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.