The Monkey (2025)

Airline pilot Pete Shelborn (Adam Scott) walked into a pawn shop with a toy monkey.  The monkey had a drum in its lap and drumsticks in each hand.  The pawn shop owner gives it a quick look and declares it broken.  He's not interested.  Shelborn is desperate to sell.  Then the monkey strikes the drum.  Through a ridiculous Rube Goldberg series of events, the pawn shop owner is killed.  This does not surprise Shelborn in the least.  He grabs a flamethrower from among the pawn shop's inventory and screams maniacally as he roasts the toy monkey.

In the late 90s, Hal and Bill Shelborn (Christian Convery) are twins who dislike one another.  Hal is the butt of jokes at school, having a very difficult time.  One night, they go through their father's things; mom (Tatiana Maslany) had said their father left without explanation.  Among his things, they find the monkey.  They soon discover that someone dies whenever the monkey beats the drum.  Efforts to destroy the monkey fail.  After several deaths, they agree to toss the monkey into a well.

In the modern day, Hal works at a pharmacy.  He has scheduled a week off to spend with his son, Petey (Colin O'Brien).  No sooner does he arrive at his ex-wife's house to get Petey than he learns his aunt has died a horrible death.  The monkey is back!

The movie plays as a comedy-horror.  The deaths are so graphic that it jumps into comedy.  Hal finds himself splashed by buckets of blood, dodging flying limbs, and even witnessing Death riding a pale horse through town.  "Over the top" does not begin to explain some of the events.

Good popcorn fun.  Recommended.

Blowing Wild (1953)

Jeff Dawson (Gary Cooper) and Dutch Peterson (Ward Bond) are wildcatters in South America.  They have sunk all their funds into a patch of land where they hope to discover oil.  However, bandits arrive.  The bandits - led by El Gavilan (Juan Garcia) - demand money for 'protection.'  Jeff and Dutch have no money, so the bandits blow up the well and steal their only horse.  The pair hike back to town with plans of getting a job.  Hungry, Dutch attempts to steal just enough money from a random man to pay for a meal.  The man proves to be Paco (Anthony Quinn), an old friend of Jeff and Dutch.  He gladly pays for them to have dinner and arranges for rooms.  In fact, he offers them a job.

Jeff, Dutch, and Paco had been in business previously, but Jeff left suddenly and Dutch left with him.  It soon becomes apparent that Jeff left on account of Paco's wife, Marina (Barbara Stanwyck).  Her relationship with Paco is difficult, all the more so now that Jeff is back in the picture.  Clearly, she has a thing for Jeff.  If Jeff wasn't in such a financial pickle, he would hightail it immediately.  To make matters worse, Paco is also having difficulties with the banditos.

Gary Cooper plays his usual stalwart, do-right fellow despite his poverty.  Jeff Dawson proves to be a highly skilled oilman who should have been turning down job offers rather than desperate for the first one to come along.  He is a paragon of virtue whose only flaw is repeated bad luck.

Barbara Stanwyck plays the bad girl.  She has a husband who loves her and provides well, but she doesn't reciprocate.  She could tolerate him well enough when it was just the two of them, but Jeff's return has rekindled her desire to find another man.  Her efforts in that direction grow in intensity as the story unfolds.

Anthony Quinn is more talk than action.  He's constantly boasting and is often oblivious to the feelings of those around him.  He repeatedly forces himself on his wife while Jeff is in the room, he presses to give Jeff money while ignoring Jeff's pride against handouts.  Constantly with the big talk, but when it comes to saving one of his wells, it is Jeff who risks himself rather than Paco.  Was it Jeff who set Paco's operation on the path to great success before he fled from Marina?  It looks that way.

Ward Bond plays his usual sidekick character.  Dutch is amiable but lacks Jeff's rectitude.  He reads the room well and makes an excellent friend.  There are none of the rough edges that are typically a feature of his characters.  He figures prominently in the first act but is sidelined after an encounter with the banditos.

Ruth Roman plays Sal Donnelly, an American woman stranded in South America.  She initially approached Jeff with hopes he might pay her way back to the States.  When it turned out he was flat broke, she practically sneered.  However, despite that, he offered to pay her way once he came into money.  His repeated concern for her welfare sparked interest.  Plus, she looks quite good in an evening gown.  Marina is openly hostile to Sal.

