ChabertQuest 2025: I Have Watched 72 Lacey Chabert Movies since November

I am full of bad ideas.  

Once, I went vegetarian for a full year just to prove that I could do it (it was a disaster, but short being force fed sausage pizza at a work meeting, I remained vegetarian all year).  

I have decided to own every issue of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen and Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane.  

To what end do I do these things?  I do not know.

But, worse, sometimes someone else's bad ideas will land in my head, and I'll think "yes, I will do that thing", especially if it's absolutely pointless. 

This post marks the end of ChabertQuest2025.  It began as a germ of an idea that became a marathon.  A Chabert-a-thon, if you will.  And now I can put down my remote and put away my Christmas ornaments.  We have done the thing we set out to do.

Some numbers:

• As of this writing, Lacey Chabert has 183 IMDB entries
• Of these credits, she has 87 live action feature films / TV films listed
• Of those, I was unable to locate 14, as they are not streaming or otherwise readily available.
• I refused to rewatch one of the movies because I'd already seen it and had a blog post about it
• Thus, since the holiday movie season began in November 2024, I have watched 72 separate movies in which Lacey Chabert appears.

Who we are and how we came to be

Last Christmas, rather than taking in a medley of new and classic Holiday movies as we usually do, we thought "we're doing all Hallmark."  After all, we've seen all of the usual Christmas films a few dozen times.  I can keep White Christmas a bit fresher if I don't sit through it every year.  So we just leaned into what's usually something we'd normally catch pieces of, but don't always watch all the way through.  

By the end of the holidays, I'd watched 9 Lacey Chabert holiday movies.  

Why Chabert for my Christmas merriment?  Well, not all Hallmark stars are of the same caliber.  

Sorry, other actors.  It's true.*  There is absolutely a Hallmark talent pool of leads who get re-cast, over and over, and here at The Signal Watch, Lacey Chabert is considered better at the acting and festive thing than the average Hallmark bear. If you're going to watch one of these movies, might as well watch one that's not a dud.

Randy, who is not good for me, upon reviewing my Holiday movie post from 2024 said "now you should watch every Lacey Chabert movie".  And I was like "ha ha.   That's insane."  

And then I was like:  ha ha... that is insane....  maybe so insane it just might....

And here we are.

Who is Lacey Chabert?

Chabert Watch: Gypsy (1993)

Midler took center stage?  Whaaaaat....?

Watched:  06/13/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Emile Ardolino

Everything's coming up Chabert!

So, I'd never seen Gypsy before in any form.  A snip of the Natalie Wood version was on once and we agreed we'd watch the full thing at some point and... we did not.

This film, Gypsy (1993), was a TV movie that aired in December of my Freshman year of college, so I am not shocked I was unaware of it existing.  All I really knew about Gypsy was:

1. Jamie once played a small part in a community theatre version of the play 
2. Broadway queen Audra McDonald is currently receiving rave reviews for her portrayal of Momma Rose.  
3. It's sort of about the ultimate stage mom
4. It's the origin story of a real life stripper turned writer turned pop figure,  Gypsy Rose Lee, who was a fixture in American culture from the 30's to the 60's

This TV movie was an adaptation of a Stephen Sondheim musical of the same name, which was originally on Broadway starting in the late 1950's and ran for some time.  The musical, in turn, was based on Lee's own memoirs, which had been a popular book.

Chabert Watch: Daddy Day Care (2003)

Watched:  06/11/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steve Carr

Sometimes coming into a movie and seeing it has an extraordinarily low rating sets you up for success.  Daddy Day Care (2003) has a 39 on Metacritic* and a Critics score at RT of 27%.  

Honestly, I thought it was fine.  Not good, but fine.  

It knew what it was - an excuse for kids to be cute and throw in some wholesome jokes.  It was clearly intended to be a family movie, and so I can see how critics decided this was bad, hoping for the Eddie Murphy of the 80's and 90's.  And I don't automatically give Eddie Murphy a pass.  I think I declared Candy Cane Lane the worst movie of 2023.  But as a family movie based on its own merits, sure.  Daddy Day Care (2003) is.. fine.  (I also have seen so many awful movies of late, this feels like Casablanca by comparison)

The movie stars Murphy as a guy trying to run a health food team within a processed food company, who loses his job when his project "Veggie-O's Cereal" bombs.  Coming with him is his side-kick, Jeff Garlin.  They recruit their former mail-boy, Steve Zahn, to work with the kids.  Regina King plays Murphy's wife, who has just started working as an attorney.  Anjelica Huston plays the head of a school/ daycare that's run like an intense prep academy.  Lacey Chabert plays her assistant.  Jonathan Katz plays a City employee keeping tabs on the daycare.  Laura Kightlinger is in there.  Kevin Nealon.  Siobhan Fallon Hogan.  And a very small Elle Fanning is one of the kids.

Brian Wilson Merges With The Infinite

Musician and legend, Brian Wilson, has passed.

I still remember my brother getting a Beach Boys record for his birthday when I was probably five.  It was a Greatest Hits, and the pop-surf classics that made oldies radio play.  And we dug it.  

But as a kid, I took the Beach Boys for granted.  Their music was everywhere - absolutely on the radio, at restaurants, and in every fifth commercial when summer rolled around. Like Elvis, they simply were.

It wasn't until college that two folks flipped me from "oldies station Beach Boys" vs Pet Sounds Beach Boys.  One was NathanC, and the other was a fellow named Robb, who was absolutely grooving out to Pet Sounds when I dropped in at his place one afternoon.  Robb was also my compatriot in discussing Phil Spector and The Wall of Sound, so this all lined up pretty neatly.

I'm absolutely one of those guys who thinks Brian Wilson was pretty great, but also one of the great American tragedies.  This is not an original insight, but I don't know how else we can discuss him.  He has a certain genius that was still very much in force when I picked up Smile several years ago, and you always wondered what could have been.  

But mental illness is a real sonuvabitch, and he struggled with his issues for so many years.  His family managed to keep him healthy and making music, and I can't imagine the love and care that took.

