Movie Time: Palm Springs

Today's movie themed post is about that old sci-fi trope known as a time loop.

It's Movie Time! 

Today's movie themed post is about that old sci-fi trope known as a time loop.

It's Movie Time! 

Today's movie themed post is about that old sci-fi trope known as a time loop.

It's Movie Time! 

Today's movie themed post is about that old sci-fi trope known as a time....

NOW CUT THAT OUT!!!

From 2020, it's Palm Springs.

As we jump into the deets about living the same damn day over and over, there may be comparisons to the film many regard as the master class of living in a time loop, Groundhog Day. 

For a guy who likes movies and has seen a lot of them, I have a somewhat embarrassing confession to make: I've never watched Groundhog Day. 

I've seen clips and scenes and what not, enough that I understand what Groundhog Day is about and could fake my way through a conversation about it and appear knowledgeable.

But I've never actually sat down to watch the dang them from beginning to end.

It's not that I don't want to. I would really like to carve out some time to watch Groundhog Day. I think it's something I would enjoy.

I just haven't gotten around to it.

I've had a similar experience with Palm Springs.  

I've seen several clips online with Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti that have piqued by interest to want to watch this movie.

I'm big fans of both Samberg and Milioti.

One recent Saturday morning when I had more important things on my to-do list, I stumbled across this movie on Hulu and said, "Fuck it! I'm gonna finally watch this damn thing!"

So here we go!

• It's November 9th in Palm Springs.
• It's the big wedding day for Tala and Abe. 

Not so much for Nyles.  

Nyles wakes up dull and miserable and fails to consummate sex with his girlfriend Misty.

He spends the morning idly floating in the pool, drinking beer.

That evening, he wanders around Tala and Abe's wedding reception. 

The only person that seems to pique his interest is Sarah, Tala's depressed half-sister and maid of honor.

Nyles and Sarah leave the party to have sex in the nearby desert. A carnal connection cut short when a mysterious assailant shoots Nyles with arrows.  

Nyles crawls into a cave, warning Sarah not to follow him.

Worried about Nyles, Sarah does follow him into the cave when...

Sarah wakes up.

• It's November 9th in Palm Springs.
• It's the big wedding day for Tala and Abe. 

Sarah confronts Nyles about what the hell happened to her?

Nyles explains that by following him into the cave, Sarah is now trapped in the same time loop he's been caught in for a very long time.

Every day is November 9th.

No matter what happens, if you fall asleep or even die, time resets and...

It's November 9th in Palm Springs.

It's the big wedding day for Tala and Abe. 

Sarah is determined not to be trapped in this time loop.

She leaves Palm Springs to travel back to her apartment in Austin TX.  Exhausted, she falls asleep and...

It's November 9th in Palm Springs.

It's the big wedding day for Tala and Abe. 

Sarah drives her car into an oncoming semi truck.

Nyles explains they cannot die but pain is still a thing. It hurts to die. 

And it doesn't work because...

It's November 9th in Palm Springs.

It's the big wedding day for Tala and Abe. 

Hey, who is the guy with the arrows?

Nyles explains that's Roy, a guy that Nyles accidentally got stuck in the time loop. Roy periodically makes the trek back from Irvine CA to torture Nyles.  Nyles can't stay dead but again, pain is real and still a thing and no matter what Roy does to Nyles...

It's November 9th in Palm Springs.

It's the big wedding day for Tala and Abe. 

Stuck in the time loop for a long time, Nyles has become complacent and nihilistic, giving up hope of ever getting out.

For a time, Sarah aligns herself with Nyles to enjoy a life free of consequence.  Random acts of drunken vandalism.  A little grand theft auto. (No, not the game. Actually stealing cars.) Telling people what they really think.  Nyles and Sarah actually seem to be having a good time in their eternal November 9th.

When the day resets back to November 9th, Nyles wakes up with a smile, content in the knowledge he's going to spend the day with Sarah. 

After another attack by Roy to make Nyles suffer, Sarah decides it's time once and for all to break the cycle and get the hell out of this time loop.

