Happy Birthday, Geena Davis

Hey!  It's the birthday of Geena Davis!  Who doesn't like Geena Davis?  

I believe my intro to Davis was as Larry in Fletch.  After that, she was just sort of omnipresent in movies.  But I decided she was *great* (post-Oscar win) when I saw Thelma & Louise and A League of Their Own within a year of each other.  

I didn't see a few of her bigger movies til well after the fact, but I can always say, along with Sigourney Weaver and a few others, if you say "hey, Geena Davis is in it", I'll watch it.  

Davis is less in the spotlight these days - the last thing I saw her in was GLOW, where she crushed it as a casino manager and former showgirl.  But she's not just doing the acting and producing thing (she's a very successful TV and film producer).  She founded the Geena Davis Institute.  

I think she's the right person to have started such an org, and their work is important, bringing research and spotlights to issues of "equitable representation in media" (from their website).  

Here's to Geena Davis - trailblazing and playing my favorite ballplayer in a movie.

Also, she once surprised Stuart at work.

Noir Thriller Watch: Diabolique (1955)

Watched:  01/19/2026

Format:  Noir Alley on TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Henri-Georges Clouzot

Diabolique (1955) hangs heavy over so much of cinema that, like many other films I've both finally watched - or still haven't seen (hello, Bicycle Thieves) - the very weight of it made it seem like homework instead of watching something for the sake of watching a movie.  

It also makes these movies difficult to write about.  I don't guess I'm ever breaking new ground, but when it comes to something with the gravity of this film, what's the point of writing about it, really?

But even I thought it was ridiculous I'd never seen Diabolique.  Spousal murder movies are part-and-parcel for noir, from probably before Double Indemnity.    

Anyway - TCM's Noir Alley programmed the movie, and what better way to frame the movie than with Eddie Muller's brand of bar room rather than classroom?  

The film is both familiar - it's been ripped off endlessly in the ensuing 71 years - and yet it remains unique and surprising in other ways.  A post-WWII France, still sorting itself,makes for an interesting locale.  The economic situation is still rough, and the occupation has left its shadow and scars.  It's also made in France and therefore the Hayes Code isn't so much a factor.  But I'd really point to the characters and performances.  Grade A stuff riding a Grade A script..

At a boys' boarding school - the principal is carrying on with a teacher with the full knowledge of his wife, a timid woman with a heart condition.  However, the principal abuses the teacher, and somehow - the wife and the mistress have fallen into a conspiratorial friendship.  Even as we meet them, they're planning how to kill the principal and make it look like an accident.

Vera Clouzot - wife of the writer/ director - plays the wife of the principal.  She is, frankly, stunning in a complex, conflicted role, asked to play so many things, and she pulls it all off brilliantly.  It's simply one of those roles that will never play as outdated and because of the legacy of the film, will keep Clouzot in the public mind despite having only three film roles to her resume (she passed 5 years later).

I don't know what to say - yeah, the movie met expectations.  Windy, twisty, unrelentingly tense...  and, of course, with an ending good enough that they ask the audience not to share the end with anyone right there at the film's conclusion - something I'm respecting here in 2026, and so I'm not discussing the film too much more.  

Anyway - that one is now checked off. 

Clouseau Watch: The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)

Watched:  01/19/2026

Format:  BluRay Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Blake Edwards

We've been having a hard time synching up of late, so Simon returned to Signal Watch HQ at 9:15 AM with this movie in hand.  

I am happy to say, I very much enjoyed The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), another installment in the Inspector Clouseau series of films starring Peter Sellers and directed by Blake Edwards.  

Taking off from the last film, it runs with the Herbert Lom character, former Chief Inspector Dreyfus, escaping an insane asylum and threatening the world unless they hand over or kill Inspector Clouseau.  In a way, this is the plot of Man of Steel, by the way.  

Recurring jokes recur - like Clouseau in terrible disguises, Kato attacking Clouseau...  but much like a Looney Tunes episode, it's all very welcome.  And the vibe is somewhere between Looney Tunes, Bond and prior Pink Panther films.  