The movie is not clear on what it wants to be.  There is the love triangle of Jeff-Marina-Paco.  There is another love triangle of Marina-Jeff-Sal.  Then there is the repeated bandito trouble that always leads to gun fights and explosions.  In the opening, it felt very like Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Ward Bond begging a fellow American to front him a meal.  Then, Jeff and Dutch get a job where they get stiffed on pay.  Happily, it diverges from there.

Just okay.

President Autopen

In recent days, it has been discovered that many of President Biden's signatures are identical.  Previous presidents have used an autopen.  For example, President Obama used an autopen to sign a law extension before a deadline while he was in France.  Generally, the autopen is used to sign correspondence, photographs, or other non-official documents.  Where most presidents issue only 50 or so executive orders a year, the use of an autopen would be unexpected.  Surely, the president can sign a document a week, especially an executive order that he crafted or a pardon he authorized.  Well, it turns out that President Biden couldn't be bothered.  Or maybe he wasn't even consulted.  The combination of President Biden's mental decline and that the autopen provided his signature on both executive orders and pardons is troubling.

Joe Biden was not calling the shots during his presidency.  He was a front man, a figurehead.  Much as it was eventually revealed that Joe McCarthy was right about communist infiltration of the government and President Wilson was an invalid during the last 18 months of his presidency, it will someday be exposed who was the guiding the executive branch during the last 4 years.  Until then, we can refer to that person as President Autopen.

Meet the Tiger

Simon Templar, a man who has been dubbed the saint on account of his initials (ST), arrived in the ocean-side city of Baycombe in England.  He was on the trail of a mysterious bank robber known as the Tiger.  The Saint was a gentleman adventurer, a man willing to skirt the law in order to bring the 'godless' to justice and perhaps get rich in the process.  Though Baycombe was a sleepy town with only a couple of automobiles (the story takes place in the 1920s), the Tiger and his cohorts - playfully called 'tiger cubs' by the Saint - have laid up here until the time is right to split the spoils.  The question becomes, who is in league with the Tiger and who is just an ordinary citizen.

Much of the tale involves the Saint having snarky conversations with the various suspects to see if something slips out.  Surprisingly, a good chunk of this is outsourced to the lovely and gracious Patricia Holm.  Patricia was orphaned and has lived either at schools or at her Aunt Agatha's house in Baycombe.  Every description of her aunt paints her as a man in drag, which later proves to be the case.  Yeah, that was a pretty weak part of the book.  Back to Patricia, she has such a large part in the book that she is the co-main character with Simon.

The Saint doesn't care for guns.  He is armed with a knife named Anna that is perfectly balanced for throwing.  The Saint has buckets of confidence, an unshakeable certainty in his inevitable success, and a generous portion of charm.  He also has a sidekick named Orace, a military man with a heavy accent, an imposing physique, and a limp.

Though it might have been unprecedented when published in the 1920s, the story feels very cliche.  The mystery of who was the tiger proved less difficult than hoped.  I had my suspect early and it proved to be the correct guess.  When revealed by the Saint in the climax, the Tiger was a disappointment.  What looked like it might have been clever maneuvering on his part was instead nothing but happenstance and, as it turned out, incompetence.

This Simon Templar is very different from the one played by Roger Moore on the long-running TV series.  Here, the Saint is out for a reward - the finder's fee for recovering the gold that the Tiger stole - rather than random do-gooderism.  Where Roger Moore disdained weapons in general and weekly resorted to fisticuffs, the literary Simon likes his knives.  I have no idea how Val Kilmer's Saint became a master of disguise.

The Saint is dangerously reckless throughout the book and only survives because the villains don't shoot him when they have the chance.  He pins his life on the timely arrival of allies or the intervention of fate on his behalf.  Oh, so reckless.  Sure, it dials the suspense and tension way up, but it also paints the Saint as foolhardy rather than courageous.  Just okay.  It has not aged as well as Ian Flemings Bond novels; read those instead.

The French Connection (1971)

Marseilles, France

A detective surveilles a meeting and trails one of them.  Afterward, he buys himself some bread and heads back to his apartment.  He has hardly opened the door when an assassin guns him down.

