Disney/PIxar Watch: Hoppers (2026)

Watched:  06/09/2026

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Daniel Chong

We don't get out to the cinema like we used to, and so it was that I missed Hoppers (2026) in the theater, despite what I'd call pretty good buzz.

It's an odd movie for Pixar, which is reeling from a few years of what I'd call unpredictable box office (which is just the industry these days).  A few movies tanked, and then a few sold like hot cakes.  If I was them, I'd be deeply unsure what to think audiences actually want in a film.

Hoppers is a weird movie.  I don't mean the sci-fi concept, which is cute and fun.  A young, plucky, adorably flawed girl, Mabel (Piper Curda) is doing battle with Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) who wants to build an overpass for his beltway through her beloved woodland glade.  She figures out a wacky scientist (Kathy Najimy) and her team (Sam Richardson and Melissa Villasenor) have built robots and can transfer their consciousness into the animal-shaped bodies.  This is done to observe species up close.  

Classics Watch: Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Watched:  06/08/2026

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  fourth, I think.  

Director:  Nicholas Ray

I didn't think I'd watched Rebel Without a Cause (1955) since the mid-90's - but here it is in 2012. I really need to start checking old posts to see what I've already covered here.

The first time I saw the movie I believe I was thirteen.  My friend's dad saw us entering teen-hood and wanted to share a bit of the teen-culture he'd grown up with.  The film had such an impact on the fellow, he bought the same car James Dean drives in the movie.

Rebel Without a Cause is, I think, one of those movies everyone knows but far fewer people have bothered to watch.  Which is a shame.  I think it's kind of a fascinating movie and it's remarkable it got made then, and now would be turned into a moist melodrama with someone muttering the theme of the film - which would be the title of the movie.  

Television Watch: Hacks Concludes

Apparently I've never posted about it before, but for the past few years, HBO's Hacks has been among my favorite shows.  

The basic premise is that Ava (Hannah Einbinder), an up-and-coming comedy writer, seems to have a career on the slide when her agent, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) teams her with his top client, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a legendary stand-up comedian, now in her late 60's.  Deborah is fabulously wealthy from her long and lucrative stand-up career with side-businesses like a line of goods on QVC.  She has a team surrounding her that is probably insulating her a bit from dealing with any unpleasantness, a daughter in her 40's, DJ (Kaitlin Olson), who is erratic at best - and has kind of seen and done it all.  

Monroe 100th B-Day Watch/ Pride Watch: Some Like It Hot (1959)

Watched:  06/01/2026

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Third?  Second?

Director:  Billy Wilder

Maybe one of the movies that I pray never gets remade,* Some Like It Hot (1959) is a wild ride of a movie that seems like it absolutely couldn't have happened on screen as a major motion picture in 1959, but... it very famously did.  Whether audiences fully grokked the subversion of the film in '59, or even now, is something I'll need to dig into.

Starring Monroe at the height of her name as a draw, plus a young Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis - it's an oddball period piece about two down-on-their luck musicians who need to flee the mob after witnessing the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, and - knowing there's a job for two women in an all-girl band - go full Bosom Buddies and hop a train to Florida.  

Superman Movie - Catching Up On "Man of Tomorrow"

Today, James Gunn, Director and Writer of the next Superman film - Man of Tomorrow - released this still of Nicholas Hoult in some very familiar looking armor.  

This unleashed hordes of people who think they're clever and have never picked up a Superman comic, never watched a Justice League cartoon, walked down a toy aisle, etc... to flap their arms and ask if Gunn was ripping off any of the man franchises in which people show up in power armor, especially the video game I have never played, Halo.   

Look, dumb dumbs, this armor first showed up in a comic in 1983.  It's been adapted and changed by artist after artist since then - to the point where a few details remain common, but the general idea is that Lex, like Tony Stark, is constantly fiddling.  And, by the way, not one of you blinked about all the armored guys in the *last* Superman movie, so what are we even doing?

Marilyn Monroe at 100

Today is the 100th birthday of Ms. Norma Jeane Mortensen, better known as Marilyn Monroe.