Still, what a legacy he left behind.

Go put on Pet Sounds and Smile today, if you can.  And here's the the Wilson family today. 

1950's Watch: Designing Woman (1957)

Watched:  06/10/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Vincente Minnelli

I was a bit wary of this film as I watched the trailer, but you never know.  

For example, I'd quite liked Woman of the Year, and I thought that was not going to land with me.  But I've been taking a mini-journey through the very limited media lifespan of Dolores Gray, who was mostly a Broadway and West End performer (she's American - she played Annie Oakley in London's Annie Get Your Gun).  She only has, like, five or six movies, total, and Designing Woman (1957) is one of them.  

The story is about a sports reporter (Gregory Peck) who meets a high-end fashion designer (Lauren Bacall) while in California, but it turns out they both live in New York.  After a whirlwind week and marriage, they return to the city and what was going on in their prior lives.  

Turns out a hard-drinking sports writer and a wealthy woman used to more of a salon sort of atmosphere with her pals are somewhat at odds.  It's a deeply heightened "men be like this", "women be like this" clashing of worlds.  

Chabert Watch: Christmas in Rome (2019)

Watched:  06/09/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  1.5

Director:  Ernie Barbarash 

Job: Tour Guide

Location of story:  Hallmark Rome

new skill:  Not going off the rails

Man:  Sam Page

Job of Man:  Business Man

Goes to/ Returns to:  Man goes to Rome

Event:  Business Deal

Food:  a bunch of Italian stuff I can't spell and/ or remember

So.  (deep breath)  I believe this is both the last Lacey Chabert Hallmark movie and last Chabert Christmas movie I have to watch during ChabertQuest 2025.  

Please clap.

If you haven't been around, we're nearing the end of watching every live-action movie in which Lacey Chabert appears that we could get legitimate access to.  And we're almost done.  It started in November by accident, became intentional in January, and it has been a journey.  

One of my self-imposed rules was that if I had already seen a movie and written it up, I was allowed to skip said movie.  Which is how I skipped The Tree That Saved Christmas.  But if I had seen it and failed to write it up, I had to re-watch it and post on it.  And, I know I watched a good chunk/ all of Christmas in Rome (2019) just this last Christmas while doing other things.  And then just didn't mention it.  I forgot or something.  

So I put this one off til last and was in no rush to prioritize the movie.

Anyway, this movie stars Chabert and Sam Page, who you may remember as Joan's would-be-doctor husband on Mad Men, a role that I am sure he has mixed feelings about at this juncture.  Page plays a Businessman from New York who is sent to Rome, just before the holidays, to look into acquiring a famed Italian company that handmakes high-end plates and bowls or something.  And because it's Rome, it is also *art*.

JLC Watch: Freaky Friday (2003)

Watched:  06/08/2025

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mark Waters

If you weren't an adult in the 00's, it's hard to imagine how easily mainstream media managed to convince the public that completely random people were now the biggest star in the world and we all had to care about them.  This was a result of the fact that the internet had not yet discovered algorithms and was just force-feeding us content, so whether they were pushing someone on teens or the elderly, we all got the same stuff.  

America was in the middle of occupying Iraq, which had begun four months before the release of Freaky Friday (2003), and as a bit of a newshound at the time, I was often trying to find out wtf was happening.  But every time you tried to get online and look at the news, sites were saying "yeah, war in Iraq that could trigger 1000 years of war with the East, but... look at what Lindsay Lohan's mom said today!".  

I have no negative feelings about Lohan, especially as a teen.  She existed.  But I can't say the same for the de-evolution of news at the dawn of the clickbait era and selling us on the antics of certain celebrities.

Lohan is fine in this movie.  Cute, has a pack-a-day-habit voice pioneered by Jodie Foster and carried on to Emma Stone just a few years later, but...  In my book, Jamie Lee Curtis is putting on a comedy clinic.  Lohan's good!  But with JLC playing a surly teen, Lohan doesn't get to do anything as kooky as JLC.  And I am not sure she has the same presence as Foster in the original film, but those may just be fond memories from 1982 or so when I last watched the movie.

I found this version, though, really, really funny - once it gets started.  And it doesn't suffer from meandering in the manner of 70's-era Disney live-action flicks.  The first ten minutes or so are rough as we watch the leads snipe at each other and get all of the set-up in place - including the shitty younger brother.  But, immediately upon the body swap, the movie works.  I was lol'ing.

2025 audiences might shift uncomfortably about the trigger being a magic fortune cookie.  I'll just leave it at that.

My recollection is that the original movie is a bit more even-sided between the kid and mom not understanding each other, but this one really leans into Lohan's character taking it from all sides before the swap, which initially I found odd, but it does give the story plenty to work with as Mom-in-Kid's body navigates her daughter's day, (the unfair English teacher played by Tobolowsky is particularly a good bit).  And I did appreciate that the script's inclusion of a step-father coming into the picture (Mark Harmon) is played so well.

But...  for comedy... JLC mooning over a boy, frustrated with her punk brother..  it's all pretty solid work and she commits to the bit.  I wish they'd done more with the therapy session stuff, but what we got was good.

Tragically, the movie is also from the era of SoCal Pop-Punk being shoved down our throats, and it wasn't enjoyable at the time and has aged like a banana left out for two solid months.  Thus, I wish I enjoyed the rock band numbers more than I did.  But I didn't, minus JLC clearly really knowing how to play the bit her character plays in the film.  That was cool.

I didn't start this post off to drag Lohan - it was just a weird time for how talent was promoted (remember how we were bombarded with Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie for way too long?), and she had some hard years transitioning to being a grown-assed adult as a result.  But this movie was a key part in her rise to fame and Disney trying to cash in on her popularity.  And you kind of wonder what would have been if Hollywood weren't so full of toxic monsters.

Fortunately, Lohan and JLC are teaming up for a sequel this summer, so maybe she'll get a second shot.  She's been fine in her Netflix movies.

