Doc Watch: My Mom Jayne - a film by Mariska Hargitay (2025)

Watched:  06/28/2025

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mariska Hargitay

I don't watch Law & Order much, but for a while back in the 00's and 10's, SVU was the one I'd watch in re-runs.  And Mariska Hargitay was hard to miss as the ultra-driven cop, Detective Olivia Benson.  But it was probably in the 2010's that I figured out her parents were screen legend Jayne Mansfield and body builder Mickey Hargitay.  

Mansfield is the stuff of Hollywood Babylon legend, following a career path that feels one-part Monroe, one-part Jane Russell.  I've seen only two or three Mansfield movies, and she struck me as very good at what she did (I liked her a lot in The Burglar), but she and I don't cross paths much in my TCM viewing.  

Once I knew about her parentage, I also never could quite sort out Mariska Hargitay's domestic situation, as I couldn't believe she'd even been born when Mansfield died in a car wreck in 1967.  It seemed Mariska was a smidge older than I'd guessed (good genes, I guess) - but she was three at the time, and in the car when it happened.  But, due to her age when Mansfield passed, Hargitay didn't have memories of her mother, and she wasn't raised by her.  

The doc, My Mom Jayne: a Film by Mariska Hargitay (2025), is Hargitay coming to terms with who her mother was, learning who she really was away from the public, and embracing her relationship with the woman she never really knew.  

Musical Watch: Wicked (2024)

Watched:  06/26/2025

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jon M. Chu

I am a huge fan of the OG Wizard of Oz.  My second biggest regret about ending the podcast was not covering the movie before we put away our mics.  In my opinion, it's not just an important film, it's a key to American film and culture.  

That said - I am fine with derivative works.  Of course people want to explore this amazing world in which Wizard of Oz takes place, to consider and deconstruct and shuffle around the cultural icons of the movie, look into the characters, themes, etc...  It's a bubbling well for interpretation, commentary and America.

Wicked (2024) came in riding decades of popularity as a stage show and soundtrack.  Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenowith were launched to super stardom with the show and became fixtures.  People who don't care about Broadway probably already knew two of the songs by osmosis before ever buying a movie ticket.  It's one of the few 21st Century Broadway shows to break into the pop consciousness like 20th Century shows like Oklahoma!, Phantom, Cats or Les Mis.  

The film adaptation did great at the box office and was at least an American phenomenon.  It did fine overseas, but likely suffered from being an English-language musical about a play that probably hasn't been getting seen in Beijing, etc...  quite yet.  And who knows if they care about The Wizard of Oz in Lichtenstein?

But in the states, it made almost half-a-billion dollars.  As the movie was released in late Fall, Christmas season 2024 was pink and green with the movie's merchandise and imagery everywhere.  It was kind of neat.

Doc Watch: Implosion - The Titanic Sub Disaster (2025)

Watched:  06/21/2025

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Pamela Gordon

Friday when I wrapped work, Jamie informed me that there was, in fact, a different documentary about the Titan submersible disaster currently playing on Max (part of the Discovery/ HBO partnership).  And so it was we put on Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster (2025).  

Just a couple of days ago, we wrote about Titan: The Oceangate Disaster which we watched on Netflix, so, yes, this is a second doc on the same topic.

Thanks to streamers seeing documentary as a fairly inexpensive endeavor, we often get more than one documentary on the same hot topic - and since the Fyre Festival adventure, I've liked watching dueling docs.  It gives me a chance to get more than one POV on a topic, and you do start feeling like you're triangulating on some version of reality as different film makers will pursue different angles.

In that prior write-up, I sort of raged against the myth of the maverick entrepreneur, so I won't repeat myself here.  

This doc is actually a great companion piece to the Netflix film with different interview subjects, some of whom share more of the mentality of Stockton Rush, some of whom were on the boat and are not covering their ass, and some saying out loud what you kind of have to suspect based on the evidence provided in both films, but which we still don't know for sure.