We're fans of Monroe here at The Signal Watch, and whether that's because of her film work - and she's terrific in most of the work I've seen, or knowing her as an icon of the 20th Century - I don't know.  She was gone more than twenty years before I really understood who she was..  But even when it's a movie I don't love (see: The Seven Year Itch), or something far greater than I expected (Some Like It Hot, The Misfits), she is what they say, and few talents before or since have come anywhere near her place in the zeitgeist.  

There's no one else left, really, from this era of film that I think today's young adults and youths would readily recognize.  And even then, they may not even know she was an actress - she's simply a face on a t-shirt.  I don't know.  But she remains an icon, maybe an ethereal one at this point, but someone still seen as a sign of glamour.  We can save our comments about how some trash celebrities try and tried to steal some of her light.

90's Schlock Watch: Twister (1996)

Watched:  05/29/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Jan de Bont

This clunker that has aged poorly in so, so many ways is about two absolute perverts who clearly can only become aroused when their lives are endangered by natural disasters.  They are followed by a vast team of nameless people who delight in their kink, and seem to have no interior lives or external concerns other than bearing witness to the named characters' pursuit of their shameful desires.  

Why this was not directed by David Cronenberg, I cannot say.

Our male lead has met a stable woman, a therapist, who he believes can save him from his shameful kink.  Knowing this therapist will never join him in his thrill-seeking debauchery, he simply pawns her off on one of the sub-perverts.

Reunited with his fellow degenerate, scene after scene unfolds wherein Bill (Bill Paxton) and Jo (The Quarterback Princess, Helen Hunt) pursue tornadoes as threat to life and limb, delighting in the chaos.  Both know the old thrills are not doing it for them anymore, and only when they strap themselves with leather to ride out an F5 tornado with no protection - the ultimate depravity - are their degenerate appetites satisfied.

Happy Birthday Kylie Minogue

Happy Birthday to pop music icon and occasional actor Kylie Minogue.

Kylie is having a good year!  She wrapped up her international Tension tour*, she won Christmas with her poptacular song XMAS, and she has released a documentary on Netflix and I believe a concert film of the Tension tour is also set to debut on Netflix.  

And she's re-releasing four albums on vinyl later this year (lil' heads-up for Jamie) including the much sought-after (by me) Light Years.

You don't really know what else she'll get up to - but maybe she'll get back in the studio for another album.

Anyway - happy birthday to Ms. Minogue.  May she have a grand birthday.

*Yours truly was at an early date on the tour here in sunny Austin, Texas.

Noir Watch: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Watched: 05/27/2026

Format:  Noir Alley / TCM on DVR

Viewing:  Second or third

Director:  Lewis Milestone

I'd been meaning to return to this one for years, but then it was hosted on TCM's Noir Alley by Eddie Muller and Ms. Rosie Perez.  Fifteen years and a whole lot more Liz Scott and Stanwyck under my belt, and I imagine my view of the movie is a bit different now.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is a twisted, black-hearted melodrama that is one of those movies that is likely to make one a real fan of Barbara Stanwyck if you weren't already (and I am).  It's a movie with more twists and turns than you'd expect, while still delivering a finale that feels completely earned and the only way this could end.

TL;DR: Watching Movies 2026 - Nothing Matters, So Everything Matters

Back in December pal Howard shared an article from Substack about the changing nature of "the canon" of film appreciation/ studies/ best of/ what-have-you.  It's a review of the publication, Sight & Sound, and their annual poll, with a desire to demonstrate the changing climate of what is considered "the best".  Perhaps the notion is that if you liked a film thirty years ago, now it is less important to the voting body of Sight & Sound while other movies, new and old have made it onto the list, moving around the position of movies thought *the* canon once upon a time.  And so it goes.

The article arrived around the same time I was pondering something quite different.  

In 2025, I turned 50 years old, which gives me roughly 48 year of movie-going experience.  My dad took me to see Star Wars in the theater during the 1977 release - wholly inappropriate for a kid that young, but I suppose my mom needed the afternoon off.*  I went to film school in the 1990's.  I've been discussing movies online without a thought of making a penny off my opinions and bad takes since 2003.  Yeah, 2003, kid.