Knee-jerk review: "The End of Oak Street"

1. Suburban neighborhood time-warp bubbled to prehistoric dinosaur age.  The kind of premise so obviously genius that you can't believe it took this long for someone to develop it.
2. You really cannot go wrong with time-warp bubbles.  Bonus points that the plot don't spend a lot of time trying to understand how or why happened, only that it did.
3. We also love that the movie takes full advantage of this crazy premise, especially as our hero family starts to figure out what's going on.  This is a textbook example of the part of any movie that screenwriting guru Blake Snyder calls "fun and games."
4. We're still not 100% sold on Anne Hathaway.  Is that terrible?  She's solid no doubt, but she's also so often clearly "acting."
5. The movie is set in the 1980s and the production design is, of course, spot on.  Like Netflix's "Stranger Things," it's also an homage to genre movies of that period as a family on the brink of separation and divorce come together to grapple with a supernatural adventure.
6. In fact there's a whole John Updike-style 1970s suburban malaise vibe (dad's a drinker, mom's writing a secret novel and dreaming of running away, nerdy sister is kind of an outcast, neighbor is a jerk) bubbling under the surface adds nice gravitas.
7. We know the characters had to get out of the house and into the neighborhood for there to be second act action, but there surely is a more plausible and understandable reason than the kids chasing after a dog that got out out of the yard and then parents chasing the kids.
8. Blink and you'll miss a throwaway moment showing why Anne's character is so good with a shotgun.
9. Yes, people do get eaten.  Doesn't seem like a great way to go.
10. Weird that the neighbors don't join forces and share resources.  Instead, it's very much every house for itself.
11. We're ashamed of ourselves for saying it, but we really disliked the little brother.  What a mess.
12. The ending - and especially the tag - takes a pretty wild left turn via those time-warp bubbles.  Very memorable, but also - the more you think about what Anne did to solve the problem - very  dark.  (Also, did she really have that much time to put her plan into motion?)

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Knee-jerk rewiew: "Coyote vs. Acme"

1. Most definitely clever.
2. Is it great? More like very good.
3. The Ninth Grade Fry definitely liked it, but we're not sure if she appreciated it as much as we did.  It's definitely a love letter to Looney Tunes cartoons.  The movie is layered with all kinds of obscure gags and references that reward nerds like us.
4. Let's put it this way: if you get the joke of setting the movie in Albuquerque, then you're our people.
5. The visuals are fantastic, definitely the best blending of live-action and animation since Who Framed Roger Rabbit?  No expense has been spared.
6. Will Forte is doing his thing, and his character does fit his hangdog vibe. But we kept wondering what a more energetic and charismatic actor might have done.
7. Indeed, the big problem is the cast.  They're just so forgettable and vanilla.  Even Jon Cena is kind of lame.  Maybe with the money they spent on the visual effects they decided to go cheap on the cast?
8. We're glad they didn't try to give the Coyote a voice.  There are some cartoons where he talks.
9. Senator Elmer Fudd.  How could they not?
10. Does anyone under the age of 60 even know who Peter Lorre is?
11. Every morning before elementary school (i.e., for years and years), the Cheese Fry would spend a good 20-30 minutes with a bowl of cereal watching Three Stooges shorts and Looney Tunes cartoons.  Plus a solid sprinkling of Tom and Jerry.  We've seen them all.  Many times.  Many.
12. Even as a kid, we never liked Tweety or Granny.  Holds true today.
13. Same with Pepe Le Pew who's 100% not funny.  How many different ways can a female black cat accidentally get a white stripe? 
14. Bonus points for going with the more insane version of Daffy Duck.
15. Definitely some big themes here about corporate greed and immorality, which dovetails nicely with Warner Bros.' cold-hearted attempt to try kill this movie as a tax write-off.
16. Wile E. Coyote is kind of a jerk, isn't he?
17. If you're unfamiliar, check out Chuck Jones' rules for Roadrunner cartoons.
18. The emotional ending is a total surprise, but also totally plausible.
19. Meep meep.

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Top Nine Topics of Suburban Nextdoor Posts

These are all first world problems, people.  Overall, life is pretty good in a big city suburban bubble.

1. Complaints about kids driving golf carts*
2. Complaints about HOA fees going up (which will always include several snarky people reminding the OP that A. the HOA board is comprised of neighbors and B. is available to join during elections)
3. Complaints about teenagers driving too fast*
4. Questions about random police activity (e.g. anyone know what's going on in the Target parking lot?)
5. Questions about what's getting built at the corner of some random intersection
6. Complaints about a contracted service (e.g. sprinkler repair, lawn care, handyman)
7. Rave reviews about a local restaurant that is probably way too far from where you live to be a feasible option (better yet: the rave review is weirdly useless because it's promoting a well-known restaurant the community already knows is great)
8. Complaints about the local city council and/or mayor
9. Reports on wild animal sightings in the neighborhood

* Bonus points if the post also features a blurry smartphone photo of the offending kid/teen.

And consider this a public service announcement... if you don't have something informative and useful to contribute to a Nextdoor discussion, don't engage.  No one wants to read your lame dad jokes ("probably building another car wash! lol"), your condescending attitude to the OP's question ("the police are probably there to investigate a crime"), or your pathetic attempt to spin a harmless post into a political op-ed piece ("don't California our Texas").  Everyone hates you.