Sarah retreats from Nyles to spend her repeating November 9th lost in books on quantum physics.  She takes online classes. She debates her professors. 

Sarah is becoming a certified genius in quantum physics.

And damned if she hasn't scienced the shit out of a way out of the time loop.

Sarah share her plan with Nyles who is frightened by the plan.

The plan involves going back into the cave and blowing themselves up with C4 explosives. 

Sarah cannot confirm if the resulting explosion will move them forward in time to November 10th.

Or it just kills them. 

But she knows it will break the time loop.

But it's not just the risk of permanent extinction that Nyles is afraid of.

Nyles is in love with Sarah and whatever this hell is that it's always November 9th is bearable with her.  He'll even cop to being happy. 

Sarah calls bullshit on this. The one woman he's stuck in a time loop with and he's in love with her? 

What happens next? 

Hey, I gotta a leave some surprises.  

Palm Springs is a really good movie and I recommend giving it a watch if you can.  Andy Samberg gives an impressive performance and I have down for almost anything Cristin Milioti is in. How does she do that thing with her eyes? It's like they inflate!

And the time loop shenanigans prompt some rather unexpectedly deep examination of philosophy and morality.

I really enjoyed this movie.   

A sentiment shared by others.  

• At the 78th Golden Globe Awards, Palm Springs earned two nominations: Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for Samberg. 
• Palm Springs won Best Comedy at the 26th Critics' Choice Awards.
• Palm Springs has a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 94%.
• Metacritic gives the film has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100.  
• Writing for IndieWire, David Ehrlich gave Palm Springs a grade B+ and praised the film for cleverly reworking the Groundhog Day formula.  
• Peter Debruge of Variety and Vince Mancini of Uproxx gave the film  positive reviews.
• IGN named Palm Springs their Best Movie of the Year 2020.

OK, I'm on the verge of overselling this movie.  

It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, OK? 

But I think Palm Springs is a very well made and extremely interesting film. 

Your Friday Video Link: It's a Peter Dinklage-a-thon!

The theme for today's edition of Your Friday Video Link is Peter Dinklage.

Why Peter Dinklage? Is it his birthday or something?

I don't know. Let me check.

<PAUSE>

No, it's not. His birthday in June 11, 1969.

Oh my God! He's not dead, is he?

I don't think so. Let me check.

<PAUSE>

Nope, Peter Dinklage is alive and well.

And inexplicably the focus of today's Your Friday Video Link.

Video Link#1: Peter reads some correspondence.... in defense of beavers! 

Video Link #2:  Peter Dinklage having some fun with his time on the TV series Game of Thrones. 

Video Link #3: Peter Dinklage has.... SPACE PANTS!!! 

That is that for this week's Your Friday Video Link.

Until next time, remember to be good to one another.

And remember that Peter Dinklage is a national treasure. 

We Might Be OK

 Regarding yesterday's post....

OH MY GOD!!! Was that depressing or what?

Is Andrea's dad gonna die?

Oh he's too stubborn for that.

He may well outlive us all.

Concerns about his cognitive decline seem to be a bit overstated.

Or my own cognitive abilities are declining.

He's making sense to me.

So one of us is off their rocker.

It could be him.

It may be me.

I'll have more in a future post.

But for now, in response to yesterday's pervading sense of doom...

I think we might be OK.

The Status Is NOT Quo

 I need to address some personal stuff.

"Routine" is the watch word here at the Fortress of Ineptitude.

Andrea and I get up Monday through Friday, making the long commute up the hallway to our respective places where we work from home.

At the end of the day, we eat dinner, watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and whatever else we have on our "to watch" list and we call it a day.

Other than not actually working at our jobs, weekends are not much different with moderately successful efforts to get things done around ye olde Fortress before collapsing into a mid afternoon nap followed by watching TV. 

Our routine might be boring but when you're as dysfunctional as we are, that routine provides an important anchor to what would otherwise be chaos.

Right now, Andrea and I are a bit gobsmacked that our routine has been significantly altered.