Omar Sharif makes a bonus appearance, we see a *very* early Deep Roy appearance, and Lesley-Anne Down makes a convincing argument for herself.

All in all, recommended.  The jokes hold up, and even scenes that could be read as homophobic kind of aren't.  

Anyway, I'll keep it short because I hate explaining jokes, and the whole movie is a joke machine.  

Happy Birthday to Elizabeth "Bitsie" Tulloch

Happy b-day to Bitsie Tulloch, the actor who brought Lois Lane to life on the recent TV show, Superman & Lois.  If you haven't seen it - fix that now.

Tulloch brought exactly the vibe I was looking for in Lois Lane on a show I admit I was deeply skeptical of when it went into production.  But I happily watched all four seasons, and would have continued had WB not hard-rebooted their entire slate the past year.

Tulloch has had plenty of roles, including the lead on the entire run of NBC's show Grimm, but I'm always reminded - she's multi-lingual and a Harvard graduate.  No dummy, this Lois.  

Not sure what her next roles will be, but we'll certainly be paying attention.

Happy Birthday, Dolly Parton

Happy Birthday to singer, song-writer, performer, actor, philanthropist, movie producer, theme park mogul, and all-around American Icon, Dolly Parton.  Today, she turns 80.  

Here's her latest - a Dolly classic, but now with some friends aboard.  This version was released over this weekend, I believe:

"Up All Night" with Rhonda Shear is Back!

,

Back during some crucial years of my late high school and college years, I basically couldn't sleep.  Long after my folks had gone to bed on the weekend, I'd be up... all night.  And in those days, even cable channels went off the air or rolled over to infomercials. 

But the USA network, a sort of junk drawer of basic cable, knew some of us insomniacs were up for nonsense before we finally gave up and went to bed.  And every weekend, they gave us two or three movies on Fridays and Saturdays, with interstitials featuring pals to take us into the wee hours.  

a true symbol of America's golden age

JLC Regret Watch: Virus (1999)

Watched:  01/16/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director  John Bruno

A while back, I read that Signal Watch fave Jamie Lee Curtis has at least one movie she made which she'll publicly drag.  Which made me curious.  And that movie was Virus (1999), a sci-fi schlock-fest. 

Having just sat through the hour and forty minutes of Virus, I am in agreement with JLC.  This movie is very, very not good.  

It's an alien-invasion film (on a boat!) where it feels like the movie is just abusing your willing suspension of disbelief while delivering scenes and sequences from other movies you've seen before and is daring you to keep watching.

Our plot:  a wave of candy-colored cosmic energy passes through the Mir Space Station, which, in turn, shoots a beam of candy-colored energy into a Russian science vessel.  The beam blasts energy around the ship while the captain is alarmed it's accessing the mainframe (boy we were worried about mainframes still in 1999) and we cut to a standard, post-Abyss rag-tag working crew of a tug boat in a hurricane.

Noir Watch: Decoy (1946)

Watched:  01/15/2026

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jack Bernhard

What an odd film.

Devoid of narrative economy, the movie starts with a guy staggering his way to the highway, and then hitches a ride from the countryside to San Francisco.  He then takes the lift up to someone's apartment, and shoots them.  It's a dame!  

A cop - an instantly recognizable Sheldon Leonard - who played Nick the bartender in It's a Wonderful Life, here playing a cop named Joe Portugal* - shows up too late.  And the woman shot tells her tale.  But only after she gets to hold the unopened MacGuffin box.

The woman is our femme fatale, Margot, played by Jean Gillie in her penultimate performance before succumbing to pneumonia in 1949 in her early 30's.   Margot's been working a grift on a mobster who knocked over an armored truck, but for his trouble is on death row - and no one knows where the money is.  She's cheating on him with another gangster, Jim, with whom she concocts a plan to get the dough.  

They'll let the guy get executed by cyanide gas, but then steal the body and revive him with Methylene Blue,** a very real medication that can, in real life, combat cyanide, but, alas, in real life, does not restore life function to a corpse.  But in this movie, it sure does.