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Knee-jerk review: "The Odyssey"

1. Now this is what we call a movie.  Wow.  Big, sweeping, expensive-looking visuals.  A cast fully stocked with A-list talent having a great time chewing the scenery.  Complex, thoughtful (and Important!) themes.
2. Writer-director Christopher Nolan will not hold the audience's hand.  He's telling his story and you have to do what you can to keep up.  We missed probably 20% of the dialogue, but got the gist.
3. And good luck keeping the Greek character names straight.  Afterward, to discuss the movie with the family we all had to just rely on the actors' real names.
4. The shipwreck scene was pretty intense.
5. Jon Bernthal is intense and scary as always.
6. Nothing like a good sniveling, cowardly villain to root against.
7. So we drove 30 minutes farther than we usually go for movies just to see this in IMAX.  It was a big, tall screen.  Crisp, yes.  Great sound.  But we didn't notice a magnitude order of better quality... not in today's world of perfect digital projection.  (Remember back in the day when theaters projected actual film so you'd have scratches or blurry focus?)  Ms. Fry disagreed, however, and found the experience better than usual.  We'd be curious to see it in 70mm IMAX. 
8. But this was an older AMC theater in a mall.  Gross on many levels.  Trash cans overflowing, soda machines out.  We apparently have been very spoiled by our local Cinemark theater with plush reclining chairs with wide aisles and leg room.
9. Never heard of Zeus's Law.  Is that really a thing?
10. Multiple sequences of sailors running like hell to their boats to escape mythical monsters. 
11. To write this post, we skimmed the Wikipedia plot summary.  Holy cow is this movie complicated and confusing.  Then again, the non-linear structure works wonders peeling all of these layers back in just the right order.
12. This is the first time we really thought about the unpleasant logistics of quietly hiding inside a giant wooden horse for many many hours.
13. Twenty years is a long time for us.  Imagine that much time passing for folks back when life expectancies were much much shorter.
14. The melodramatic ending, what with all the bloody revenge and silly disguises and reuniting lovers, is very Shakespearean.  And also very satisfying.  Guess Homer and Shakespeare knew what they're doing.
15. Tom Holland gives good sad weepy eyes.
16. We heard of the Sirens and the Cyclops, of course.  But we definitely didn't see it coming when Circe showed up. 
17. Biggest lesson: don't eat lotus flowers offered by Charlize Theron.
18. Christopher Nolan is a skilled, accomplished artist.  No question he is a master filmmaker.  But he leaves us a little cold.  It's often a lot of sizzle and little heart.  We still love Batman Begins, Memento, and The Prestige best.  Interstellar is a close fourth, but it's too long.  A lot of his movies feel too long.  This is especially true of the loud, forever endings of The Dark Knight and Inception.
19. We should all take a minute and think about this movie's incredible success.  A three-hour, R-rated movie about an ancient Greek poem.  This is not a teen-centric popcorn comic book movie.  This is serious cinema and the masses are totally eating it up.  The folks in our AMC theater represented a remarkable cross-section of moviegoers of all ages and backgrounds.  Yes, word of mouth is keeping the momentum going - good movies do that - but a lot of this is driven by Christopher Nolan's name on the poster.  Spielberg and Lucas could do that at one time, but not lately.

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Six months of books, Part III

Here's a three-quel post to our January 2026 and July 2025 one-line book reports. This one covers our reading in the first half of 2026.

6:40 to Montreal, Eva Jurczyk - This Agatha Christie locked-room murder mystery set on a snowbound stranded train certainly seems like it should be a good book, but the execution (not to mention a ridiculous ending) is ultimately just too implausible.

The Future Was Now, Chris Nashawaty - This detailed account of the making of eight sci-fi/fantasy movies released in the core-memory summer of 1982 (including classics like Star Trek II and Poltergeist) is a delightful gift for Generation X sci-fi nerd movie buffs like us.

The Gone World, Tom Sweterlitsch - For the first 200 pages, this seems like the smart, complicated, epic time travel novel - with big doses of alien horror! - we all desperately need, but it never truly soars because of a tangled climax that gets too convoluted and artsy for its own good.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald - Yes, it's pretty good. And yes, to wring as much meaning and understanding out of the text as we could, we geeked out and actually bought and read the Cliff Notes version as well.

History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage - A fascinating way to examine world history using popular beverages (starting with beer and ending with Coca-Cola) to explore civilization's economic and cultural evolution.

The Man Who Saw Seconds, Alexander Boldizar - This dull book about a man who can see a few seconds into the future which leads to all kinds of trouble with government forces - and which we most definitely did not finish - proves that there's more to a good novel than a great premise.

Secret of Secrets, Dan Brown - This erudite thriller featuring The Da Vinci Code's symbologist Robert Langdon stumbling into yet another deadly conspiracy is talky and tedious, especially the final 100 pages that feels like the world's longest epilogue, but it more or less works.

She Kills, Skip Hollandsworth - A reprinting of some of the author's best true-life crime articles (some are more engrossing than others) from Texas Monthly magazine works as a literary equivalent to those sordid Netflix documentaries Mrs. Cheese Fry loves so much.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien - A haunting, somber collection of interconnected Vietnam War short stories - written by a veteran of that conflict - that we're grateful landed in our book pile after our 11th grader read it for English class.

