I watched the 1986 remake of The Fly all the way through for the first time a year or so ago. I enjoyed it, but something felt off. After watching the 1958 original directed by Kurt Neumann, I realized that there was the story I was familiar with. FUN FACT: The Fly originated as a short story by George Langelaan and was first published in the June 1957 issue of Playboy.
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When I mention “the story” I was familiar with, the first thing that immediately pops in my head is one of the shorts from the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VIII, titled Fly vs. Fly. Here we get the teleporting disaster in which the scientist has the head of a fly and vice versa unlike the remake which shows Jeff Goldblum slowly body morph into a hybrid creature. The remake also adds the elements of a love story, which granted some are present in the original (there’s a happily-married couple with a son), but not to the extent of straying from the original source material.

Here are a few important dates in the history of women:
 
1960: The FDA approves the first oral contraception for sale in the US.
 
1963: The Equal Pay Act was signed into law by President Kennedy.
 
1965: The Supreme Court strikes down laws in Connecticut that restrict access to birth control for married couples.

• It's an interesting enough tale, but the emotions are so low-key that I had a hard time hooking in - Jon
• I felt like this movie suffered from some genre schizophrenia - Lane
• I wanted to see more of the neighbor from the beginning - Cooker

Of the two Jim Jarmusch films I've seen (Ghost Dog, Only Lovers Left Alive), he's been locked in my estimation as a guy who knows how get whatever 'cool' is onscreen. Therefore, I was pretty surprised he started a film in a drab post office. Starring Bill Murray in sad, blase mode, Broken Flowers was not what I was expecting, but it is still an intriguing mystery.

Murray's Don Johnston is a lonely guy who can't sustain a relationship, idly living in his gray home until he gets a letter from a former girlfriend, saying that his son has run away, likely to find his father. Don didn't know he had a son in the first place, and spurred on by his nosy neighbor (Jeffrey Wright), he narrows the possibilities down to four women. Jarmusch follows Don as he travels from place to place, seeking to find the answer to this new question more out of curiosity and boredom than any paternal instinct. Each ex, well cast by middle-aged actresses like Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, and a near-unrecognizable Tilda Swinton, offers him little information and falls on the spectrum from accommodating to hateful. The value of Don's journey becomes less about answers and more about the act of doing anything at all. He goes from a character who doesn't give a shit in general to viewing every late-teenage boy as a what-if scenario.

It's an interesting-enough tale, but the emotions are so low-key that I had a hard time hooking in. I prefer Jarmusch when he's creating uber-mensch's, beings of myth that exist beyond normal human behavior. Don Johnston, an observer through and through, is in that ballpark, but without the indulgent camera work that accentuates the superhuman traits, it's just not as enthralling as urban ninjas or Moroccan vampires. 

​C+

​Deadwood is easily my favorite TV show.  I think it captured something deeply true about the American ethos and broader humanity, and since that show wrapped, I've been especially open to modern, revisionist Westerns.  Not the cowboys and Indians type, but the morose, isolating, ultimately cynical type.  Give me an Assassination of Jesse James or a Meek's Cutoff over anything starring John Wayne in chaps.  Informed by Deadwood and the aforementioned movies, among others, the frontier becomes a place of unfulfilled promise, a dam with a shaky foundation that is fundamentally unable to hold back the forces that drove people to the frontier in the first place.  The Overnighters lands firmly in that tradition, a real life boomtown with all the upheaval that comes with it.  Pastor Reinke would find himself right at home in Deadwood with Al Swearengen and Joanie Stubbs.