Doc Watch: Titan - The Oceangate Disaster (2025)

Watched:  06/18/2025

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mark Monroe

(blogger's note:  we did also watch the other doc on this topic over on MAX)

Well.  This was horrifying.

I woke up this morning to another Space X rocket exploding on the pad.  Which is kind of normal when you're figuring out gigantic rockets (see the Atlas rocket program).  But the failure rate of Space X is starting to be a real stunner as booster after booster goes en fuego.  As is the insistence we get Tesla robot taxis on city streets when those taxis don't seem to recognize things like children in the road.

Also, I've worked for difficult people.  I have been a difficult people to work for.  What neither I, nor those people, have done is ignore and fire anyone who was coming along to warn us of catastrophe.  Especially catastrophe that would murder me 4000 meters beneath the ocean waves.

What Titan: The Oceangate Disaster (2025) manages to do is show how one ego run amok - and an absentee board, I'd argue - led directly to the death of five people for absolutely no reason.  

It's a story of a small kingdom, one with life and death stakes, where one guy's Ahab-like vision meant that employees needed an almost religious faith in a technology that clearly was not meant to do the thing it was required to do.  And our Ahab would ruin you if you crossed him.

I think in the wake of the news stories on Titan, we all had a pretty good idea that there had been signs.  What it was hard to know was how numerous, obvious and devastating the indicators of coming disaster had been and for how long.  

In simple terms, the doc lays out the case that systems we assume will be there didn't just fail, they don't exist.  

SPOILERS

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.  

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.  

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...

Soderbergh Watch: Black Bag (2025)

Watched:  05/10/2025

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steven Soderbergh

So, this was the movie I meant to watch in the theater, but we walked out.  And, given the film's style and the necessity of following every line of dialog, I am very glad we made that decision.

I am unshocked that a movie directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender was very much my jam.

I don't want to get too much into the details of this espionage/ counter-espionage thriller.  Part of the joy is going in knowing very little other than that Fassbender and Blanchett are playing a pair of agents for an Mi6 sort of set-up, and seeds of doubt are planted.  

Marvel Watch: Thunderbolts* (2025)

Watched:  05/01/2025

Format:  Alamo 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jake Schrierer

SPOILERS for a new movie

I won't belabor Marvel's trials and travails, real and imagined, over the past few years.  We all know the narrative.  It's not one I necessarily agree with, but it's out there.  

Does Thunderbolts feel different from other recent Marvel stuff?  Yes. In some ways.  Mostly the ways in which you don't feel like this movie fell out of a Marvel continuity Mad Lib generator that requires you remember what happened in a movie in 2009. It does the continuity thing correctly - we've seen almost everyone in this movie before - if you watched all the Marvel stuff (and I have, minus the What If? shows).   They don't break that continuity and may refer to it - but I think the story itself makes sense without all that, as long as you listen to what the characters say about themselves. 

Our characters are from the Black Widow film (White Widow, Red Guardian), Ant-Man and The Wasp (Ghost), Captain America (Bucky) and Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Valentina, John Walker).  It's a good mix.  Plus, Bob.

Coogler Watch: Sinners (2025)

Watched:  04/26/2025

Format:  Drafthouse

Viewing:  First

Director:  Ryan Coogler

I guess Marshall is my "there's a vampire movie out, we're going" buddy.  And, really, Marshall was the ideal movie buddy for this one.  He's an avid music fan, a musician, and his rock sensibilities - when I met him in the early 1990's - were blues-based.  He's also a fan of vampire flicks, although I don't think I've convinced him to watch the Hammer vampire flicks yet. 

In addition, Marshall is well-read, and with an academic background in creative fiction, his critical analysis is always impressive.  But he refused to send me a blog post for this movie so that I didn't have to write one.  He is refusing me this one simple request, and so I am hoping if I butter him up enough with this high praise, next time, he'll do it.

Anyway - count me in with the people who loved Sinners (2025), and am excited about seeing it again.