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Starlight Rollercade Memories

We were amazed that Google image search dug up this image of the dearly departed Starlight Rollercade that resided on a stretch of Harry Hines Boulevard that was already pretty seedy in the early 1980s.  Judging by the pristine look of the building and the fins on the cars in the parking lot, this photo looks like it came from an advertisement postcard from the 1960s.  But we remember well those glass doors leading to the cashier alcove - that entrance remained wholly unchanged through the early 1980s.

The Cheese Fry didn't spend a lot of time at Starlight, which is probably what made a trip there so special.  A few birthday parties, some church youth group excursions, an end-of-sixth-grade celebration.  Going there was an event, people.  The smelly, unnaturally heavy rental skates.  The dark and dank vibe in the concourse around the edge of the rink, contrasted by the harsh fluorescents of the in-house pizza joint.  The feel of rolling off the sluggish worn-out carpet and onto the fast and shiny wooden rink floor. 

But the reason we even came up with this blog post subject was the music, played by an actual deejay (likely spinning actual records in dual turntables) from a far corner of the rink, sitting up high like a judge presiding over a courtroom of pre-teen, PG-rated fun.

To this day, we cannot hear these songs without being transported to the twinkling disco ball flashes of the Starlight Rollercade and those exhilarating moments of skating so fast that the wind whipped our hair, trying hard to look cool as we struggled desperately to not wipe out.

"Break My Stride" by Matthew Wilder (1983)
"Driving My Life Away" by Eddie Rabbit (1980)
"Electric Avenue" by Eddy Grant (1982)
"Funkytown" by Lipps, Inc. (1979)
"Magic" by Olivia Newton-John (1980)
"Queen of Hearts" by Juice Newton (1983)

There's a roller rink still in operation in a suburb not too far from here.  It's the only one know of - and for a few years there, it was a popular destination for our kids' friends' birthday parties.  Going there was fascinating because it reminded us of Starlight in so many ways, but at the same time it was also so very different.  Like a sort of funhouse mirror version of the roller rink of our youth -- too clean, too bright, too new.  And they didn't play any early-1980s music.

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Knee-jerk review: "Obsession"

1. Whoa. 
2. If you're looking for a violent horror movie that fully commits to its dark and disturbing premise, this is the one for you.
3. Don't trust gimmicky toys purchased at New Age crystal shops.  That's the lesson we learned.
4. There's really no other way for the story to end, is there?  Like we said... whoa.
5. Bear is one weak-willed, cowardly protagonist.  We liked him less and less as the movie went along.  We understand that's the whole point (he certainly grows to understand the error of his ways), but it didn't make for a fun experience.  He gets what's coming to him.
6. Best scene: the creepy customer service call.
7. Runner up: "I like watching you sleep."
8. After one particularly shocking moment that was bloody and horrifying in ways far worse than was needed to make the point, we sort of checked out.  Gleefully grisly violence isn't as appealing to us as it used to be.
9. Inde Navarrette certainly knocks it out of the park with her performance.
10. "Kiss the person to your left."
11. Everyone can appreciate how scary it is to consider telling a close friend you want to be more than friends.  The fear of rejection is vivid and real.  But Bear had a couple of perfect openings to make his move and he totally chickened out.
12. Michael Johnston gives Billy Crudup vibes.
13. Made for $750,000 and it's grossed $300 million so far.  That's serious word of mouth.  We saw it a month into its release and the theater was packed.
14. This movie is surely resonating with moviegoers because of the way it dissects the difficulties of navigating romantic relationships, putting a horror spin on secret workplace crushes and emotional manipulation and wondering if your partner loves you as much as you love them.  These are all universal worries and fears that writer-director Curry Baker expertly taps into.
15. Mix into that a layer of sexual predation themes with Nikki not exactly a consciously willing participant in any of this.
16. We don't understand why Bear didn't try to undo the wish sooner.

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"Ted Lasso" Characters, Ranked

The Cheese Fry is extremely late to the "Ted Lasso" party.  Only recently did we finally finish the third season.  No big deal, right?  It's only been about three years since that final episode first aired on Apple TV.   But season four is coming this summer - we'll watch that one a little sooner.

"Ted Lasso" is a national treasure.  Put simply, it's one of the best television shows, full stop.  You just don't see this kind of high quality sustained for that many seasons.  We haven't watched everything that's out there, but the only other show we've watched in its entirety that was this good for that long, so perfectly cast and written and directed, was FX's "The Americans." 

Beyond just admiring the show's elite level of execution, it's the upbeat, feel good vibe of "Ted Lasso."   This is a show with heart.  These characters are good, decent people working through everyday challenges.  Just think about how so rare that is in a television landscape chock full of cynical themes (criminals run amok, housewives run amok), missed opportunities (so many shows start strong only to fizzle), repetitive premises (we love post-apocalyptic stories, but it's enough already) and tiresome formats (reality TV, for the most part, is a cultural blight that does no one any good).  

There's echoes of NBC's "This Is Us" in the way "Ted Lasso" manipulates your emotions and skillfully surfs sad and happy moments alike, but "This Is Us" was deadly serious and self-important whereas "Ted Lasso" is chipper and frothy.  The best comparison we can come up with is NBC's "Friday Night Lights," a similar show where everyone was so dang likable and interesting and fully realized that the plots were almost beside the point.  You just wanted to hang out in that world for an hour.   Even better, "Ted Lasso" is in so many ways an old-fashioned workplace comedy like "The Office." "Friday Night Lights" never made us laugh out loud.  With "Ted Lasso" there's always a gag or a joke, but it's not following a cheesy, laugh track sitcom set up/punchline structure.  The jokes and humor here flow naturally from these screwball characters.  Nothing ever feels phony.  It's a polished gem of a show.