To do this, Margot seduces the doctor who does the autopsies on executed crooks.  I guess she's really good at *something*, because in a short time she convinces the doctor (Herbert Rudley) to join in on the operation.  If they can get that money, then she'll be happy!, she says.

Anyway, things take... a while... to get to the point.     

The one thing this movie has... well, it also has a knock-out nurse (Marjorie Woodworth) working for the doctor who seems like she's in a completely parallel story that isn't being filmed... So the OTHER thing this movie has is British-born lead actress Jean Gillie, who is really pretty terrific, gorgeous, and as solid a femme fatale as you're likely to find.  The character as written is why this movie exists - not that all the characters aren't a *little* bit bonkers, but Margot is a stunning psycho, using her charms to manipulate three men at a time, sometimes two in the same room.   

The weirdest thing is that the movie is called "Decoy", and at the beginning of the movie they start at the end, seeing Margot shot, the doctor clearly dying and you see an unopened money box.  And , because the movie is called "Decoy", one might spend 80+ minutes sitting there going "well, clearly that money box is a decoy".  

Like, I have zero idea why this starts at the end and tells itself in flashback.  It does nothing to help the story as we can see what will become of everyone before the story starts.  And it's not a good enough movie to make you say "gee, what was that?  Maybe there's twists and turns!"  It just plods toward that ending we saw at the beginning.

Anyway, it's certainly not awful, and from a "this is bonkers" perspective - bringing people back from the dead, Margot's scheming, etc.. - it's interesting.  But the pacing can feel deadly in the first thirty minutes or so, and it telegraphs the ending in the title.  So.

*truly, it can be said he is Portugal, The Man 

**Methylene Blue is the name of my new shoegaze band

Wise Watch: The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

Watched:  01/14/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gunther von Fritsch / Robert Wise

We're continuing on with movies directed by Robert Wise - our gameplan for 2026.   

In his first outing directing, Wise did some pick-ups for The Magnificent Ambersons while Orson Welles was out of the country.  For his second directorial effort, Wise was *again* tapped in after the first director wasn't around.  Gunther von Fritsch was let go from The Curse of the Cat People (1944) for going over time and over budget at the notoriously tight-fisted RKO.  

I don't know what work belongs to Wise and which to von Fritsch here, so we'll just talk in generalities.

Re: the actual movie - as Jamie said after the movie wrapped "that was a wholly unnecessary sequel", which is absolutely true.  I'd argue The Leopard Man is more of a spiritual sequel to Cat People than this movie - but it *does* feature our heroes from the first movie, and Irena (Simone Simon) in ghostly form.

Avengers Doomsday and the All New Return of Hatin' on Superheroes

 

What a time it's been for Marvel of late.  

I think people forget about the crazy early years of Marvel when they were essentially an indie studio who leveraged studios for distribution.  Marvel was acquired by Disney in 2009, AFTER the release of the first two films.  Superhero films taking off was not a foregone conclusion, it was a thing that made sense as FX could now kind of do anything, and the generation of 1980's comics readers made their way into positions of influence where they could roll back the anti-comics hysteria of the 1950's and 1960's and show what comics had been up to since Katy Keene was a big seller.

So credit where it's due, no one forced superheroes on the public, the public was ready for them.

And, look, we all know something got off-base with Marvel after Endgame.  But many things have changed both at Marvel and in the world.

Recently I was rewatching part of The Marvels on cable - and I can see why it didn't take.  *I* liked the movie, but it required homework.  One had to watch and recall Ms. Marvel, know a side character from WandaVision, and be all in on Captain Marvel (which I was or am).  And as a stand-alone movie it never felt entirely like they'd worked out the actual stakes of the movie, the personality of the villain.  Instead, they focused on the character interaction and that story, which was a worthy story, certainly.  But there was so much going on between Skrulls, singing water planets, Hala melting down, Ms. Marvel's family, Nick Fury in space, etc...

Extrapolate that across the line, and it's maybe just too much and not enough at the same time.