SPOILERS

It's Morbin' Time: Morbius (2022)

Watched:  03/22/2025

Format:  FX Movies

Viewing:  First

Director:  Michael Espinosa

A movie whose reputation proceeds it, Morbius (2022) was met with critical derision, a fan base that showed up *ironically*, and a star who seemed to agree - we can all have a laugh at this movie.

I don't even really know what's wrong with Morbius - but, yes, the vibe is off.  Nonetheless, I'll speculate based on the final product.  

Unlike Madame Web, you don't have the immediate feeling "something is very, very wrong" in the first five minutes.  Morbius really takes its time to utterly fall apart and admit no one knew what to do with this character once they had him.

I'd even argue the first 1/3rd of the film is entertainingly campy - or at least made for a good laugh as I put it on whilst on the elliptical.  Jared Leto plays the very-ill but brilliant Michael Morbius, who we're to believe has grown to be a 30-something adult while requiring thrice-daily dialysis.  As a child, he befriends "Milo" - later played by Dr. Who's Matt Smith - and they have a working/ parental relationship with Jared Harris.  

Chabert Watch! The Wedding Veil Journey (2023)

the sixth of six of these.  I deserve a cookie for finishing.

Watched:  03/18/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Ron Oliver

heads-up:  If you're here for 100% Chabert content, I am going to alert you now, Lacey Chabert is a supporting character/ Executive Producer on this movie, and not the star.  But watching the Chabert filmography will mean sometimes she is not the lead.  I know.  I can't believe it either.

Job:  Art and Rarities Auction House Exec

new skill:  empathy for other humans

Man: Victor Webster

Job of Man:  Restaurateur and Chef

Goes to/ Returns to:  Goes to Greece

Event:  None, really

Food:  Greek cuisine

First, I finally figured out where I knew Alison Sweeney from - she was on Days of Our Lives when that was the go-to soap opera to watch in the 1990's thanks to Sweeney's character, Sami (who was batshit) and Deidre Hall's Marlena was possessed by a demon.  Weird, wild stuff.

On to the show:

With our couple established in the third Wedding Veil installment, we get the direct sequel here in the 6th and (mercifully) final installment, entitled The Wedding Veil Journey (2023).  

In this movie Alison Sweeney and Man are realizing their schedules as an art auctioneer and restaurateur are incompatible, and they never see each other.  In fact, they never managed a honeymoon in what we're told is three years later, meaning the movies are actually supposed to span something like 6+ years.  

Sweeney and Man head off for Greece, but their plan is bad.  They will stay only one night in a hotel and then wing it from there.  Because of flight delays, they wind up arriving late, have nowhere to stay, and wind up in a struggling but lovely resort that seems honestly super nice.  And clearly the production had the run of the place, likely due to COVID.

Animation Watch: The Wild Robot (2024)

Watched:  03/15/2025

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Chris Sanders

Well, this is kind of funny.  I wondered what had become of the writer/ director of Disney's Lilo & Stitch after watching the movie the other night, and here is as writer/ director of The Wild Robot (2024).  

The biggest problem The Wild Robot has is that it came up against Flow in the same year in the Oscar race, and the two, curiously, share similar themes using animals as their analogy.  But, luckily, I am not an award-granting body, and have place in my brain for both movies.  And I liked this movie quite a lot.

Yes, The Wild Robot is worth seeing, if for no other reason than that the design of film is a wonder.  It's some of the finest work I've seen from a US animation studio outside of Pixar or Disney, mixing realism with painterly flourishes, with classical film-making featuring inventive use of camera movement in a way that I just rarely feel anyone outside of Pixar, in particular, really lands (I'm still not over some of the imagery in Soul).    

And, it's all in service to the story.  

Chabert Watch! The Wedding Veil Expectations (2023)

Watched:  03/13/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:   First

Director:  Peter Benson

Job:  Curator at an Art Museum

new skill:  interior decorating

Man: Kevin McGarry

Job of Man: art teacher

Goes to/ Returns to:  Stays in Boston

Event:  Museum gala

Food:  Pineapple pizza (her pregnancy craving)

If one concept needed absolutely no sequels, it was The Wedding Veil, but here we are.  