If you haven't seen it, give it a shot.  Full disclosure: this is one extremely profane show that loves the F-bomb.

And now, we present the main characters ranked in order, starting with the most layered, complicated, and funny one at the very top.

1. Roy Kent, obviously
2. Rebecca Welton
3. Jamie Tartt
3. Coach Beard
4. Leslie Higgins
5. Ted Lasso, how crazy is it that the supposed main character barely cracks the top five; that's how stacked this show is
6. Keeley Jones
7. Nate Shelley
8. Trent Crimm of The Independent
9. Sam Obisanya
10. Dani Rojas
11. Isaac McAdoo
12. Zava
13. Sassy Collins
14. Colin Hughes
15. Dr. Sharon Fieldstone
16. Rupert Mannion

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Knee-jerk review: "Backrooms"

1. There's some old-fashioned jump scares, yes.  But mostly this thing is powered by a sense of growing dread and surreal weirdness.
2. Mark Duplass alert.
3. There are certainly familiar horror movie elements, like the fear of being stalked by some unseen bad guy -- there's also a fun but kind of stale "Stranger Things"-style twist at the end -- but for the most part this felt wholly original and inventive.  Some really crazy "what in the world am I watching?" moments.
4. Renate Reinsve is a little stiff.
5. Opening sequence is dynamite.
6. The movie's set in 1990, but the set design is 100% late 1980s and chock full of ugly decor ripped right out of our teenaged memories.
7. So who did install those creepy off-kilter breakers switches?
8. What helps makes the movie so memorable is that so much of it's ambiguous.  While we get the overall gist of what's happening, there's a whole host of strange, smaller details that just aren't fully spelled out.  You really have to read between the lines to piece everything together.  The family Cheese Fry have had many "did you notice..?" discussions sharing pet theories about What It All Means.
9. There's no way we'd be able to find our way back out of that maze.
10. We went into this with only the most basic understanding of the "backrooms" premise, which is probably the way to do it.  We, of course, conducted extensive, obligatory internet sleuthing after the fact to learn more.  Some of what we saw in the movie comes right from the internet series.
11. It's true: the buzz of harsh fluorescents can be pretty oppressive.
12. Bonus points to the Little Fry for figuring out what that little radio was broadcasting.
13. So is Clark a good person or not?  Discuss.
14. Palm sweating moment: the stairs up to the ceiling.  You'll know it when you see it.
15. "It's like describing a dog to someone who's never seen a dog."

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Knee-jerk review: "The Mandalorian and Grogu"

1. No, it's not terrible, but it's definitely disappointing.
2. The movie probably spends 20 minutes of its total runtime on our heroes fighting CGI monsters.  That gets really tedious.
3. You can't tell us that this movie's development didn't start from a stack of 40-minute TV scripts.  An episodic "here, then there" is structure okay for a quest story, but this all feels very stitched together.
4. The big climax should be rousing and cathartic.  We were bored.
5. Also a weird downbeat subplot detour towards the end right as the action should be ramping up.
6. We're guessing it's an intentional retro choice to make Grogo seem like a foam rubber puppet?  His hands don't move.
7. Bonus points, however, for letting Grogu actually do something other than just look cute from the sidelines and use the Force every once in a while.
8. We really didn't need to see more Hutts.  That whole species is just a little ridiculous.
9. Also a problem: no central antagonist.  Who are we rooting against?  Who's the hero fight ing against?  Instead, it's just a series of thugs and bounty hunters.  That's not ideal when you're trying to build momentum and tension.
10. The four little mechanics - also fam rubber puppets - pretty much steal the movie.
11. So Pedro Pascal was for sure on set at least for the water fight sequence.
12. Amazing how Blade Runner's neon, rainy cityscape aesthetic so totally changed the way movies visualize the future.
13. Odd to have this whole 1950s-style noir boxing melodrama storyline.  Someone actually says "The fix is in."
14. Like we said, there's way, way too many CGI alien monsters.  Less is more.
15. Big fans of the Dave Filoni animated Star Wars shows will probably like it more than us.  Like so many big-budget brand movies like this (see also: Marvel), it sometimes like it's more for the die hard nerd fans than mass audiences.  At some point, Hollywood will learn that the safer odds lie in appealing to everyone and generating good word of mouth rather than inside baseball fan service.
16. What's the point of the iconic white stormtooper armor if laser blasters can still kill them with one shot?
17. There may may be a throwaway gag that calls back to the hologram chess game in the original Star Wars movie.  If that's the case, that's really cheesy cringe.
18. We heard others complain that the movie is overall very dim.  We agree.  All of the action happening inside or at night needs the brightness knob turns way up.
19. We still very much love the first season of "The Mandalorian" and the way it leaned so hard into Star Wars' Western origins.  Great stuff.