Last week, Andrea's father had to go to the hospital with a rather lengthy list of things that were to put it mildly a cause for concern. 

Her dad is 88 years old and for the most part is healthier than a lot of people half is age.  He has been remarkably self sufficient. And for the most part, he has all his cognitive marbles.

Until last week.  

A disturbing episode where he became lost, confused and incoherent pointed to an inescable fact that time was running out on his status quo.

A sad part of aging is no matter who well you might take care of yourself, there is a point where the human body reaches it's limits of sustaining a healthy existence.

To put it another way: entropy is a bitch.

It comes for everyone and everything.  

It has inevitably come for Andrea's dad.

Wrapped up in the routine of our existence, we did not want to see that coming. 

By the time this posts, our routine will be different, spending more time at her dad's house and less here at the Fortress of Ineptitude.  

Doing whatever it is we need to do to help her dad live his life. We want to help and we will do what we can. 

But we are not prepared for this. I for one am not prepared to deal with my own life let alone be responsible for someone else's.

Like it stays on this blog's banner, I am trapped in a world I am not designed to cope with.  

For the moment, however, my marbles are slightly better organized that my father in law's so I guess it's time to step up.

Meanwhile, Andrea's brother is working on getting their father into assisted living. 

Their dad does not want to go.

Neither did my mom when she was no longer able to live on her own. Her situation was different as she was in the throws of an ever encroaching dementia.  

My father in law is not so far gone but he's wobbly enough that he needs help and guidance, especially from those trained specifically to do that.

Andrea and I will do what we can.

Even at the cost of our routine.

We need to accept that the status is not quo. 

Tuesday TV Touchbase: Leverage, Hudson & Rex, Phineas & Ferb (Also Roku Live TV)

For this week's Touchbase, let's look in on TV shows Andrea and I are catching up on.

We're up to season 2 of Leverage and the point where Gina Bellman who plays Sophie Devereaux had to be written out for  a few episodes while she was on maternity leave in 2009. Taking her place was Jeri Ryan as Tara Cole as the team's grifter.  Tara's more ruthless and less compassionate than Sophie.

We're still plowing through season 2 of Phineas and Ferb.  We basically use P&F to cap off an evening's TV entertainment, especially if we just watched something particularly distressing. (Case in point, this week's Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was very depressing and we needed some Phineas and Ferb to decompress from that.)  

Don't have time for an entire episode of Phineas and Ferb?  Here's the whole thing in just one minute.

We're still catching up on Hudson & Rex.  The good ones before the producers fucked over John Reardon and Diesel died.

We're not necessarily watching these in order. Sometimes Charlie Hudson and Sarah Troung are a couple, sometimes their not.  To be honest, it's not always each to determine which episodes are which.  

Sarah's smiling at Charlie with delight and affection when he said something funny? Nope, not dating. Just friends.

To be honest, whatever Charlie's feelings are for Sarah in any given episode, it's clear his emotional priority is Rex.

There was an episode where Charlie is forced to team up with a French Canadian detective who chastises Charlie with "You would rather work with dogs than with people."  And Charlie just stands there sputtering because he WANTS to argue with her but he can't because damn it, she's right.  

Oh good! Sarah interrupts the moment to say she loves Charlie.... nope, she has new forensic evidence to share on their latest murder case. 

Anyway, we're still having fun with Hudson & Rex for 6 seasons and 2 episodes of season 7. 

There's a Season 8 with Rex teamed up with a different guy named Hudson? No, I refuse to acknowlege it exists. 

Season 8? Blasphemy, I say! Blasphemy! 

This past Christmas, son Dean and friend Jan got me Roku to help manage my various streaming services as well as provide even more options to watch TV.

As if I needed ways to watch even MORE television.

Here's some of what I'm watching on Roku's Live TV option.

Classic Doctor Who  is mostly Tom Baker but also Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, Davison, Colin Baker & McCoy.

There are other channels with TV dramas that are British or Britsh adjacent such as My Life Is Murder and Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries.  I recently caught up with a 1980's adaption of Hound of the Baskervilles with Tom Baker as Sherlock Holmes. 

