Rock Me Amadeus!

You Say It's Your Birthday!

In the Home Stretch of Rob Hanes Adventures #27!

2026 Pasadena Comic Con Report

Revisiting Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings

Capsule Reviews

Hamnet
This is a (presumably) fictionalized dramatization of William Shakespeare’s romance, marriage and relationship with his wife, Anne Hathaway, and the loss of their son, Hamnet. The film dramatizes how Shakespeare, in dealing with the family’s grief, may have partly inspired him to write “Hamlet.”

I found the film unengaging—while the film opens with Shakespeare at odds with his father about becoming a playwright, we see none of his journey to success. While this may partly be because the film is primarily focused on Hathaway, it nevertheless creates a hole in the film. Indeed, while it’s clear Shakespeare and Hathaway genuinely love each other, due to his focus on his career, in the film, Shakespeare nevertheless is an absentee father whose live in London we never see.

Marty Supreme

While I thought Marthy Supreme was a tour de force, I’m not sure I thoroughly “liked” it, but it did stay with me. The initial trailers misleadingly made it look like a feel-good underdog story—I’m glad I was disabused of that in advance, based on (non-spoilery) reviews I read in advance and someone reminding me the film was from Josh Safdie, of the Safdie Brothers.

In truth, it’s about a somewhat unlikable but laser-focused Marty Mauser (Timothy Chalomet), who’ll do whatever it takes to achieve his dream of competing in the table tennis British Open championship for personal glory and to bring American attention to the sport. And this often includes crossing moral (and legal) boundaries. The film’s saving grace is Marty occasionally showing some humanity and, at the end, once he’s achieved his goal, seemingly ready to get on with life.

One Battle After Another
I saw this film at its release, at Quentin Tarantino’s Vista Theatre in the L.A. neighborhood of Los Feliz, partly because it was one of two theaters in the country showing it in VistaVision.

While the film seems to have been roundly praised, I frankly didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed tonally all over the place and I was not sure whether it was intended to be taken seriously or not, and whether or not it’s a drama or a Roadrunner and Wylie Coyote cartoon. It made a little more sense after I learned that the film is based on a Thomas Pynchon novel which made the film’s reception even more surprising since I doubt most moviegoers aren’t familiar with the book.

Fackham Hall
Fackham Hall is a parody of British period shows of the Masterpiece Theatre variety, particularly Downton Abbey, in the same way Airplane was of disaster films. It definitely was a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” sort of a comedy. That said, while I chuckled a few times, and the name cast was generally game for anything, I thought there were more misses than hits. The best running gag for me was that J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the guests at the manor where a murder occurs (while still in the process of writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), resulting in several amusing references and shout outs to the books.

Nouvelle Vague
Directed by Richard Linklater, Nouvelle Vague is a charming French language dramatization of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking French new wave film, Breathless. Filmed in black and white, and told in a cinema verité style that mimics the original film, it takes you behind the scenes as Godard directs his film with no script and in guerrilla style, sometimes to the consternation of his actors and crew. Actress Zoey Deutsch is particularly luminous as American actress Jean Seberg.

Blue Moon
Also directed by Richard Linklater, Blue Moon was released just a few weeks after Nouvelle Vague. Set in a single night at a bar, it stars Ethan Hawke in a rare bit of character transformation as musical lyricist Lorenz Hart, as he reflects on his life and career during the opening night party of the musical Oklahoma!, written by his former colleague Richard Rodgers with his new partner, Oscar Hammerstein (a terrific Andrew Scott in an otherwise small role). Like a play, the evening unfolds as Rodgers struggles with the state of his life (obsessing over a young ingenue he has befriended played by Margaret Qualley), fearing that Rodgers and musical theater is moving on without him (as it did). While the film was a little talky at the beginning, the film hits its stride as it marches to a sad and tragic conclusion.

Remembering the 1994 Northridge Earthquake

I was reminded that yesterday, January 17, was the anniversary of the 1994 Northridge earthquake—which that year, like today, was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Though I lived “over the hill” from the epicenter in the San Fernando Valley 25 miles away, we nevertheless felt much of its force, being suddenly shaken awake at 4:30 in the morning. I vividly remember sitting up in bed as the house violently swayed back and forth, like an old 1930s cartoon. Fortunately, the rented house we were living in at the time didn’t experience any serious damage other than a partial collapse of a cinder block retaining wall in the back of the property. 

 That said, my job at the time was in the very epicenter of the earthquake in Northridge. I was asked to report into work three days later. The building where my office was in had been deemed unsafe to occupy and for the first few months we worked in an open field in what looked like a MASH unit. We eventually worked out of new temporary trailers for the next several years as the office building was retrofitted and eventually re-opened. A parking structure at the site had completely collapsed. It was fortunate that it not only occurred in the early morning hours, but also on a holiday. 

Though freeway collapses had occurred, they did not fortunately affect my commute directly—in fact, two of the freeway collapses occurred a few exits outside of my commute on both sides, one just about a mile from me. (An on-duty highway patrolman on his motorcycle lost his life in the other collapse since he did not see the missing section in time.) A year later, President Clinton visited our site to mark the recovery.

(These are all my personal photos.)