Updated Star Wars movie ratings
1. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
2. Rogue One (2016)
3. Star Wars (1977)
4. Return the Jedi (1983)
5. The Phantom Menace (1999)
6. Solo (2018)
7. The Force Awakens (2015)
8. Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)
9. Revenge of the Sith (2005)
10. The Last Jedi (2017)
11. Attack of the Clones (2002)
12. The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

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Knee-jerk review: "Project Hail Mary"

1. It's really, really good.  A sure-fire audience pleaser with lots of humor and suspense and sci-fi spacewalk action.
2. But is it a cinematic masterpiece?  Eh.  Some fans may be overstating things just a little.
3. On the other hand, some of the moviegoers criticizing the movie come across as weirdly bitter and sullen nitpickers.
4. The music is pleasantly quirky at times, lending a goofy charm to a fairly serious situation.
5. We knew we knew Carl from somewhere.  Wasn't until later we realized he's the pastry chef on "The Bear."
6. Ryan Gosling really has it, doesn't he?
7. Honestly, it's probably hard for us to be completely objective since we read the book a couple of years ago.  It was pretty amazing.  The story has more than one pretty great plot twists.  So for us, watching the movie in a way was a lot of waiting for the next narrative moment from the book to happen.  (What must it have been like for Ms. Cheese Fry to experience all of that for the first time?  For the record, she loved the movie.)
8. Rocky is great, of course, as you may have heard.
9. It's probably a little cringey for the savior of the world to be a rumpled middle school science teacher with a wiseass personality, but that's part of what makes the movie great.  A nobody without faith in himself who rises to the occasion.
10. Any good writer just wants to put their characters in impossible situation where there is no good choice.
11. The flashback structure is cliche, but cliches are cliches because they work.
12. Incredible that they kept the ending.
13. Everyone's surely familiar with 2015's The Martian (which kind of is a masterpiece), another adaptation of a science-heavy Andy Weir novel.  Weir also wrote a sci-fi suspense thriller set on a moon base called Artemis which is really good.

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Doctors from "The Pitt" Ranked in Order of Who We'd Prefer as Our Doctor

If you haven't already heard, HBO's "The Pitt" is peak television, a fantastic 2020s update of NBC's late, great "ER" but with more gore and an appropriate workplace sprinkling of four-letter words.  This is the sort of perfectly polished show that's clicking on all cylinders - the writing, the directing, the acting, the production design.  It's like alchemy the way everything comes together.

Our question: if you ended up in the emergency room, which doctor from "The Pitt" would you most like to see whip open that curtain with a laptop in hand?

1. Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif) - The perfect mix of sincere empathy and seasoned "seen it all"
2. Dr. Michael Robinavich (Noah Wyle) - Always grumpy, but the guy cannot be stumped; he's the big boss for a reason
3. Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) - Full disclosure: Cheese Fry crush bias
4. Dr. Jack Abbott (Shawn Hatosy) - Medical rock star; bro spends his free time riding along with the SWAT team; additional points for being a grizzled war veteran
5. Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) - Yes, she came in season two hot and heavy, ruffling feathers with her patient passports and AI nonsense, but admit it: she's way underrated
6. Dr. Melissa King (Taylor Dearden) - Quirky, yes, but pretty sharp; she seems detail-oriented to a fault, which seems important in an ER
7. Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball) - Solid, but falls in our rankings here due to the whole recovering addict stuff
8. Dr. Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) - Close second to Dr. McKay when it comes to caring and bedside manner, but he's still pretty green; he's going to make some big misses
9. Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) - Horrible attitude, chip on her shoulder, hard pass

Honorable mention goes to bad-ass charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), who's probably the most competent, unflappable person in the whole day ER shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.

Not ranked, for obvious reasons: med students Victoria Javadi and James Ogilvie.  They're a mess.

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12 Observations from a 14-Year-Old's Club Soccer Game

1. Portable camp chairs are everything.  Some city soccer fields provide aluminum bleachers, but it's never guaranteed.  You can go with the basic Walmart model with four legs and two arms - the cup holders will cost more - or upgrade to the high-end "look at me!" models with pneumatic piston rockers and/or built-in adjustable shade awnings.
2. There's always the one parent who's way too aggressive with the cheering, whether it's arguing with the ref ("Call it both ways!"), criticizing his kid's play ("Come on, move to the ball!"), or demanding cut-throat intensity even if your team is blowing out the opponent ("Keep the pressure up!").
3. You really cannot tell how good a team will be just by looking at them warm up.  Scrawny kids who look like pushovers can be crazy fast and agile, tall girls that look formidable can be clueless on offense.
4. Don't ask us to explain the offsides rule.
5. Soccer weather can be extreme.  We've watched just as many games on freezing cold mornings wrapped in multiple layers as we have on broiling hot summer afternoons with our chairs strategically positioned in the slender shadow of a field light pole.
6. Right or wrong, if a parent can speak Spanish we will assume they know way more about soccer than we do.
7. Thankfully, youth soccer doesn't entertain that ridiculous "extra minutes" nonsense.
8. Good luck parking on tournament days.  If it's not mud fields, it's mud fields with gravel.  The trick is to show up during the "shift change" when the earlier block of games is ending thereby allowing you to stalk the folks shuffling out to their cars carrying armfuls of camp chairs or dragging those game-day wagons.
9. Surprisingly, many of these giant soccer complexes just didn't have enough money in their budgets to create signage.  And so you're creeping along in your car squinting through binoculars like GI Joe on a secret mission trying to read the tiny, faded 8-1/2 x 11 sized metal signs that are cable-tied to the goals facing the wrong direction.  "Is that a 3 or a 4?" "If that's a 6, where the hell is 7?"
10. Parents, stick to your side of the field.  Look for your kids' bench and place your chairs opposite that bench.  And leave a nice 10-yard buffer zone at midfield.  It's not that hard.  We don't want to hear your cheering for your kids or complaining about ours.
11. It's always a weird "Twilight Zone" moment when you realize there's a player on the other team with the same name as your kid.
12. Inevitably, you will believe with absolutely certainty that the refs are making more calls against you than the other team.  Guess what?  The parents on the other side feel exactly the same.

