doing it’s best to trade on George Clooney and Brad Pitts movie star charisma and shared cinema past instead of doing the work. 

What work? You know the part where you create interesting characters, put them in increasingly dire situations and watch them scramble and bump off each other?

Yeah, there’s not much of that here. 

Instead, it’s Clooney and Pitt playing Clooney and Pitt in a movie where they are hardly ever challenged by any situation. No one wants to play weak and no one wants to be vulnerable. 

There are a couple of moments that got me. I enjoyed every song that magically played in Clooney’s car. A few of the action scenes did fine. And I liked the ending an awful lot because I’m a sucker for that particular way out. 

But the whole thing is weak tea. 

It’s Ocean’s 14 all the way down to the famous Clooney/Pitt shorthand conversations but without all those messy character actors or interesting scenes to gunk things up.

Look, I don’t want you to not watch this. Its out there maybe you will find more of it to love than I did. 

But what I would urge you to do is check out Clooney in Out of Sight and Pitt in Killing Them Softly. In both movies they (and everyone else) does the work necessary to bring interesting crime characters to life. 

And yeah, there’s always Ocean’s 11, which featured one of our greatest directors at the top of his game making a masterpiece while also just goofing around. 

Finally, the one other movie with Pitt and Clooney together that you ought to check out (and which goofs around in a very different way) is Burn After Reading. 

Here’s what I think ultimately of Wolf’s. Somewhere in the process somebody at the top of this thing said, “hey, we got Clooney, we got Pitt, don’t worry about it.” 

And they really should have worried about it. 

This movie, like the characters that live in its frame, has got sand. 

Grit. Guts. 

This movie seduces your spouse and then winks at you and you find you can’t hold a grudge. 

Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is one of the grizzly director’s great masterpieces but only became so long after it was released. The studio cut all the life out of it but it was eventually restored to be closer to Peckinpah’s intentions. 

I’ve only ever seen the restored version. I’m writing about it today because I bought the Criterion edition. 

It looks great.  

Moving on. 

The movie’s scenes feel like dream sequences but the dialogue is full of dry wit and danger. 

It’s also a hang out movie. Billy, Garrett and the gang are always telling stories about old times. From the way they talk you would think these were good times. But it’s funny because all those stories seem to end with some poor bastard getting killed.

Here’s a great scene in a movie that has nothing but great scenes:

Pat Garrett rides into town after finding that Billy the Kid, who he had moved heaven and earth to capture has escaped and killed two of his deputies. 

When he gets there he finds the townsfolk, who had stood by while Billy escaped, are having a something close to a fiesta around the dead deputy.  

“Won’t some of you people get him up off the ground and into it?” Garrett snarls. 

Perfect. 

Also, the way James Coburn says “people” strongly suggests that he does not believe they deserve the designation. 

The movie is full of moments like that, everyone Garrett encounters is pissed at him for betraying Billy and siding with the Santa Fe ring, the corrupt government and the law. 

Notice how every conversation Garrett has is laced with bitterness. Didn’t they all ride into town together as outlaws all those years ago? 

No one dares pull a gun on Garrett, he’s too damn dangerous. But their mouths stay loaded and everybody he meets calls him a son of bitch, whether they use those exact words are not. 

Everyone, that is except Billy. 

He recognizes that Garrett is giving him time to leave. He even knows that he should. But he just can’t do it. 

Here’s their first conversation in the movie. 

Billy: Ol’ Pat… Sheriff Pat Garrett. Sold out to the Santa Fe ring. How does it feel?

Garrett: It feels like… times have changed.

Billy: Times, maybe. Not me.

Not long after Garrett and his gang kill a bunch of people and arrest Billy. And the conversation they have there, backed by Bon Dylan’s acoustic guitar songs is one of the most beautiful moments in guy cinema. 

Billy: You’re in poor company, Pat.

Garrett: Yeah, but I’m alive.

Billy: So am I…

Kris Kristofferson was far too old to play somebody nicknamed The Kid and who historically died at 21. Doesn’t matter one lick. He’s charming and diabolical. 

