2025 Media Diet - January to June

Just as we were getting settled into El Paso and the last boxes of the move from Savannah in September were being unpacked, wouldn't you know it! We went and had another kid!!

Introducing Marigold Viola Morris or Goldie for short. Goldie is so perfect, I give her the rare A++.

Now on to the more normal (if less adorable) rankings.

Movies:

Paper Moon (B+): the movie itself is probably an A. Maybe even an A+ if Ryan and Tatum had a great relationship off screen and this was a true buddy thief movie. The fact that the hostility between dad and daughter is, if anything, toned down casts a pall over the film. I wanted to laugh at the great scam scenes, but instead knowing the history of the actors, it just left me sad.

Accidental Tourist (A): One of the movies suggested from Box Office Poison (one of my favorite books of the year!) and generally is quite good.

Sorcerer: (A+): Another movie I watched from reading Box Office Poison and it is an absolutely brilliant and taut thriller that I cannot believe I had not heard of until this year. It and Sexy Beast were my only two rewatches. 

Fear of God; The Making of the Exorcist (B): Another film from my Friedkin kick.

Thomas Crown Affair, the 90s version (A): Enjoyable little romance/thriller and a great soundtrack.

Flow (B+): It is beautiful but it felt more like homework than an enjoyable experience. As Morgan said 'what an odd small sad movie.' Monty's attention span faltered as well. The soundtrack was my favorite part.

Godzilla Minus One (B) : I get it. It's a good movie but turns out I never liked Godzilla movies and turns out I didn't like the Godzilla portions of this one

To Live and Die in LA (B+): The last film of my Friedkin kick. Good film but just an okay one by Friedkin standards.

Challenger; The Final Flight Documentary (B)

Music Man (B): Watched this with my mom while waiting for Goldie to be born and laughed so hard at the unintentional comedy of it but no, it does not hold up on its own minus a few quality musical numbers (and Shipoopi is not one of those numbers!)

The Last of Shelia (B -): In Box Office Poison it describes this as a 1970s Agatha Christie style swinging whodunit. Besides not being like Agatha Christie, nor really swinging, nor much of a whodunit, it at least got the 70s part right.

Escape from New York (A+) and The Fog (A): Late 70s/early 80s John Carpenter really was great.

Sexy Beast (A+): Yes yes yes! Wow! This was the most tour-de-force movie I watched all year. Ben Kingsley’s performance is absolutely incredible and so is Ray Winston’s as Gal. They somehow manage to upstage Mr. Black Magic himself, Ian McShane. I watched this three times in three days and am still enthralled. I love movies like Sorcerer and Escape From New York where they create this little bubble of a world and just plop the viewer in it, and Sexy Beast does that so well.

Seven Days in May (B+): I got on a bit of a Kirk Douglas kick (the chin!) that is still ongoing and for my money, he wipes Burt Lancaster off the screen in this one. Also, the movie portrays a base in New Mexico right outside El Paso as being so remote, so isolated, and so desolate that a general could hide an entire brigade ready to take over the Army without any one else knowing about it. That part is very true.

Paths of Glory (A -): Great war scenes. Only okay courtroom scenes.

TV Shows

White Lotus Season 3: (B): Forgot this one almost as soon as I watched it. I will go to my grave arguing Season 1 is still the best.

Sirens (B+): Very popular Netflix show and while I enjoyed it at the time, only after watching it do you realize the main character Devon is ancillary to the main plot. For those of you who have watched it, think about it—even if Devon never comes on the island with her fruit bouquet, it does not actually effect the arch of her sister or Julliane Moore or Kevin Bacon’s characters.

Stand Up

Brooks Wheelan: Alive in Alaska (B+). Four solid bits for a comedian I didn't know about and the video at the end solidifies his jokes. Would have really enjoyed this more as a documentary film. He's got a lot of charm.

Matthew Broussard: Hyperbolic (B+): Watched this right after Brooks Wheelan's special and Broussard's jokes are better than Wheelan’s and yet Wheelan tells a better total story. By the 20-minute mark, this felt like a long set someone does for a late night show.

Chad Daniels: Empty Nester (A-)

Rosebud Baker: Mother Lode (A)

Podcasts

Alternate Realities; A Strange Bet by NPR (A): Having had a parent and friends slide down the conspiracy rabbit hole, this podcast hit close to him. The premise is simple-- the author's father believes in Q-Anon and that a secret state will arrest Hillary Clinton in a pedophile sting, and the son does not. So they make a bet about 10 things that the father thinks will happen in the next year, and then the series follows as the son and dad start to try and figure each other out. It is only three episodes long and I highly recommend it for people who have lost loved ones to misreality.