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Knee-jerk review: "Send Help"

1. Director Sam Raimi is a filmmaker maestro, playing the audience's emotions like an instrument.
2. We were surprised to realize Dylan O'Brien has pretty good actor chops. 
3. This is a wild ride chock full of plot twists... and copious amounts of body fluids from both man and animal.
4. Half our fun was looking to see the frequent looks of abject repulsion and horror on the 13-year-old Fry's face.
5. Yes, there will be eye gouging.
6. The set up of Rachel McAdams' (swoon!) mousy and cluelessly awkward cubicle worker is perhaps a bit over the top, but we get it.  She's the heroine of the movie, yet that fact is totally undercut by the fact that we've all worked with weirdos like this.  It's not fun.
7. This is a tight script, but also one that wholly relies on the contrivance that a hardcore fan of the show "Survivor" (with bookshelves full of survivor texts) winds up stranded on an island with the skills needed to survive.  But was it Hitchcock who said audiences will buy one - and only one - dramatic coincidence?
8. It's a good point: none of your coworkers want to smell whatever it is you're eating for lunch.
9. "No help is coming."
10. Now that's what we call a heel turn.  Totally understandable based on what we know about the character, but still 100% monstrous.
11. "Planning and strategy" isn't the same thing as "accounting."
12. What's your go-to karaoke song?
13. For a second there, we thought she was actually, really going to do it.  When you see the movie, you'll know what we're talking about.
14. Bonus points for the old school, grainy 20th Century (now Studios, not Fox) logo and fanfare.
15. Is it a thriller?  Is it a black comedy?  Yes.

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Six months of books, Part II

Consider this a sequel post to last summer's rundown.  Below are one-line reviews of books we read in the back half of 2025 (plus the first few weeks of 2026 - a couple of Christmas presents are in the mix).

Alright, Alright, Alright, Melissa Maerz - A gloriously exhaustive oral history of the making of one of the greatest coming-of-age movies of all time (and easily a top five movie for the Cheese Fry), Dazed and Confused.

The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt - Essential reading for any parent, curating a multitude of studies and cultural trends to create a focused, compelling argument about the urgent, addictive dangers of smartphones and social media on developing brains.

Dead Girls Can't Tell Secrets, Chelsea Ichaso - A convoluted mess of a story that relies on irritating turns involving our high school student heroine again and again identifying the wrong culprit in her quest to find out who - wait for it - pushed her sister off a cliff. 

Fire in the Hole, Elmore Leonoard - One of the Cheese Fry's favorite authors, this is a collection of Leonard's short stories, each one a hard-boiled gem of quirky characters, clever plot twists, and pitch-perfect dialogue.  

A Flicker in the Dark, Stacey Willingham - A crazy Southern-fried Gothic family drama (girl's dad long ago confessed to killing teen girls but now that she's adult more teen girls are going missing, so What Exactly Is Going On?) is just soap-opera-loony enough to totally work.

Grunt, Mary Roach - Roach is a national treasure, whipping up amusing journalistic explorations in specific niche topics like - in this case - the intersection of science and soldiers (see also Stiff and Packing for Mars).

Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions, Ed Zwick - Perhaps not at the level of William Goldman's seminal Adventures in the Screen Trade, this show business memoir from one of Hollywood's more successful filmmakers (and TV showrunner) offers juicy behind-the-scenes angst and drama alongside practical advice for making TV shows and movies.

Horror Movie, Paul Tremblay - Long on the Cheese Fry's reading wish list, this book was ultimately a big disappointment, a bizarrely complicated and unpleasant meta story about the rebooting of an infamous underground horror movie and the ways the line between fiction and reality can blur.  [This one and Dead Girls Can't Tell Secrets are the only books on this list currently exiled to the "give away" box in our garage.]

Lock Every Door, Riley Sager - A sharp, entertaining thriller about a down-on-her-luck woman agreeing to a too-good-to-be-true job housesitting a posh Central Avenue high-rise condo only to realize too late that there are creepy, possibly deadly shenanigans afoot among her wealthy neighbors.

Running with the Devil, Noel Monk - A fascinating glimpse into the rise of rock band Van Halen, as told by their tour manager, chronicling not just the band's extreme interpersonal dysfunction, but also the staggering amount of substance abuse and sexual conquests they pursued on the road in the late 1970s.