New York City

Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) takes down a drug dealer while dressed as Santa Claus.  His partner, Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider) suffered a knife-wounded during the arrest.  Rather than go home, Popeye convinced Cloudy to get a drink.  This soon turns into a stakeout of Sal Boca, a convenience store owner with a criminal record.  Popeye has a hunch that something big is coming and Sal is part of it.  However, the mastermind of the drug dealers, Alain Charnier (Fernado Rey) is quite clever himself.  He quickly spots Popeye following him and takes measures to lose him.

It is a gritty movie that spends the majority of its time in the dark underbelly of New York's drug culture.  It's cops, drug dealers, and innocent bystanders.  As the Charnier and his sidekick are French, they only speak French to each other; the Amazon version of the film has no subtitles, making their conversations a mystery.  

Gene Hackman won the Academy Award for his role as Doyle.  Doyle is a loose cannon cop with anger management issues and poor taste in hats.  To the positive, he is a workaholic with a nose for finding the bad guys.  Overall, he is not a particularly likeable person.  He's abrasive and abusive.  On the other hand, he has an endless supply of persistence.  Hackman's range as an actor was truly impressive.  He could be hard-as-nails dangerous (this movie or Unforgiven), funny and devious (Lex Luthor from the Superman series), or goofy and harmless (Young Frankenstein).  RIP

The Border

Throughout the Biden Presidency, we heard that there was nothing he could do about the border.  He needed new laws to stop the flood of immigrants across the border.  Congress must pass new laws to stem the tide.  The president's hands are tied without additional legislation.  Really?

President Trump has been back in office for just over 6 weeks and border crossings have plummeted by 85% or more.  Amazingly, Congress has passed no new laws.  Nope.  Trump is just enforcing the laws that are already on the books.  It is illegal to enter the United States without permission.  The border crisis that Biden claimed to have no power to reverse somehow turned on a dime when a new president was inaugurated.  It is exactly events like this that destroy faith in media.  For the last four years, the media uncritically echoed the Biden Administration's claims of helplessness in the face of illegal immigration.  How does one trust what the media reports now when current events demolish previous reporting?  There is a reason that some have referred to the mainstream media as Democratic stenographers.

Europe, NATO, and Ukraine

Much is being made of the recent Oval Office tiff between President Trump and President Zelensky.  Critics claim that Trump's failure to support Ukraine in its continuing battle against Russia is no different from taking Putin's side in the conflict.  Always, criticism of Ukraine is labeled as apologist behavior on behalf of Russia.  However, I want to know what is our interest in Ukraine?  What national interest are we serving?  Why can't the Europeans tackle this one?  Let's consider some numbers:

Russia is the 11th largest economy in the world with a $2 trillion GDP.  It has a population of 145 million people.

The United States is the largest economy with a $27 trillion GDP.  We have population of 343 million.

If not for nuclear warheads, Russia is a gnat compared to the USA.  But what about Europe?

The European Union consists of 27 countries with a combined GDP of $18.6 trillion and a combined population of 450 million.  Germany alone has a GDP of $4.5 trillion (more than double Russia, you will note) and a population of 84 million.  France and Italy also have larger GDPs than Russia.  Why can't the European Union deal with the Ukraine problem?  After all, it is their backyard, not ours.

Let's consider NATO.  Not including the USA, there are 31 NATO countries with a combined GDP of $24.7 trillion and a combined population of 640 million.  That is 12 times the GDP and 4 times the population of Russia.  Moreover, several of these countries are nuclear powers.

After World War II, it made sense for the United States to guarantee the defense of Europe while it rebuilt from the ruins.  The Soviets had shown a clear desire to annex territory and impose communism.  NATO was needed to defend the remnants of the West.  Today, that clearly isn't the case.  The Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago and we are pretending it is still a threat.  Either the European Union or the Non-USA members of NATO could easily defeat Russia if they put any resources into it.  The US should have spent the last 30 years weening Europe off of the USA paying for its defense.  They're all grown up now and can defend themselves.

NATO has outlived its purpose.  We should stop funding Ukraine and stop subsidizing European defense.