The movie version doesn’t let him be the full psychopath he was in real life but there are several moments where his cunning shines through. 

Watch how he cheats during a standoff. Or when he toys with a group of bounty hunters who don’t know they’re outmatched. 

And, most significantly, when he waits to kill Bob with the deputy’s own gun. The deputy made sure Billy knew just what that gun, loaded with a mess of dines, would do to a man.

He just never thought Billy would be the one pulling the trigger.

Some of this movie is just part of the real history of Billy the Kid. The jailbreak in particular almost always shows up in these flicks. But a pair of Billy The Kid westerns I loved as a kid (Young Guns and Young Guns 2) clearly borrowed from Peckinpah. 

That’s ok, there’s no doubt that Peckinpah was taking liberally from Leone and all the other Spaghetti Western directors. If this had been dubbed I would believe it came out of Italy or Spain in the 1960s. 

Every scene in this movie reinforces its theme but one in particular stands out. 

Garrett is resting by a river when a family on a boat float by. A boy is throwing a bottle in the river and the dad is shooting at it. Wanting to join the fun, Garrett fires at the bottle too. 

But the dad, alarmed, starts shooting toward Garrett. Garrett barely gets to cover and then he grabs a rifle and prepares to return fire. 

And then the two men see each other, both ready to kill, and they somehow understand that all of this was a mistake.

The family floats by unharmed. Garrett goes on his way. 

The guns were loaded, but both men realized the whole thing was pointless. 

What struck me recently about Tim Burton is that I don’t think any younger directors followed in his footsteps. 

Certainly Wes Anderson comes closer given that they are both obsessed with production design. But Anderson has never been interested in anything remotely spooky or bizarre. 

Burton lives in the macabre that a young mind might enjoy. It’s not horror, it’s that time in your life when you discover death and try to grapple with what it all means. 

Burton’s solution is to laugh at it and to let yourself dress all in black.

It’s no wonder that his later years success is an adaptation of the Addams Family that focuses on the original goth girl, Wednesday Addams. 

Burton, Charles Addams and the scarier bits of Roald Dahl all inhabit the same corner of fiction. Spooky and morbid with a dollop of creaky jokes. 

A Beetlejuice sequel wasn’t really on my radar. The first movie is a classic but I never thought it needed a follow up.  And I am exceedingly tired of these nostalgia plays. 

But I found myself at a theater awash in sequels and remakes and this looked like the best option. 

Glad to say I think I choose correctly. 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a sharp script, tight funny scenes and enough scares and gross out moments to satisfy any fan of the original movie. 

The characters and actors nail the assignment especially Catherine O’Hara who’s Delia Deetz gets to have some fun teasing her step-daughter Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz who has grown up and raised another mopey teen girl who is eternally angry with her mom. 

O’Hara also delivers one of the best lines in movies this year near the end of this flick’s machinations. I don’t want to give it away but I howled not just because it was funny but also because it was a perfect encapsulation of that character in one line.

I had a lot of sympathy for Lydia Deetz who was a bright light as a teenager in the first movie and has a messy life as an adult. 

That’s the way it works for most people, the right job never happens, a death of a loved one knocks us down and we have to keep going even when the ghosts in our head just won’t shut up. 

Ryder played her with a lot of fragility, maybe too much, but it makes sense even if it didn’t make me happy. 

Michael Keaton remains a perfect human vehicle for a fast talking trickster demon. For those of you who were fans of the Beetlejuice cartoon I think you will enjoy just how much he’s Lydia’s sidekick and even protector here. 

Not that he’s reformed exactly but the movie knows how much fun it is to watch The Juice deliver comeuppance on people who deserve it. 

It’s the real fundamental rule of this particular universe – Beetlejuice is not the bad guy. 

He’s a force of nature, and disgusting but real evil belongs to the people Burton and the writers actually hate. In the first movie it was New York centric yuppies. In this one, it’s sensitive modern men and ex-wives. 

Burton also wisely understands that a little of this will be all most of us can take. A joke zips by, it works in a light way, and then we rush on to the next thing. There’s 90 minutes of it, with just enough subplots to spice up the story when it lags. 