Because we're doing all of this for science, I looked up the book that these movies are all supposedly based on, and it has nothing to do with anything in the movie.  I have no idea why they keep crediting the author.  The only thing the movies have in common with the book is that there's a wedding veil.  The plot and characters seem totally different.

The author is a Texas romance writer, and seems to pen hot and heavy romances about cowboys that take place here in the Lone Star State.  At some point, she renamed the book to make it more Texas themed.  Anyway, the series is well reviewed by romance fans, so get on that, if that's your jam. 

Back to our film!  

It's an indeterminate amount of time since we last checked in with Chabert and Man.  And as we have already been told in the first installment, and mentioned in two other films - they're happily -ever-aftering.   So, as we enter this film, we must put together a movie that both has some sort of conflict and doesn't disrupt the Hallmark promise of life being great after marriage.  Thus, we have a film with multiple plot threads and issues that rise up, and then fizzle away like water on a hot plate.

Chabert Watch! The Wedding Veil - Unveiled (2022)

Watched:  03/03/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Terry Ingram

heads-up:  If you're here for 100% Chabert content, I am going to alert you now, Lacey Chabert is a supporting character/ Executive Producer on this movie, and not the star.  But watching the Chabert filmography will mean sometimes she is not the lead.  I know.  I can't believe it either.

Job:  Art Prof

new skill:  I'd say researching art, but that is literally her job.  So, I guess, making lace?

Man: Paolo Bernardini

Job of Man:  Sales and Marketing for a lace company?

Goes to/ Returns to:  Goes to Venice

Event:  None?

Food:  I am sure they ate Italian food and talked about it

Budgets on Hallmark films make no sense to me.  

We're making our way through the Wedding Veil series, I guess.  It's a five movie (to date) series about a magical wedding veil that forces people to fall in love.  Frankly - its power is terrifying.  

Three Hallmark stars (Chabert, Autumn Reeser and Allison Sweeney) buy the veil together, as their "something borrowed" item they'll all wear.  And the first movie sees Lacey Chabert fall in love with a terrible, terrible human who looks like a Bad Boy version of Mikey Day.  

This is the best the veil can do?

Regarding budgets - the first movie ostensibly took place in San Francisco and Boston, but that was clearly Canada.  Nice locales, but nothing you don't see in many-a-mid-budget Hallmark flick.  

But the sequel, The Wedding Veil Unveiled (2022) - starring Autumn Reeser - takes place all over Venice, Italy.  They left the continent and went somewhere awesome.  You even see the library from Last Crusade.

Neo-Noir Watch: A History of Violence (2005)

 

Format:  Max?

Viewing:  First

Director:  David Cronenberg

Watched:  03/01/2025

Back when A History of Violence (2005) was in theaters, I was scheduled to see it as it’s based on a comic from a briefly lived DC Comics adult-oriented imprint. I’d read and quite liked the comic, but at showtime, one of us got sick, and we didn’t see it. And then, I never got back to it.

And that’s a shame, because 20 years later I liked it. But had I seen it back then, I doubt I would have understood how much this movie reads like a 1940’s film noir, maybe something like The Killers or a Goodis novel or movie.  It kind of reflects some of that post-War noir grit where we didn't slot people into "good guy" and "bad guy" so readily.

SPOILERS  

Viggo Mortensen stars as the smalltown café owner, Tom Stall, married to Maria Bello. The pair share kids aged around 16 and 5. Like many noir films, it’s about what happens when the unbridled viciousness of organized crime intersects with the mundane lives of ordinary people - and what happens when someone among the normal people isn't so average. 

 In a different decade, the William Hurt role is played by Raymond Burr in a B picture or Richard Conte if they had more money. Ed Harris would be played by Robert Ryan, and you can imagine Burt Lancaster in the lead role.