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Knee-jerk review: "Anaconda"

1. It can be hard to accurately judge the comic content of a movie when you're sitting in a crowded theater surrounded by people howling with laughter.  You can definitely get swept up in it.
2. But this movie certainly seems hilarious.
3. There's at least three moments of over-the-top, are-they-really-doing-that insanity.
4. The boar sequence alone is worth the price of admission.
5. Jack Black's sweaty, arched brows intensity is an acquired taste that we still haven't yet fully acquired, but it works pretty well here.
6. Paul Rudd, on the other hand, is 100% always a slam dunk.  He's fantastic.
7. This movie is the very definition of looking-glass meta, taking place in a world where the original 1997 Anaconda exists and this gaggle of frustrated filmmakers - played by recognizable stars of 2025 - decide to remake it, which leads to an unending run of inside baseball gags about the movie business and a commentary on sequels like the one we're watching.
8. At first we were going to argue that movies about people in the movie business aren't usually appealing to mass audiences, but this one at least tries to make it more about the friendship of this group of misfits and a need to chase your dream no matter what.  It'll do.
9. "Sometimes I go to Trader Joe's just to feel the air conditioning" is a fantastic living-in-L.A. joke and we are here for it.
10. Yes, we get some obligatory cameos from the original movie.  Of course we do.
11. Selton Mello - playing a deeply weird snake wrangler - steals the movie, which is hard to do when Black and Rudd (and Steve Zahn doing funny Steve Zahn things) are around.
12. Effective movies, even goofy diversions like this, have to sell in the first few minutes that the hero's life is in some significant way an unsatisfying dead end.  The adventure in the movie we're watching is what will ultimately pull the hero out of that awful life.  Anaconda spells this out explicitly with some business about Jack Black's life being "B, maybe B-plus."
13. Bonus points for a pretty decent character reversal plot twist involving stolen gold.  Remember the old adage that comedy plots still need to work without the jokes.
14. For the record, Sir Mix A Lot's comic "Baby Got Back" rap song with its infamous anaconda lyric came out in 1992, five years before the Jennifer Lopez movie.  But we have no recollection whether her Anaconda featured the song.  As you might imagine, Jack Black's Anaconda most definitely does use the song.
15. Way more funny than we expected.  This has to have really good word-of-mouth, right?

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Knee-jerk review: "Now You See Me Now You Don't"

1. Not our choice.  The Eighth Grade Fry wanted to see it.
2. Completely implausible and illogical in so many ways, but certainly also entertaining.
3. What a bizarre concept: world-famous magicians who broke up years ago have such a rabid following that (and two key plot points hinge on this fact) any hint of a possible reunion show attracts thousands of people.  It's like they're the Beatles crossed with Taylor Swift.  Only this group doesn't sing hit songs... they do magic.
4. Like superheroes, these heroes all have their own secret power.  There's the mentalist, the escape artist, and.. well, one of them can fling playing cards like weapons.  Seriously.  Let us remind you that this is a three-movie franchise now.
5. We can't recall many details of the first two movies (2013 and 2016), but this one definitely has a pleasant Ocean's Eleven con artist, let's-get-the-bad-guy vibe.
6. We would probably watch Woody Harrelson do anything.  Always an excess of charm and charisma.
7. This may be the first-ever movie police chase involving an F1 racing car.  Fun!
8. "What's the trick?"
9. Jesse Eisenberg always just sort of plays himself, doesn't he?  He's very good at it, of course.  But is it acting?
10. As silly as so much of this is, gold star for the big twists at the end.  Satisfying.

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Knee-jerk review: "Tron Ares"

1. There's a curious amount of negative buzz out there, but the movie is not bad at all.  For what it is, it gets the job done.
2. We did find it odd, however, that for a movie called Tron, almost all of the action takes place in the real world.  That makes for a novel approach (when we saw a Recognizer patrolling the skies over a real world city in the trailer, we were 100% sold), but the fun of Tron movies are the scenes on "the grid."  We were particularly disappointed when Greta Lee's kidnapping to the grid was cut so short.
3. Bonus points for retro 1982-era lightcycles.
4. Jeff Bridges... is he playing a wizened old Kevin Flynn here or the Dude from The Big Lebowski?
5. This movie looks really, really expensive.  Not just the digital effects,  but there's a lot of practical stunts and car crashes as well.
6. Gillian Anderson doing a British accent, presumably because she's playing David Warner's (for the original movie) daughter?
7. Bummer not even a Bruce Boxleitner cameo.
8. We were worried at first because the first five minutes or so is a huge information dump recapping a very convoluted background of the Tron universe, which is mostly just corporate backbiting and tedious business intrique.  But in the end, you get the gist.
9. Pundits have correctly noted it's a strange choice for Disney to bet hundreds of millions of dollars on a second sequel to a rather niche 1980s nerd property, especially given the so-so reaction to the last one (Tron Legacy - which was 15 years ago!).
10. There's some pretty cool action stuff in here, especially the extended chase in the first hour.  Top notch.
11. Jared Leto is definitely a solid character actor.  Quirky, smart... but also a little creepy.  We're not sold on him as a leading man hero.
12. Cool to see that the evil Dillinger family still likes to use the flat desktop glass computer keyboard and monitor.  Some things should never change, no matter how impractical.
13. Fantastic music by Nine Inch Nails, as you may have heard.
14. All of the business with the "particle lasers" (which can zap you to the grid or bring grid things to our world because... technology) is completely illogical, but it's consistent in its illogic so it mostly works.
15. The movie tries to be hip with some Depeche Mode and Frankenstein references, which is the right idea in a movie that's mostly way too serious and grim, but those moments are a little cringey.  
16. We're scared to go back and watch the first Tron again.  We suspect is has not aged well at all.
17. Derezzing is still way cool.
18. How many people will get the 1982 movie Sark reference at the very end?  In theory, that moment points to another Tron movie, but the box office results thus far suggest this is, as they say in Tron, "end of line."
19. Space Paranoids is still a terrible name for a video game.
20. Overall, it's totally fine, people.