Chabert X-Mas Watch: Family For Christmas (2015)

Mirrorverse Man watches Lacey, while she stares you down

Watched:  06/08/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Amanda Tapping

Job: News reporter/ Housewife

Location of story:  San Francisco and Bay Area 'burbs

new skill:  being a mother

Man:  Tyron Leitso

Job of Man:  Advertising creative

Goes to/ Returns to:  Goes to alternate timeline

Event:  School Christmas Pageant (very overdecorated)

Food:  Mushrooms and what I think was Captain Crunch

In 2015, Lacey Chabert made four movies, three for Hallmark.  Two of those Hallmark movies were Christmas films.  In 2015, she is on her way to building her own legend.

The first Christmas movie selection for 2015 was A Christmas Melody, the Mariah Carey movie, which we previously covered.  

Our selection today was Family for Christmas (2015),  one of the movies in which Santa is not just a jolly old elf making toys - he's a chaos agent who uses his reality-warping powers to wreak havoc with an unsuspecting person, hoping he can make people hook up.  Santa in Hallmark-Land does not care about toys or children, he cares about making strangers decide to make it.  

Santa is a freak.

Previously, Santa gave Chabert "courage"/ "the inability to stop herself from escalating an already bad situation" in A Wish For Christmas.  This time, Santa finds a perfectly happy career gal/ news reporter (Chabert) who gets a friend request from her college sweetheart she dumped to become a successful reporter.  Meanwhile, she's being offered jobs in NYC, getting the most understanding breakup in Hallmark history, and stealing her assistant's ideas for stories.

Apparently Chabert ponders that Friend Request and what could have been with this ex-boyfriend SO HARD, her pondering becomes a Christmas Wish.  One she did not explicitly make, but Santa still says "yeah, but you really wanted to know".  

Chabert X-Mas Watch: The Christmas Waltz (2020)

no idea why dude looks like he's about to abduct Chabert

Watched:  06/07/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First full time through

Director/ Writer:  Michael Damian

Job: Attorney 

Location of story:  Manhattan

new skill:  Waltzing

Man:  Will Kemp

Job of Man:  Dance instructor

Goes to/ Returns to:  It's all in Manhattan

Event:  The Christmas Dance show

Food:  Wedding cake?  

The curious thing about the Will Kemp/ Chabert movies is that (a) Chabert is *not* a classically trained dancer, and (b) Kemp is, like, 9 inches taller than her.  So it's not a traditional ballroom couple.  But it does fulfill some vision of a graceful man taking the audience's stand-in in Chabert and making sure you CAN dance.  And isn't that what it's all about?

The Christmas Waltz (2020) is about power-lawyer Chabert figuring out her perfect life and Christmas wedding are not happening when her absolute shitheel of a fiancé decides to take a promotion and move to Boston less than four weeks before their wedding.  I mean...  honestly, guy.

Chabert has signed them up for dance lessons for their wedding dance, but winds up using the lessons for herself, remembering she loved to dance as a child and walked away from it to lead the perfect life her fiancé just poured gasoline on, and then tossed a match.  

Comedy Watch: Summer of 69 (2025)

Watched:  06/06/2025

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jillian Bell

So, Hulu has sort of decided to corner the market on horny teen comedies and stoner comedies through the American High company.  

We have a six-degrees-of-separation connection here as someone we know worked on the film, and I wanted to check it out.

This is a "not aimed at me" movie, and that's cool.  I'm a 50-year-old dude, and not a young woman.  But I still found it pretty funny.   But, yeah, this is a movie that seems to be speaking to the awkwardness of being a teen girl - especially a "good girl" teen girl, something I am unlikely to ever be.  But it's not like everyone was speaking Romanian, so I basically got it.  

Chabert Not-Hallmark X-Mas Watch: A Holiday Heist (2011)

Watched:  06/06/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Christie Will Wolf

So, I thought A Holiday Heist (2011) was going to be a Hallmark movie, but it was not.  It was, instead, one of the weird, trash movies that get made every year in a filmmaking economy I do not understand.  It wasn't A Talking Cat!?! levels of not-giving-a-@#$%, but it was closer to that than it was theater-ready.  It made your typical Hallmark movie look like It's a Wonderful Life by comparison.  I do not know who this was for, where it was shown, who paid for it...  Usually when something is this trash it's called something like "The Dog Who Saved Christmas", but there's no dog in this movie.  They can't afford it.

The filming had to have occurred over, like, two weeks.  There's maybe five locations, and all of the money went to getting hired gun actors with some name recognition to show up, do some schtick, and mostly not be there longer than two or three days.

In this case, it's Vivica A. Fox as the mean Dean of the college and Chris Kattan as a wacky uncle who has nothing to do with anything.  

And... Lacey Chabert as the focal character.  As she does in so many movies, she plays the anchor of the plot.  She is the general-female-protagonist-with-an-artistic-bent, this time a college student skipping Christmas to work in an art gallery (Chabert herself would have been about 28 or 29 when this was filmed).  

Chabert X-Mas Watch: A Christmas Melody (2015)

Watched: 06/04/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  Second?

Director:  Mariah Carey

Job: Unemployed/ diner waitress/ Would-be-Fashion Designer

Location of story:  Silver Falls, Ohio

new skill:  Giving up

Man:  Brennan Elliot

Job of Man:  Elementary School music teacher

Goes to/ Returns to:  Returns to

Event:  Christmas concert/ Snowflake Pageant

Food:  I don't know that they had a food they harped on

The two Queens of Christmas in one forgotten movie!

Chabert stars!  Carey directs?

I'd seen this one during COVID lockdown, but, honestly, I was pretty drunk.  Plus, I blocked out a lot of what I watched during lockdown, so it was kind of like seeing it for the first time.

I re-read my original post on this movie, and I agree with most of it.  It is very fixated on high school and a girl leaving and everyone rubbing it in her face that she had to come home after (checks notes) her husband died and her business failed.  

So, yeah, being a jerk about that seems right.  As we've learned in the last decade, people are the worst.