Chabert Watch! The Wedding Veil (2022)

Watched:  03/01/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:   First

Director:  Terry Ingram

Job:  Assistant Curator at an Art Museum

new skill:  walking in 6" heels on grass

Man: Kevin McGarry

Job of Man: philanthropist

Goes to/ Returns to:  Stays in Boston

Event:  Museum Gala

Food:  mac n' cheese

So...   apparently - despite starting as recently as 2022 with this movie, The Wedding Veil, there are already 5 movies in the Wedding Veil series, and likely more on the way.  I kind of knew this series existed, and was avoiding starting the series so we didn't need to sprint through five movies on the same topic.  But we're running out of other Chabert options here on Hallmark as we speedrace our way through her non-Christmas filmography in a way I did not anticipate when I was like "you know what would entertain Randy...".  But 2025 has been 2025, so here we are.

Basically, the idea of The Wedding Veil series is something like The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (which I've never seen).  It's about how possession of this 19th century wedding veil will lead to true love.  Three friends, who just happen to be played by Lacey Chabert, Autumn Reeser and Alison Sweeney - three of the top Hallmark stars - find and purchase a wedding veil together, all agreeing to share the veil when they find it in an antiques shop in San Francisco.

I call shenanigans that three people would agree to look the same at their weddings in a spur-of-the-moment decision, but here we are.  And we *will* get three movies of our heroes getting married, I guess.

This movie has to do the heavy lifting for the series as it has to establish (a) the magical power of the veil, (b) who each of the three leads in the series are, and (c) what their particular deal is with romance.  Fortunately, we all know Chabert is up to this task.

NASA Watch: Fly Me To the Moon (2024)

Watched:  02/27/2025

Format:  Apple+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Greg Berlanti

What an odd movie.

This is kind of what has happened with the mid-budget romcom.  They wound up on streaming services.  I don't know if Apple wanted to be in the Scarlett Johansson business or if they bought the movie.  But here it is on Apple+, which I have for MLS soccer purposes and through T-Mobile.

This is a movie about the value of truth, that uses the conspiracy theory of faking the moon landing as it's second-half pivot, and basically only gets the names of the Apollo 11 astronauts right, tossing out the rest of what happened in actuality in order to make a cute story.  It's fine, but if you're a NASA nerd like my wife, and by extension and maybe a lesser extent, me, it will make you want to pull your hair out.

Apollo 11, the focal point of the film, may be one of the most well-documented events in human history (that's the one where they walked on the moon the first time, Howard).  To make up how mission control works, and who was working there felt... weird.  Even odd little details crop up - like, I don't know if I ever heard anyone ever refer to any part of the vehicle as "the ship", but it happens here a couple of times.  

Hallmark Watch: Sisterhood, Inc. (2025)

Watched:  02/22/2025

Format:  Hallmark/ Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Lesley Demetriades

I watched this because my allergies had taken me out, Jamie was curious, and I'd just finished The Outfit and was like "yeah, sure, whatever. Palette cleanser.".  And, look, Rachael Leigh Cook is always good, and it's a cute idea for a movie.  

Tech CEO gets fired, turns her energy to helping her slacker sister.  She does this by applying corporate structure to the problem, building a board which she chairs, with the goal to help improve her sister's life.  

The cast has to carry one of these movies, and it felt a little spendy in that department.  Rachael Leigh Cook is a name and talented, and manages to make sure a character who could be prickly is sympathetic.  The mother is played by Judy Kain, who has been in tons of stuff and is good.  The sister's pizza boss is a guy from the Sopranos.  And Jackie Hoffman is somehow in this.  Go figure.

The bit about trying to turn this personal project into a business idea feels very real.

Anyway, yes, there's a romcom element, but it's the B-plot.  The A-Plot is about sisters and family and done with a surprising bit of character.  It does not hurt that the slacker sister played by Daniella Monet was pleasantly goofy while feeling like a real character, and really pretty funny.

I had not planned to watch non-Chabert Hallmark content, but it appears we're doing that now.  And as I have always believed Hallmark makes for ideal media when you don't feel great, this movie provided evidence in support of that hypothesis.

Also, I am planning to make Jamie watch Heat and Godfather II this week, so if we're swapping in some comfort watching in between, so be it.