Books

Box Office Poison by Tim Robey (A+): I referenced this book several times while talking about movies because that is what it is about—movies that either fairly or unfairly flopped. Each chapter is only about 10 pages and they do not have to be read in order. Great beach read.

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (A): I think this is the second time I’ve read it (maybe third). It’s like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in that it is always enjoyable to read but just forgettable enough to be able to pick it up five or so years later and it is like you’ve never read it.

Dead Calm by Charles Williams (A): Listened to this entire thing in one afternoon cleaning. Wished I had saved it for a beach read because this is excellent light reading fodder. Can't believe that I hadn't read any Charles Williams before this because this is a very good pulp novel.

Operation Paper Clip by Annie Jacobson (No grade). As a general rule, I either give up on  mya book after the first 50 pages if I'm not feeling it or slog it out until the end. Paper clip was the outlier. I made it 250 pages in before I couldn't take the stories of Nazi scientists getting away with injustices in the name of the Cold War any longer. Maybe if there had been a comeuppance for at least a couple, I would have slogged through, but no, war criminals got away with murder (literally) and were super arrogant about it. That's why I couldn't finish it.

Friedkin Connection by William Friedkin (A+): As part of my Friedkin kick I read his autobiography and cannot recommend it enough. Great old Hollywood stories without all the varnish.

Escape Room by Airey Neave (no grade): another that I couldn't finish even though I made it 200 pages in. The author led escapes for spies and downed pilots behind Vichy lines in WW2 but he never left his London desk and it reads very matter of fact.

Challenger; The True Story by Adam Higginbotham (A-): I had such high hopes since the author’s last book, Midnight in Chernobyl, is one of my all time favorite. Here, the story still hums and has the same frantic pace at Midnight in Chernobyl, but for some reason reads more dull.  

Hunting Eichmann by Neil Bascomb (B+) and Manhunt; the 10 Year Search for Bin Laden: Peter Berger (B+): Solid entries into the true crime sub-genre of hunting down and catching notorious criminals. While good, they do not rise to the level of books at the top of this category like Vengeance.

Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (A+): By far my favorite fiction book of the year. What I said above about liking movies that create little worlds goes double for books, and Ellroy pulls it off in his description of 1950s LA. It is pulp. It is noir. It is part autobiographical (Ellroy’s mother was murdered in a similar fashion to the Dahlia). It is perfect. One of the great American novels.

When The Going was Good by Graydon Carter (A): Juicy details, luxurious settings, intelligent but not too fancy writing. The entire book reads like a good Vanity Fair article and having read my fair share of them (including the articles in the Dominick Dunne books I included in last year’s list) it is easy to see his editorial style and panache shine through.

Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson (A): The book focuses on four protagonists, one of whom is T.E. Lawrence, as well as three contemporaries—a German, an American, and a Zionist. As such, with it jumping around from character to character, each section is only as interesting as the character featured themselves. Fortunately, the sections about T.E. Lawrence are so interesting and great, it makes up for the sections about his duller brethren (William Yale is the worst).  

American Caesar by William Manchester (B+): Manchester wrote my favorite history book World Lit Only by Fire (or quasi-history since it does take several “liberties” with the truth) but this was my first biography of his and it reads at points more like a hagiography of General Douglas McArthur than a serious biography.

That said, the book does contain a fact so interesting I have been thinking about it all year. In American Caesar, McArthur describes his first memories as a child being with his father, an Army officer himself, on the New Mexico plain and having to huddle inside their little cabin when they faced attacks by the local Native American tribes. One of McArthur’s last acts as a public person, nearly 70 years later, was discussing the dangers of America building too many nuclear warheads and the mutually assured destruction (MAD) doctrine. That is, this one man went from beginning his life in a cabin with no water or electricity and facing raids on the American wild west frontier, to seeing the development and deployment of nuclear bombs. It is as if in McArthur’s 72 years, the world leapt forward more like 700 years. Mind-blowing to think about that progress from 1880 to 1950.  

However, Monty, judging by his outfit choices, Monty still wishes it was the 1880s.

That's all folks!

Come back next month for a guide to Savannah on my website and be sure to browse the National Parks page for hot takes about America's greatest sites!