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Knee-jerk review: "Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale"

1. We admit that's a pretty stuffy, arrogant title for a movie.  Let us decide how "grand" this finale is, okay?
2. If you liked the show and the last two(!) movies, you're certainly going to like this one.  A wonderful immersion in this fascinating world, like putting on an weathered, cozy coat on a blustery day.
3. What is it about Americans that makes period English stories about class and station so interesting?  That's also part of what made Game of Thrones so fun - the royals scheming concurrent with drama among the peasants. 
4. As usual, everyone makes a huge fuss over Mary (Michelle Dockery).  Good grief.  So much hand-wringing and furrowed brows about making sure she's okay and she doesn't need anything.  Between the two Crawley sisters, the real catch, of course, has always been Edith (Laura Carmichael).
5. Not much plot, really, other than more of the same as everyone worries about how the world is changing and ending their way of life.  Sort of been the background theme since the show started all the way back in 2010.  It's more like a TV show - little storylines that bump along (some funny, some serious) with only this broader thread involving a character who may be a con artist trying to worm his way into London society tying it all together.
6. Without a traditional storyline, then, the real fun comes from these characters interacting.
7. We call this production design porn - you can entertain yourself just by soaking in the layered, detailed 1930 period costumes and sets and exteriors.  Downtown London, a horse race, a carnival?  Yes, please.
8. If you step back and really look at this... franchise?  [Is this a franchise?  A long-running television show and now three movies.  That's a franchise, right?]  If you step back and really look at this franchise, it's a little awkward to realize you're rooting for A) a wealthy aristocrat family always concerned they may soon be a little less wealthy and B) a fleet of servants so fully shaped and indoctrinated by the culture that they can imagine no other worthwhile life than running around catering to the silly social whims this aristocratic family.
9. It's rare that we have an issue with casting in a Hollywood movie, but Alessandro Nivola simply isn't as charismatic and charming in his performance (not by a long shot) as the film needs him to be for the story to make sense.
10. It took us a moment to realize that - per number 8 above - the Crawleys not only have this huge mansion called Downton Abbey, but they also have this sprawling, posh house in London called Grantham House.  Seems like every house needs a name.
11. We didn't know there was a mid-credits scene until after we left the theater.
12. We wish we could speak with the polite charm and dry wit of these people.  Truly.  In fact, when the villain gets a comeuppance, the insults and threats are so totally cloaked in London niceties that we as an audience member felt wholly unsatisfied.  Did he even understand that he's been told off?

Favorite Downton Abbey characters:
* Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville is especially good in this one as the dad who's totally getting left behind by progress)
* Edith Pelham (smooth where Mary is sharp)
* Bertie Pelham (smart, clever guy but his wife Edith is totally out of his league - good for him)
* Charles Carson (the stuffiest of stuffy butlers but if you need a butler who knows his stuff, he's your guy)
* Tom Branson (you always need a guy like this who shows up from out of town and knows exactly what to do)

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Knee-jerk review: "The Long Walk"

1. Yeah, it's pretty bleak.  
2. And very gory.  The filmmakers certainly don't shy away from the violent, shocking brutality of gunfire.  Seems a little gratuitous maybe.  Then again, too many movies make gunfights unrealistically bloodless and tidy.  
3. We were in a serious Stephen King phase back in middle school and high school.  We read everything, including terrible books like The Tommyknockers, which King famously wrote while high on painkillers.  So we read The Long Walk probably in... 8th grade?  (For the record, The Shining and It remain two of the scariest books we've ever read.)
4. Mark Hamill makes a pretty good villain.  He's completely unrecognizable here.
5. The book was written in the late 1960s and is very clearly a Vietnam War allegory: young men enter a hopeless situation and die horrible deaths one by one, forging strong friendships and sharing personal secrets along the way.  The brotherhood stuff here is very powerful.  Too bad it's forged in such a terrible, grim fire.
6. Stories like this clearly inspired The Hunger Games.  Aside from the first movie, all of the Hunger Games sequels were directed by Francis Lawrence, who's also the director here.  One could argue he's making a companion movie.  While The Hunger Games had an over-the-top, exaggerated vibe - it may be set on Earth, but no one would mistake Panem for our America - The Long Walk has a drab, gritty, urgent feel to it.  This is what our world could become.  If The Hunger Games is a fairy tale, The Long Walk is a "60 Minutes" story.
7. There's really no way to end a film like this well.  Just about everyone is going to be dead before the final fade out.  But how it all plays out was particularly disappointing to us.  One character makes a choice that goes against everything he's been arguing for 90 minutes.  The Long Walk, it seems, broke him.  We get it, but we don't have to like it.
8. "Warning!"
9. Actors Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, the two main characters, are fantastic together.  There's an interesting dynamic that emerges as they debate vengenace and hate versus love and forgiveness.  It practically turns religious.
10. Some of the flashbacks involving secret police, summary judgments, and the suppression of speech feel uncomfortably timely.  This sort of cultural synergy is always fascinating to us because those scenes were surely shot at least a year ago.  The zeitgeist always finds its way into art whether we know it's happening at the time or not.
11. It is good?  Absolutely.  Is it fun?  Not especially.

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