I went into the theater in a bad mood and this dollop of dark humor brightened my day. 

Given the title of this sequel and the ending (not exactly a cliffhanger but not exactly a final moment either) it seems certain there will be a third one of these. 

It’s also one of the biggest box office hits of the year. I suspect if everyone wants to come back it’s already got a green light.

I think you can measure the success of this film this way. Now, instead of facing the third one with dread I’ll be looking forward to it. 

As the kids say, this movie is a vibe. 

Another movie in my endless to be watched file and I finally pulled the trigger.

With modern movies we know so much because if you are online or on film Twitter or whatever tons of it gets thrown at you whether you care or not.

My wife gets frustrated because I know specific details about shows or movies I have never seen.

“How?!” Is a frequent refrain in my house.

The answer is I read a lot of nonsense. I have no plans to watch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice anytime soon. I may never watch the Joker sequel. But I can tell you everything you could want to know about those flicks. Even though I do not wish to know, you know?

But with older movies, they can still be a surprise.

And this was a blast.

I had not paid attention to the director of King of New York but as the credits rolled I slipped over to IMDB and everything clicked. 

Abel Ferrara, the guy who directed Bad Lieutenant, directed this. If Sidney Lumet directed NC-17 movies this is what they would be like. 

I found it really interesting that the best scenes are just Walken and the group hanging out and partying. There is some semblance of a plot but it doesn’t have a story in the traditional sense. 

Walken’s crew kills some various enemy gangs, then a frustrated bunch of (spoiler) retaliates and then there is a thrilling climax. 

I enjoyed it all the way through but I locked in for the final 30 minutes or so when the movie entered its endgame. 

Again, I think it’s fascinating that the story in this movie is bare bones but the style overcomes it all. 

I am not generally a style guy. I don’t care how many cool Spielberg shots you show me from Crystal Skull that is still a bad movie. 

But here, the dialogue and plot might be thin but the cool vibes never stop. 

Probably doesn’t hurt that Walken is a magnetic, charming arch criminal and that everyone else is giving career best performances. 

I mean this is a movie that launches Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne and David Caruso. Hard to argue with the casting department on those results.

I can’t speak to the rest of Ferrara’s filmography but you can see why this and Bad Lieutenant became towering influences on the last three decades of filmmaking.

Warren Ellis is a clever writer. 

His heroes are often too clever for their own good, haunted by their mysterious past mistakes and tasked with stalking down and defeating clever, evil and murderous monsters. 

At least that’s how I remember it. Ellis burst into the comic book scene in the 1990s with a book about a righteous journalist in the future called Transmetropolitan. Artist Darrick Robinson provided stunning visuals and the comic was in the conversation with other legendary comics like Preacher and Sandman. 

I was in high school, I was studying to be a journalist and as you can imagine Ellis became on of my favorite authors. 

After a wildly successful career in comics and recent success as the creator/writer of the Netflix Castlevania show Ellis is moving into … podcasting. 

Thankfully, it’s not politics or sports. Instead, Ellis is doing what he does best, telling interesting stories that fall somewhere between mystery, action and horror. 

The Department of Midnight is an audio drama about a scientist turned investigator tasked with dealing with outbreaks of hmmm evil science? Macabre, mad physicists? Old demons breaking into our world using tech instead of magic? Something like that.

Every episode features James Callis (Battlestar Galactica) as Dr. John Carnack who “is employed as a crash site investigator by the Department Of Experimental Oversight.”

The agency is often called The Department of Midnight much to Carnack’s chagrin.

And while mad science might be the order of the day Ellis manages to bring in his other obsession — English folklore. 

Each episode is about 20 minutes and Callis is joined by a guest star. The first two episodes are self contained but there is obviously something important going on in the background. 

Following Ellis career remains entertaining because you never know where he will end up. As a comic writer he frequently argued for more original graphic novels but the format never took hold. Then he had a hit with artist Ben Templesmith on Fell. 

There instead of leaving the American format of single issue comics he and Templesmith went for a smaller page count and a cheaper price. 