I also still think the movie is very thin, and that's a screenplay issue, but also I'm surprised I was so surprised by this the first time.  It's kinda par for the course for a Hallmark movie to basically provide a set-up and then people shoot the shit for forty-five minutes, there's a small bit of tension about the two would-be-lovers maybe not getting it on, and then they throw caution and financial security to the wind and go for it.  I'd argue that when there's more to it, that's the outlier. 

But, yeah, it's about Chabert giving up LA to come home where she has what seems like a 2700 sq foot Queen Anne waiting for her in perfect condition.  Her daughter has a gift for singing and poetry, but is sad they've left LA.  

Chabert enrolls her daughter in her old school only to find that her high school nemesis, Mariah Carey, is there and the Queen Bee of the PTA, etc... and a real piece of work.  But Santa works there as the janitor?

Superman 2025: Predictable Patterns

You can follow our posts on Superman at this link, and our posts on the new movie, Superman (2025) at this link.

Well.  With the arrival of the second trailer, it sure feels like people are getting onboard the Superman (2025) train, at least online.  I think the slow roll out of images, ideas, etc... is actually working very well.  

In my years of observing superhero media releases, there's a distinct pattern when it comes to superhero fans and their management of the conversation online.  That conversation can impact what normies see online, which may shape what they may think is the "informed" opinion to have prior to a movie's release - especially in the critical demographic of young adults, who will pay more attention to their peers and what some guy in his mother's house said on TikTok than anything else.

That can be hard.  

Chabert Holiday Watch: A Royal Christmas (2014)

Watched:  06/02/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing: Unknown

Director:  Alex Zamm

Job: Tailor/ Would-be-Fashion Deisgner

Location of story:  vague Europe

new skill: passing for someone allowed in public

Man:  Steven Hagen

Job of Man: Prince

Goes to/ Returns to:  Goes to

Event:  The Royal Christmas Ball  

Food:  pancakes

I have two more non-Christmas movies to watch as part of ChabertQuest 2025, but just wasn't in the mood for either after a weird couple of weeks around Signal Watch HQ.  So, instead, I went down the list of the Christmas movies I have to get through, and we picked this one.  

While I had not previously written this one up, I am positive I've seen it in parts or in whole as I certainly remembered bits of it, so I am not calling it a First Viewing.  

Wrongly, I believed that A Royal Christmas (2014) was Chabert's first Christmas movie for Hallmark.  It's not.  We'll get to that one.  Nor is it even close to the first basic cable Christmas movie about an unlikely American regular-ol'-girl who sweeps a prince off his feet.  But it does appear to have been the moment Hallmark fully invested in Chabert for Christmas, and ten years later, she basically signed a contract to be the Queen of Hallmark Christmas.

The movie was filmed in Romania, but with American and English talent.  Jane Seymour co-stars, which can't have been inexpensive.  And they have a whole castle, block off city streets, etc...  Maybe it's a huge budget!  Maybe the dollar goes super far in Romania!  I have no idea.

Our basic story is that Chabert is a normal girl with a dream to be a fashion designer.  She works at her dad's tailor shop in Philadelphia and has been dating an MBA student, Leo, for a year.  Leo is to spend Christmas with Chabert and her dad, but Leo is  suddenly summoned home.  Before he departs, she learns Leo is actually Leopold, a legit prince of a small, independent country in the South of France.  A sort of San Marino, I guess.  But it is what SNL would call The Kingdom of Caucasia.  And, so the movie can happen, she goes along.

Jonathan Joss Merges With The Infinite

Actor Jonathan Joss has passed.  

He was the voice actor for John Redcorn on King of the Hill, appeared on Parks and Rec, and was in many other productions.

I met Joss once somewhat by accident.  I was attending a small swap meet/ convention, and I guess Joss was packing up his table to leave just as I showed up late.  He saw that when we locked eyes I knew who he was due to what I assume was a stupid grin, and... as people so often do seeing an amiable lumbering fellow, shoved a box of stuff for me to carry.  And so it was, I was briefly assisting Jonathan Joss on his way out to his car.

Anyway, I was so f'ing pleased to meet the guy, who cares about carrying a box or two?

Today I learned he was murdered by a former neighbor at the site of his former home.  It seems to be a textbook hate crime, and I find myself helplessly furious that this happened.  Hopefully justice will be swift and certain.

Fuller Watch: Forty Guns (1957)

Watched:  06/01/2025

Format:  TCM forever ago, but on DVR

Viewing:  First

Director:  Sam Fuller

I'm gonna say - I've never disliked a Sam Fuller movie.  And, in fact, I like Sam Fuller movies when I watch them, and I probably need to watch more of them.

Forty Guns (1957) is a pastiche on the Wyatt Earp/ Tombstone mythos and OK Corral films, with Barry Sullivan playing the Wyatt Earp stand-in, Griff Bonnell.  The three Bonnell brothers ride into Tombstone to collect a lawman who has been robbing mail delivery.  But on their way in, they're passed by Stanwyck in all black on a white horse, and riding head of forty men - her Dragoons.  

Stanwyck's Jessica Drummond is the hard-as-nails boss of the territory, who has helped turn Arizona into something like civilization, but rules her territory with forty hired guns who ride far and wide doing her bidding while she puppet masters politicians, judges and the law.  

She has a maniacal brother, Brockie (John Ericson), who she covers for even as he causes her no small amount of trouble, this time by shooting an older lawman - who is going blind.

In some ways, this is a familiar version of the Earps and the Cowboys story from Tombstone - three brothers taking on an organized mob on the edge of civilization.  In others, it's a bit different as Griff and Jessica start to fall for each other, seeing in each other that they're the kind of people it took to build the West, but now the use for people like them is coming to a close.

Del Toro's "Frankenstein" Trailer

 

If you hang around this site, you may know I have an affinity for Frankenstein, which is usually associated with the original novel, and definitely the Universal monster films.  More recently, I've also been shown the Hammer Frankenstein films which feature Cushing as the mad doctor, and I've taken a shine to them for their weird perversity.  But I'll also check out other films, comics, whatever - from time to time if the good doctor or the monster is involved.  This includes the take in DCSU's Creature Commandos.  

