Finally ... What I watched in June

I’ve set a new record for procrastination of the recap of movies I watched in June, which you’ll realize if you look up at a calendar and realize the month is now AUGUST. At any rate, July was a busy month, with comic book work, yard work and cleaning out a flooded basement work. So, without any (more) delay, here’s what I saw a long, long time ago. I’m keeping this short and sweet – partly because I can barely remember these movies.

I’d heard great things about this R-rated X-Men film, and it pretty much lived up to my hopes and expectations. It’s amazing how Hugh Jackman, a tall, good-natured Australian, has come to almost perfectly embody comics’ resident short, cranky Canadian. He’s especially good here (and especially cranky) living in a dystopian semi-future, on the run and playing the reluctant dad in a decidedly dysfunctional family, with Professor X and Weapon X serving as he surrogate father and daughter. Nice, if strange, to see the very funny Steven Merchant playing a mutant with a tragic backstory (and, to be honest, front-story), and the final shot of the movie, when lil’ Weapon X makes a telltale adjustment to the cross on a certain grave was damn near perfect – and actually brought a lump to my throat. If, back in the very early 1980s, you had told young me that an R-rated Wolverine movie would be one of the best movies of the year when I turned 50, I wouldn’t have believed you … but I would’ve been waiting through those decades to see if maybe, somehow you were actually telling the truth.

The first time I watched this a year and a half or so ago (thanks again, TCM Underground!), I was so stunned by the sheer strange incompetence of the film that I barely noticed anything else. But this time around (and yes, I might be the only person alive who’s willingly watched “Abar the First Black Superman” twice), I was struck by something else: its surprising sincerity. True, the film is amateurishly made by any standard, with some of the least-polished performances ever (awkwardly) captured on film, but that only serves to highlight how hard the filmmakers are trying to tell their story of racism, black empowerment and frustration at the violence and despair faced by African-Americans back then (and, sadly, now). It’s not a good movie, not exactly, but there is something at its center – a real heart and desire to share a story that needs to be told, no matter how clumsily it does so. If you have any interested in cult movies, blaxploitation or cinema of the 1970s, give it a look the next time it shows up on TCM Underground. At the very least, you’ve never seen anything else quite like it.


The only thing this 2017 film has in common with “Abar The First Black Superman” is that it’s also trying to say something about what it means to be black in America. Jordan Peele’s impressive directorial debut, however, says it with style, wit and no small amount of sharp, satirical humor. This one’s been written about quite a bit recently, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets more press in a few months as Oscar predictions and Best Of lists start filling the web, so I won’t add to the stack with my own musings. (Well, not much anyway.) Plus, the film has so many surprises, both large and small, that I don’t want to risk spoiling anything. Like most horror movies, “Get Out” is more enjoyable the less you know going in. I will say that it’s refreshing to see a movie – especially a horror film – that actually rewards replaying in your head once the final credits roll. I kept spotting new connections and bits of foreshadowing that Peele cleverly embedding in the film without spelling them out. “Get Out” isn’t a complicated film, but it is a smart one, and it requires – and rewards – a level of attention from its audience.

As I’ve said before, my favorite thing about Turner Classic Movies (my favorite channel) isn’t its dedication to showing the established Hollywood classics – they're are great, but I can see them anywhere. What I really love are the forgotten films that fill its schedule during the off-hours. Films like, for instance, this 1942 B-picture, part of the “Boston Blackie” series starring Chester Morris as a reformed criminal who now (get this!) fights crime. They’re not great movies, but they are fun, offering the sort of entertainment that a mid-level hour-long TV drama delivers today. (And, at a mere 67 minutes, “Alias Boston Blackie” isn’t much longer than those TV shows.) As a bonus, this 1942 film delivers a swell dose of nostalgia, with a yuletide setting and a goofy plot about a convict escaping prison dressed as a clown who then needs Boston Blackie to prove he’s actually innocent. It’s decidedly low budget, but there’s a decent car chase and a strange running gag involving a guy who keeps losing his breath and needs to be hit. Now that’s exactly the sort of thing I tune into TCM for!