I don’t know how much credit for these things Ellis deserves but anytime I spot a writer with an email newsletter and a strong social media presence I’m reminded of how in the early days of the Internet Ellis was out there building a community of his people any way he could. 

And that graphic novel push? Well Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have a nice business of single volume graphic novels. They put out two of them or so a year and they sell like gangbusters. And they’re wonderful. 

Brubaker and Phillips deserve all the credit in the world, of course, but I do think about how Ellis and others kept trying to bring publishers and comic book shops to the water just to watch them refuse to drink. 

And now there’s this. Make no mistake, the Castlevania show sounded like Ellis. But The Department of Midnight is exactly what I would expect from the writer who gave us Global Frequency and Planetary. Especially when he’s given an clean canvas.

Anyway, Callis sounds like he’s having a blast and the stories are tight, tension filled bits of humor and horror. 

I’ll be interested to see how this experiment ends both in Ellis’ fictional world and in our world where most writers are not yet making a living doing audio dramas. 

Let me tell you about a band I loved. 

The Allman Brothers could honestly lay claim to being one of the best bands in the world. At least the first version could before Duane Allman tragically died. 

Without their star guitarist the band soldiered on. The second version of the band was really good. They may not have had the sound and the power of the original line up but it was still great music and great times. 

And, as successful bands will do, they kept playing and performing down through the decades, a third version formed, a fourth and a fifth. Each a little less electrifying than the original. 

And that’s what I’m thinking about as I’m watching John Woo’s remake of his own classic The Killer. 

Almost immediately, Woo announces that he is still at the helm because the movie opens in a church and the heroine claps her hands to make doves fly through the frame. 

Doves and Christian symbolism and crazy action scenes that could not exist in the natural world are to John Woo films what the dolly shot is to a Spike Lee joint. 

Hong Kong had become a Mecca of action cinema when Woo hit it big with his first version of The Killer in 1989. Hard Boiled showed up in 1992. 

Thanks to the rise of DVDs and eventually Netflix even kids in rural parts of the Deep South could discover these flicks.

These movies, along with others from that era rewrote the rules of action cinema. Woo’s gun ballet was entirely different than anything happening in the rest of the genre. 

It was such a revolution that Woo and his star Chow Yun-Fat were whisked off to Hollywood to try their luck. Both had real success for a time. 

Face/Off has a wild premise and insane performances but Woo’s perpetual motion as a director makes it work. Or at least never lets you slow down long enough to think about the ridiculousness of every single scene. 

So Face/Off and Windtalkers are the high points of Woo’s journey in America. Maybe not quite as perfect as his Hong Kong movies but strong entries into his canon. 

And I don’t know what happened for us to get new John Woo movies in 20 years after he mostly faded away. 

I wish I could report that he made another Hong Kong classic or something on par with his Hollywood work. But, no, this thing is pretty lifeless and I had a tough time getting from the start to the end. 

Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy and Sam Worthington do what they can. Sy and Emmanuel are meant to have some chemistry that just isn’t there. Worthington feels like he’s walking into a different movie. 

Everything looks like streaming crumovision. I was never one of those guys who would scream, “I miss film!” 

But I certainly do miss when every movie didn’t look like pale copies of each other because they were all shot and lit under the same cheap conditions. 

There were moments where the action approached the old days. A nifty sequence with a sword and the finale both swing with style. 

But there is far too much dialogue, and scenes where people in English or French detail every aspect of the plot. 

I didn’t come to a John Woo flick for the story. 

The thing about any revolution is that if it succeeds the revolution eventually becomes part of the establishment. Filmmakers took what John Woo did and remade it, sometimes lovingly and sometimes cynically. 

I’m not gonna name any names here because the simple truth is that if you have enjoyed just about any shoot-em-up in the last 40 years it probably owes a debt (and maybe it’s entire being) to Woo. 

Finally, you can’t legally stream the original Killer or Hard Boiled or the most of the other 80’s and 90’s Hong Kong flicks. But you owe it to yourself to try and see them. 

No matter how many copies there may be in the world the originals still contain that old magic.