But, yes, we're always curious when a new movie is in the offing.

Guillermo Del Toro is as good a choice as I could ask for in regards to the material.  That Universal let this movie happen and it isn't coming from them is sort of a shock.  But I can appreciate that Netflix is willing to do something that looks so close to the novel, where I suspect Universal would want to get back to ol' flathead and maintain their brand.  Especially as they just opened a whole amusement park around the idea (which looks amazing, by the way).

Anyway - I can tell nothing.  This is basically the first chapter or three of a very long book, with a few glimpses of SOP Frankenstein tucked in.  But that's okay. Oscar Issac is a personal favorite of mine, so I'm happy with that casting, and I think Mia Goth is Elizabeth, so that's good.

So, this Fall - for Halloween I was already planning to blitz the Hammer Frankenstein movies, which are weird and unsettling in their own way - and I can include this and just make it a Franky-fest.

Brooks Watch: Spaceballs (1987)

Watched:  05/31/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  10,000,000th

Director:  Mel Brooks

Rick Moranis should have gotten the Oscar for this one.

Back In Time Watch: Back To The Future Part II (1989)

Watched:  05/30/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Robert Zemeckis

I have a very strange relationship less with Back To The Future and the two sequels - maybe more strange than I maybe should have for three movies I don't really care about.  I think those movies are perfectly adequate 1980's movies that were kind of an entertaining carnival ride at the time, but that was it.  Over the years, like so much of Gen-X's media from our formative years, the Back To The Future movies have been elevated and elevated in the zeitgeist until, now, they're considered a major cultural touchstone.  Which, to me, is like "what if The Wraith or Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend were the movie that generated a cottage industry for a studio, inspired rides, a West End musical, and endless devotion?"  

Like, the movie was something I enjoyed, sorta, at the time, but it wasn't my jam.

First, as a kid I found Michael J. Fox as much fun as nails on a chalkboard.  It wasn't until Spin City that I found him remotely tolerable.  And in retrospect, that was probably that Connie Britton was such a distraction I didn't notice Fox as much.  I do not wish to speak ill of Fox, but his general Michael J. Fox-ness was a major factor in my reaction to all of his movies.  Sorry, dude.

I felt like, even at the time, "oh, here's more of that Boomer nostalgia about the 1950's and 60's" which was all over at the time.  I mean, 1986 gave us Peggy Sue Got Married, and the previous years had been giving us Happy Days, Grease, Sha-na-na...   As a kid who liked sci-fi, it felt like a waste of the potential for the concept, and only later did I appreciate that time travel was just the excuse to soak in this funny premise of a kid meeting his parents at the same age.  And hear music from 97.7 - all the oldies, all the time.  

The humor in the first one struck me as dumb.  The bit about "I am Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan" just felt... lame to me. 

Chabert Watch: Reach for Me (2008)

Watched:  05/29/2025

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  LeVar Burton

So.  Interesting, small, indie movie with some name talent.  I kept wondering how this was pulled off, and then the movie ended with "Directed by LeVar Burton" and the lightbulb went off.  Who doesn't love LeVar Burton?  And if you don't think he's great, we can't be friends.

And when I say name talent, I mean Chabert, of course.  But also Seymour Cassel, Alfre Woodard, Adrienne Barbeau, Larry Hankin, and Burton himself.  I am not familiar with actor Johnny Whitworth, one of the major leads, but he was good!

The movie is... odd.  It's about Alvin (Seymour Cassel), a patient in hospice who is facing his end.  He loses his roommate (Hankin) who he kind of got along with - but maybe not as well as he believed. Alvin's an old, sad and angry asshole, and a letch who grabs the butts of the volunteers.  He talks about sex like he's in a a dorm trying to impress wide-eyed Freshmen as a Sophomore.  

Chabert Watch: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

Watched:  05/28/2025

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mark Waters

When people ask "why did studios stop spending money on romcoms", I think it's fair to point to movies like this and say "well, this is what they were making, and people didn't like it."  Metacritic has this at a 34, which sounds correct.  

I had not seen this movie, and until I looked it up a week ago to watch it, I thought it was a movie in which Eva Longoria was a ghost hassling her boyfriend.  But that was Over Her Dead Body, which people also didn't like.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) is a movie I may have known existed at one point, but...  in 2025, I just had no memory of it coming out.  I don't know if it met expectations or not, making about $100 million worldwide.  

Chabert Watch: Hello Sister, Goodbye Life (2006)

Watched:  05/27/2025

Format:  YouTube TV on demand

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steven Robman

This movie is about a young woman (Chabert, playing a college junior here) with a rocky relationship with her father, who has remarried and has a young daughter (Samantha Hanratty).  When her father and her step-mother die in a car accident, she learns that her father named her custodian of her half-sister.

While attending college, she moves into her father's house and tries to take care of a seven-year-old.  As it turns out, for a hard-partying college girl, this is a change of pace.

Wendie Malick plays Chabert's mother, a woman who also seems like a lot of fun, but who maybe was not a role model for structured parenting, and is more excited to have an adult-aged college daughter she can hang with than she was to raise a young child.

Happy Birthday, Kylie Minogue

Kylie's war room for when she plays "Risk"

Over COVID, my passing interest in the music of Kylie Minogue turned into a whole thing.  I wrote about it here after JAL, TreyMerica and I saw her in Austin in April.  Here's the photo album of us attending.  Rita Ora opened, and was great.

I am not an expert-level fan, but I am a fan!  And so it is that I wish Ms. Minogue the happiest of birthdays.

She's on tour now in England, so I hope it all goes swimmingly for her.

Here she is from Disco, performing Magic.

Doc Watch: Pee-Wee as Himself (2025)

Watched:  05/26/2025

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Matt Wolf

Watching Pee-Wee as Himself (2025) is a strange journey.  There was a lot I didn't know up until when he joined The Groundlings, and then there was what I did know -  including the two arrests.  But in the end, the film kind of unravels a bit in a way that seems almost inevitable - surely director Matt Wolf laying the trail to let us know this is coming.