It's a 24 hour a day party with The Graham Norton Show channel.  

The Star Trek  channel has the original series 24/7 

The Price Is Right - The Bob Barker Years is a peek into pop culture and consumer history.  Wanna see people get excited over winning a brand new Ford Pinto? Or one of those new fangled Radar Ranges? Or television sets that are 10% TV and 90% furniture? 

Watch Bob Barker ogle the models without fear of reprisal from human resources.

The Joy of Painting allows you to enjoy the calm honeyed tones of Bob Ross as he crafts beautiful landscapes from nothing save the light touch of his paint brush on a blank canvas.  

There's an entire channel dedicated to TV series from producer Dean Devlin including The Librarians, Leverage and it's sequel series Leverage: Redemption.  Since Andrea and I are only halfway through season 2 of Leverage, I have to be careful not to be spoiled on episodes I haven't watched.  

There's an ION channel with more chances to watch Hudson & Rex as well as Bones and look, more chances to watch Leverage. 

Don't want to sit through an entire episode of SNL with lame monologues, bad sketches and musical guests you never heard of? The Saturday Night Live channel is a distillation of classic sketches from across the 50 year history of SNL although most are from the past decade or so. 

And there are channels with classic sitcoms from the 1980's and '90's such as Just Shoot Me, NewsRadio and Mad About You.  

There's an entire channel for just Cheers. 

And The Dick Van Dyke Show.  

And that is that for this week's Tuesday TV Touchbase.

Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.   

Have You SEEN the Stock Market?

Usually on Monday I will reflect on whatever dumb, immortal, illegal shit Donald Trump said or did over the preceding week.

The problem I have is trying to narrow down which which dumb, immortal, illegal shit Donald Trump said or did because there is so much of it on any given day. 

It's hard to distill my thoughts to any one paticular issue when every single damn day, Donald Trump is a lying, petulant, bullying, unintelligent, sociopathic, dishonorable, treasonous, gutless, moronic, heartless, soulless, slimy, loathsome, vile, incompetent, psychotic, crooked, disgusting, reprehensible, revolting, horrible, malicious, obnoxious, hateful, small minded, despicable god damn, motherfucking piece of shit! 

But he has help.

Unlike in his first term when Li'l Donnie might have accidentally nominated people to positions of power who actually understood their jobs and had some level of competency to understand how to do them, Trump 2.0 is top heavy with syncophants who see loyalty to der Führer as their only consideration.

Does Donald Trump  want something? Well...

• Is it legal?
• Is it Constitutional?
• Is it ethetical?
• Is it humane?

Fuck all that! Donald Trump wants something! Go do that thing!

Last week, Pam Bondi as ostensibly the Attorney General, head of the alleged Department of Justice appeared before a U.S. Senate oversight committee prepared to discuss things that a DOJ should be doing and answer questions about those things.

Such as hey, what's up with those dang Epstein files.

Bondi brought a big ol' binder full of documents to show how seriously prepared she was to seriously discuss the serious business of the Department of----

Nah, I'm fucking with you! 

It was a binder full of insults.

Instead of actually answering any questions about whatever legal shit the DOJ has done, is doing or will be doing, Bondi would consult her oversized notebook of quips and zingers to attack any Democrats who dared think they had a right to ask a question or (get this temerity) dared to expect an answer.

She was also prepared with take downs of any Republicans deemed insufficiently loyal to der Führer.   

Bondi snippily snapped and snarled her way through her prepared put downs all the while refusing to answer any questions that might make Li'l Donnie feel bad.

Pam Bondi really went off the rails when she shouted over questions about the Epstein files with declarations about how well the goddam Stock Market is doing.

SIDE NOTE: The Stock Market is doing great! Mostly fueled by a big speculative bubble about A.I..  

Corporations are just giddy over the prospects of replacing those pesky annoying people with Chat Bots who don't demand annoying things like decent wages, health benefits and a work/life balance. 

