I think the best way to watch this is the way I did: While doing something else.   I was wrapping Christmas presents while it played.  It’s endlessly silly but, despite it’s awful rep, sorta fun.  Since I felt no time pressure, I didn’t bother with the remote, so its FF score might be artificially low.

FF= 0

Japanese title: Kozure Ôkami: Kowokashi udekashi tsukamatsuru)

From 1972.  I remember seeing this on Black Belt Theater in the ‘70s.  It’s the first in a fascinating, unique series.  (If a ronin assassin roaming the Japanese countryside pushing his toddler son in a baby carriage isn’t sui generis, then I don’t know what is.)  The blood effects on the DVD took me by surprise – they’d been excised from the TV version (with very good reason).  It’s clear they inspired Tarrantino in Kill Bill.  The film’s 82-minute running time is perfect.

FF= 0

Someone said they thought I’d like this little film I’d never heard of.  They were so right.  This is like digging in your garden and finding a diamond, folks.  Based on a true story, the HBO movie starts in the 1930s and ends in the ’60s, following the life of Vivien Thomas (Mos Def), a black man who helped pioneer the first cardiac surgery.

Like the film, Vivien Thomas is an undiscovered diamond – a brilliant guy with a high school education who wants to go to med school but is thwarted by the depression.  He hooks up with Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman) and over the course of a decade or more they develop the techniques that allow them to treat pulmonary stenosis.

But the film’s subtext is racism.  Not the ugly, violent sort, but the matter-of-fact racism that makes Vivien Thomas invisible.  In the film, he’s the true innovator who makes the surgical miracle possible, but receives no recognition until long after he’d helped pioneer the field of cardiac surgery.

This film won a bunch of awards.  Am I the only one who’d never heard of it?  See it.

FF= 0

Wanted to see this on the big screen but schedules didn’t mesh.  Heard bad things about it and, yes, the whole traveling-down-the-lightning-bolts-to-machines-they-left-here-a-million-years-ago-that-nobody-happened-to-trip-over-in-those-million-years setup was crap, but man . . . watch it in surroundsound with the subwoofer cranked up and it’s freaking awesome.  Yeah, you could have cropped the whole Tim Robbins sequence and not missed a beat, but I was glued.  Tom Cruise may be a major a-hole, but he did right by this film . . . although I don’t know if he’d have been half as good without the amazing Dakota Fanning to play off of.  (Jeez, that’s an awful sentence, but I’ll leave it.)

FF= 0

Amazing.  Simply amazing.  How these penguins use teamwork to survive blizzards and howling windstorms is, well, inspiring.  You’d swear they can think.

FF= 0

Wow.  Tried for weeks to see this during its theatrical release but something always got in the way.  Damn.  Wish I’d seen it on the big screen.  Again: Wow.

FF= 0

This is old school, B&W, yet very cool. A little confusing at times, but some real character development and (at least for me) an unpredictable course. The sword fights are far more realistic and less acrobatic than the flying silliness of later films.

FF= 0

Not great, but not bad. I found Depp’s Wonka a real creepy critter, more menacing than Wilder’s take. Those teeth, that vacant look…

FF= 0 (My grandson watched with me and he doesn’t go for FFing – but I doubt I’d have done much anyway, except maybe in the Oompa-Loompa musical numbers.)

Very entertaining.  Cliched storyline, sure, but who watches chop-socky films for story?  Excellent, inventive fight sequences (at least for me, since I’m unfamiliar with Thai-style fighting).  It had a few spots that seemed slow, but every time my thumb drifted FFward, something would stop it.

FF=0

Okay, I’m hooked.  Completely.  Utterly.  Missed the start of the series during the regular season, and when I finally tuned in I was, well, lost.

I was delighted to see “story by Jeffery Lieber” in the opening credits.  Jeff and I go back to the mid-1990s when Matt Costello and I were scripting the “Dark Half Interactive” project for Orion Interactive; Jeff was acting as producer.  He’s not the least bit squeamish but Matt and I managed to gross him out with our “Birthing Woman” interaction (don’t ask). The project was orphaned and became vaporware when MGM bought Orion.  He’s a talented guy and I do believe he might have learned a few things from Matt and me about telling weird tales.  If so, I’m happy to have passed them on.  He’s paid his dues.  He deserves this.  I wish him the best.

FF = a big fat ZEEEERO (and hungry for more while praying the quality holds up)