Beyond that, the doc faces the same problem that I found with the recent Steve Martin documentary.  It's a lengthy film, it criss-crosses the years and draws connections, but the subject is so practiced at maintaining their inner-selves, and their privacy, that even at the end, you feel like you barely saw anything even after 3 hours.  

Jumbles of photos from a childhood are interesting, but don't tell a story.  Talking heads commenting on what they're already framing are useful, and provide color, but it feels very carefully managed - we're told it's carefully managed.  We keep seeing the collections, but there's no discussion of what's in there, or why (and as a collector, I know there's a story behind everything).  We see his parents, but they won't ever come out and discuss them beyond "his dad was macho and may not have liked Paul's lifestyle".  His mother is a non-entity.

Both Paul Reubens and Steve Martin, who agreed to let themselves be known via documentary, still want to control, and so we get a look through a very narrow lens, which is better than nothing, but it feels more questions are raised than are satisfied.  If you want to spend time with how Pee-Wee came to be - then we've got a great film for you.  If you want to know Paul Reubens, that may not really happen.  

Happy Birthday, Siouxsie Sioux

 

Best wishes to Siouxsie Sioux on her birthday. 

With any luck, she's pondering new music.

Chabert Watch: Elevator Girl (2010)

Watched:  05/26/2025

Format:  UP free trial on Amazon 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Bradford May

Job:  Massage therapy receptionist, Would-Be Chef, DJ for children and old people, I lost track

new skill:  Landing a dude to fund her boho lifestyle

Man: Ryan Merriman

Job of Man:  Attorney - Mergers and Acquisitions

Goes to/ Returns to:  Stays in place

Event:  a six-year old's birthday, and others

Food:  No special food, but they do make hummus

So, this is somewhat technically Lacey Chabert's first Hallmark movie.  If you're looking for ground zero for how she eventually became a big deal at Hallmark, she signed up for this movie, which was picked up for distribution through Hallmark (a lot of "Hallmark" movies are not made by Hallmark, but made independently to be purchased by Hallmark.  I don't know all the details.).  

It's now available on UP!, which I learned is still going when I looked for this movie, but I hadn't seen the network in years.

Around this same time, Chabert's career was obviously in an odd patch.  She's having work released, but this is her first release of 2010.  In 2009, she was in the big studio romcom Ghosts of Girlfriends Past starring McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and Michael Douglas, but also The Lost, which we've already covered.  And she's doing a bunch of cartoon voice work - she voiced Gwen Stacy on The Spectacular Spider-Man for 25 episodes.

The description for Elevator Girl (2010) made it sound like it would be about people from two different classes making it work, but it's more like...  two people with nothing in common dating. 

Peter David Merges With The Infinite

I remember being handed a Hulk comic at summer camp, featuring the gray-skinned Hulk of the period.  I only knew the Hulk as the green skinned guy who yelled a lot and I was stunned at what I saw.  He was now a Vegas enforcer named "Mr. Fixit", and it was absolutely wild.  I soon learned through the Bullpen Bulletins, it was Peter David driving that effort.

Peter David's name was kind of everywhere for the first decade and a half I read comics, and of his many great efforts, I particularly liked his X-Factor and Supergirl.  He had a unique ability to find ideas that were out there, and, like The Hulk, turn them into something familiar but new.  X-Factor became a complex story about a mutant team affiliated with the Pentagon.  Supergirl went from the Matrix character to the Earth Angel inhabiting a dead girl to a girl who could kind of leap far and was bullet proof.  I assure you, this all made sense at the time.

He also transformed Aquaman, created Young Justice, handled She-Hulk, Star Trek, Superman and endless more.

David will be remembered among comic fans as one of the most creative minds of his era, making oddball ideas make complete sense and for caring so much about his work.  

I know he'd been having health issues for a while, and I'm sorry he passed.

Marvel Re-Watch: Thunderbolts* (2025) - in which we really talk about Marvel in 2025

Watched:  05/25/2025

Format:  Drafthouse

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Jake Schreier

We had already seen Thunderbolts (2025) in the theater when the movie opened, but Jamie in particular wanted to see it again, and I'm a fun guy, so why not?

I enjoyed it on a second viewing maybe more than I initially liked it.  It really is a tight script, and I kind of reveled in the fact that the big set piece at the conclusion of the movie takes place without a shot fired.  This is near Doom Patrol territory in how we're approaching super-stuff.  

I've seen complaints about the palette of the movie, a gripe which seems to be missing the way movies work, and instead of saying "the aesthetic looks ugly.  They did it wrong" failing to ask "why does it look the way it does?  We know this was intentional."  Because the conclusion there is pretty @#$%ing obvious, and you're so close.

But we know all this.  So I want to talk about where we are with Marvel in 2025.

Box office for the movie is not amazing.  It's made something like $330 million, which I would happily take, but which is a pretty far cry from billions of dollars Marvel hopes to make with every movie.  But...

Chabert Watch: A Little Piece of Heaven (1991)

The poster features Cameron realizing he just committed several felonies

Watched:  05/25/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mimi Leder

Holy @#$%.  This movie is unhinged.

The vibe is sort of Hallmark Hall of Fame, with the rural setting and people all deciding everything is going to be swell for Christmas at the end.  It's about Kirk Cameron kidnapping kids and taking them to his pig farm so his adult, developmentally disabled sister will have friends.  In order to keep the kids, he tells them that they've died and his house/ farm is heaven - all evidence to the contrary (for example, you have to live with Kirk Cameron).  Along the way, they become a sort of family, in a way that feels lifted from The Legend of Billie Jean of all movies.

Look, full disclosure:  I can't stand Kirk Cameron.  This started all the way back in his Growing Pains days.  He's a mediocre actor and seemed like a smug jackass even when he was just taking up real estate in Tiger Beat.  But his subsequent weirdo, condescending, "it is I who know the true word of God" routine was thin 30 years ago, and it hasn't improved with the years.  He's just the worst.