A lot of economists are really worried that this bubble is about to burst and send us into a crash not unlike what hit the economy in 2008.

Who cares, the future is someone else's problem. 

As for those annoying Epstein victims and their advocates who just want shut the hell up, the past is also someone else's problem.

All that matters is RIGHT NOW everything is GREAT! 

Pam Bondi's abrupt swerve into wildly extolling the successes of the Stock Market in avoidance of actually addressing the question she was asked about the Jeffrey Epstein case is just a perfect distillation of the transactional attitudes expressed by Donald Trump and his acolytes.

Who cares about your injustice as long as my stocks are going up? 

SIDE NOTE: Trump's EPA last week rolled back years established guidelines on climate change that will make it easier for companies to pollute the air and water.  This move ignores the concensus of like 99.99% of all known science but hey, Donald Trump thinks climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese or some bullshit.  

Just like the DOJ, the EPA is prepared to ignore facts in deference to whims and selfishness of  der Führer.  

Without worrying about climate standards, cars will be cheaper so Li'l Donnie's rich friends can sell more cars and make more money.  

Well who the fuck cares if the fucking planet is on fire if I'm getting richer.

Damn it, where was I?

Oh yeah, Pam Bondi.

So Pam Bondi's meltdown to praise the Stock Market instead of addressing the crimes of Donald Trump's good buddy Jeffrey Epstein is of course an embarrassment to the DOJ and to this country.

Or it should be.

Ah who cares? My stock portfolio is going through the roof! 

Doctor Who: Absolute Maybes

 

It's been a minute since I've done a Doctor Who post.

Here's what we know:

Russel T Davies is absolutely out as show runner!

No, we do not know this but that doesn't stop people from speculating wildly online that this is a thing.

We know there is supposed to be a Christmas Special this year and last we heard, RJT was/is/will be writing it.

After that....

Who knows?

I would say that given how the Disney+ deal imploded and some of that was due to some questionable choices by RJT, I would speculate that Russell may well be on his way out. 

But ignore all that you're hearing because nobody knows nothing. 

Here's another one:  

David Tennant is absolutely returning as the Doctor! 

Again, this is just the rumor mill running amuck.

And as much as I am down for David Tennant in anything, I kind of hope this rumor remains unfounded. 

Doctor Who really needs to move forward and beyond this rutting around the moldering truffles of nostalgia including whatever Billie Piper is supposed to be.

Billie is most definitely OR most definitely NOT the Doctor!

The rumor mongerers cannot seem to wrap their heads around a consistent theory of Billie's role in the show.

My guess for what it's worth is Billie is some interim form of the Doctor owing to the unique circumstances of 15th Doctor's regeneration. Some manifestation of Bad Wolf or the Moment or some damn thing like that. 

CEO of BBC Studios Global Content Zai Bennet assured that the  BBC is committed to ensuring Doctor Who has a “long and flourishing life”.

Meaning... what exactly? 

Your guess is good as mine.

Which brings us to another rumor.

There will not be a NEW Doctor Who series until 2028.

Again, just wild speculation but it sadly makes sense.

Unless the BBC is ready to ramp up production of new episodes immediately in the wake of completing the 2026 Christmas special, it seems unlikely a Doctor Who series would be ready for 2027

The general concensus of everyone guessing on the internet is that the BBC will not make a decision on a Doctor Who series until after completion of the special or even waiting until after it airs. 

Particularly if there are pivotal decisions up in the air as to who will actually run the show or even star in it. 

Another thing that is still up in the air is the fate of The War Between the Land and the Sea outside the United Kingdom.

The UNIT based Doctor Who spin off mini-series was part of the Disney+ deal but Disney has made NO reference to when or even if the series will ever be presented on it's platform.   

Meanwhile, the series is available for sale in the U.K. on DVD/Blu-Ray.

Meanwhile, I have been catching up on classic Doctor Who on it's Roku channel and there will be a Doctor Who Is Classic post at some unspecified point in the future.

Just like the BBC, I too can be vague and uncertain about the future. 

Doctor Who has a future filled with absolute maybes.