So, I was not thrilled to watch this.  

Chabert Watch: When Secrets Kill (1997)

Watched:  05/24/2025

Format:  YouTube - someone posted this a bit and no one took it down

Viewing:  First

Director:  Colin Bucksey

blogger's note: if it seems like I'm blazing through the Chabert movies, I am.  We're getting close with 7 non-Christmas movies left, and then 5 Christmas movies.  It is a journey, y'all.  But it is inspiring me for what I'll do next.  And while I have enjoyed my time with Ms. Chabert, and I have plenty to say on it (which I'll sum up at the end), it also feels like I'm in the home stretch after 62 Chabert movies here since the Christmas season kicked into gear.  

Man, made-for-cable TV movies of the 1990's are buckwild.  It's easy to forget if you haven't seen one in a while.  

When Secrets Kill (1997) is based on a Patricia MacDonald novel, and she's a prolific mystery author who does quite well.  I have no idea how true to the book this is, but it is wacky.  

The version I watched was commercial free and seemed like it was encoded from VHS tape, complete with bad picture and warbly, distorted audio, which made for some tough viewing.   And, of course, the 1990's ever-present synth score.  

I associate 1990's cable flicks with Lifetime Movies, which were such a weird mix of noir and domestic concerns aimed at an imagined audience of women (babysitters stealing babies, babysitters stealing husbands, babysitters stealing babies and husbands.).  And, certainly, a Bio-Mom returning falls into this realm.  But this aired across multiple channels, so I don't know who owned it.

Our plot:  A couple (Gregory Harrison and Roxanne Hart) are mourning a stillbirth of a much-wanted baby.  On Mother's Day, their adopted tween-daughter (Chabert) doesn't show up for brunch, and they head home as Mom doesn't want to celebrate anything.  After a brief fight at home, Chabert's birth mother appears at the door without invitation.  This is, of course, stressful.  

Chabert Watch: Off-Season - The Lex Morrison Story (2013)

Watched:  05/22/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steven K. Tsuchida

I did not have NBA-player Vanity Project down on my Chabert bingo card, but here we are.

Look, I didn't like Rick Fox when he played for the Celtics and rolled my eyes when he went to LA.  I liked him less when he married America's precious angel, Vanessa Williams.  He became dead to me when he divorced Williams.

How dare you, Rick.

So, yeah, I was immediately not excited about this when I realized this movie was about Rick Fox wanting to be in a comedy and throwing money at it until it was a reality.

I have no idea what this movie is.  It looks like a TV movie, but I can't figure out who it's for.  It feels very much like people goofing in front of a camera more than a TV show or movie.  

late edit:  I forgot the casual racism toward Asian people.  It was incredibly yikes and all out of Fox's mouth.

The story is that Our Hero is part of the PR team for an NBA team.  He's assigned to keep an eye on Lex Morrison (Fox) over the summer and get him in shape for the next season.  If he doesn't, he'll be fired.  Lex is, of course, wacky and out of control and not living up to his potential.  We are continually told Lex is in bad shape, but he is Rick Fox.  

Our lead guy, Zack Lively, is probably fine.  But weirdly and wildly bland.  He has a sort of partner-in-crime who is asked to play doofy/zany very, very broadly, and feels like a high school kid doing improv.  

I guess Fox was dating Eliza Dushku when the movie was made, so she's in it as a brief supporting role, and she's honestly the funniest part of the movie.  

There's a subplot about Lacey Chabert as a sports reporter who our lead wants to date.  Chabert does not embarrass herself.  Which I can't say for pretty much everyone else.

The movie was not for me.  But it was short at 75 minutes.  

But it is entertaining seeing them try to frame Rick Fox and Lacey Chabert in the same shot.

Also, this movie seems to be about how much Rick Fox didn't like living in Boston.  It's very weird.

My suspicion is that Rick Fox just thought this idea was good and wanted to have his own Hollywood project (he does appear in TV and movies) and decided he could be in a comedy, so he spent some of his Lakers money and made it.  He has the Executive Producer credit, and it's budgeted at $650K, so he could have easily financed it, especially using his own house as the set for half of the movie, if that is his place.  Write-offs, ahoy.

George Wendt Merges With The Infinite

George Wendt, actor most famous for his run as Norm on TV's Cheers, has passed.  

For the duration of the show's 11 seasons, Wendt played barfly Norm Peterson - a guy somewhat beat up by life but who was quick to shrug it off with a quippy one-liner.  

He also appeared in numerous films, memorably in Fletch and House.  Post-Cheers, Wendt worked steadily, often doing single episodes of TV or brief appearances in movies.  He would go on to play Santa at least four or five times, including in Santa Buddies and the A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All - uncredited here for reasons I was unclear on.  He was a wildly popular SNL host, and is why, today, we all still say "'da Bears".

It's hard to explain to today's kids what the world was like when everyone watched network TV, and of network TV shows, Cheers remained an absolute monster hit for its entire run.  Norm was a common denominator for any conversation.  Enough so that when someone licensed the idea of Cheers and put bars in airports that looked a bit like the set, they put a Norm dummy on a stool so you could sit next to him while you waited to make your connection to Duluth.  Apparently that went poorly.*

I cannot imagine what he made over the years on residuals from re-runs, but for twenty years after the show aired, it was still on all the time.

Wendt was much beloved, and seemed an okay guy.  We'll miss you, sir.

*Sadly, when I went into the Cheers bar in Minneapolis, the figures were no longer a feature.

1940's Watch: Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

Watched:  05/19/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dorothy Arzner

I basically threw Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) on because I saw it starred Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara, and, in the end - and to my surprise-  the movie wound up kind of blowing me away.  

What starts off feeling like any of a few hundred other Depression-era movies about showgirls trying to make it (which is how contemporary reviews started and stopped with the movie), the well-worn story is repurposed as a criticism of the business of show, burlesque, the male gaze, and the position of women in society and the flack they take for making money.

I'll back up here and mention, two of the three screenwriters on this movie were women.  It also seems a male director started the film and immediately quit, handing the reigns to Dorothy Arzner.  

Chabert Watch: Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

Watched:  05/19/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Joel Gallen

I mostly missed the wave of teen movies that arrived in the late 1990's.  And the ones I did see, I only partially remember at this point, and/ or am unsure if I watched them all the way through.

I'm not even sure if Not Another Teen Movie (2001) closed out the cycle or not.  What's curious about this movie is that it kind of helped launch the terrible movie-spoof cycle that would morph into the terrible Scary Movies flicks and other spoofs. 

The 2005 release of Dirty Deeds we watched as part of the Chabert-a-Thon was trying to be one of the comedy teen movies, and I think it must have arrived very late, in retrospect.

Not Another Teen Movie is an interesting artifact for a lot of reasons.  

Chabert Watch: Sanitarium (2013)

Watched:  05/18/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Directors:  Bryan Ramirez, Bryan Ortiz, Kerry Valderrama

So, this one turned into a bit more of a rabbit hole than I was expecting.  

Sanitarium (2013) is a movie independently produced in San Antonio, Texas - just down the road from my own Austin, TX.  It's a great town, and I recommend it.

The film is an anthology, three stories centering around how a trio of inmates landed in a sanitarium run by Malcolm McDowell, who sort of book-ends the film and shows up here and there.  But the movie is a testament to people figuring out they can afford the day rates for some actors and living out the dream of making a movie with actors they like.

Chabert Watch! Shadow of Fear (2004)

Watched:  05/17/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Rich Cowan

The cast in this thing is absolutely wild.  James Spader.  Peter Coyote.  Aidan Quinn.  Robin Tunney.  Alice Krige.  Matthew Davis.  and, of course, Lacey Chabert.  

I am guessing this was a straight-to-DVD movie.  It's a kind of throwback to 1940's post-war melodrama that might have been categorized as noir, but does feel decidedly 00's.  And, once again, I see the idea here, even if the execution left me mostly flat.  

I can see all of the casting as being spot on.  But the movie's plot itself is insane and absurd.  Maybe it could have worked with a different director.   Lighting.  Something.  What's weird is - they have the sets, they have the talent (mostly), but it feels like it was shot as a TV movie that happens to contain actors doing a pretty good job with a pretty ridiculous movie.  There's one scene where a guy - I think nameless, but impacted by our villain - is *acting* and I want to be, like, my guy... it's okay.  You can dial it back.  You care more than the director.  And that may be true of everyone in the cast.

Musical Watch: Kismet (1955)

Watched:  05/14/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Vincent Minnelli

A couple of months ago, I rewatched It's Always Fair Weather, and remembered Dolores Gray existed. The first time I'd seen the movie, she was my favorite part of the film. And, sure, I like a smile that makes Geena Davis' grin seem understated, but she was hilarious and her two numbers were fantastic.

My understanding is that: as a teen she was given a shot by Rudy Vallee, and became a nightclub chanteuse, headlining by age 18 or so.  There's a whole story about her getting caught as a bystander in a drive-by shooting as a young woman, but that she recovered and was back performing in night clubs in a couple of months, the bullet never removed.  

Gray's career was primarily on the stage, both in New York and London.  She played Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun for two years in the West End.  Back in the US she co-starred in a popular stage production of Destry Rides Again with Andy Griffith.  

Like many radio and stage performers, she'd have disappeared into the collective memory hole if not for her few movies.

Superman 2025: The New Trailer Hits

You can follow our posts on Superman at this link, and our posts on the new movie, Superman (2025) at this link.

Well.  There it is. 

We finally get an idea of the plot in broad strokes.  For comics-folk and Superman fans, we get the characters and literal from-the-comics stories getting referenced.  I'm seeing Action Comics 900 and All-Star Superman #12.  Maybe a dash of Dini and Ross's Peace on Earth (a great one-off if you can find it).  The take on Lex feels like Waid and Yu's Birthright, or else I'm projecting.

But, and stick with me, this feels like the Superman I look for in the comics and the Superman I occasionally get in TV or film.  It only happens when the creators don't get bogged down with being about their own internal mechanisms or veer off to just punch things (although I like that, too, from time to time).  

This is a Superman who is out there doing his absolute best in a world that is so (unnecessarily) complicated, doing the right thing is frowned upon when you don't ask for permission to save lives.  

Ya'll, from Action Comics #1, Superman was the fantasy of two guys who asked "what if you didn't have to ask to do the right thing?  What if no one could stop you when you tried to help?  What would that look like?  How would we react?"

In his first appearances Superman is seen busting into the governor's mansion to insist on a stay of execution for an innocent man.  An issue or three later, he's taking on weapons dealers trying to start wars, forcing them to the front lines - he is not asking anyone if it's okay.  Superman was intended to be a bit rogue-ish and outside the law, because it's never been too hard to see we build systems that don't benefit the people who need them to function, and certainly that was the case in the mid-1930's.   

Chabert Watch: Thirst (2010)

I need two tubes of Burt's Bees, STAT!

Watched:  05/12/2025

Format:  Fawesome

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jeffrey Scott Lando

ChabertQuest2025 is becoming a study in types of low-budget independent movies.  

This film is the "what can we shoot that's dramatic with a really small cast and give everyone stuff for their reel?" feature that's essentially a horror movie as people are trapped in a remote location and will be killed by nature.  Sometimes that is sharks, sometimes that is getting wedged between rocks.  Thirst (2010) is the desert.

I find these movies mostly deeply unappealing in a "your whole movie could have been an email" sort of way.  Watching a large group of people get picked off by alligators or sharks?  Sign me up!  90 minutes of a small group go through therapy and only one lives at the end?  I'll take a pass.  It's a predictable slog.

Usually the movies move slowly, are often melodramas at their heart (otherwise, why care about these victims?), and you spend the whole movie wondering why they made this and that bad decision.