🍿Mary Poppins (1964) is 139 minutes long! This may explain why I had never seen it beginning to end until recently. Did children actually sit in the movie theater for more than two hours back in the 1960s to watch this?

Don’t get me wrong, it is a good movie. But much too long.

Via Kottke, a mashup poster of the upcoming Oppenheimer and Barbie movies, and it looks… mostly like Barbie.

It reminded me of that saying about putting a tiny bit of something into something else and getting mostly that first thing. Snobbish of me, I know, and I am sure both will be great!

If there was my type of a long-form article, it would be the making-of any complex project. Like of The Last Unicorn (via Robin Sloan), or Back to the Future (warning: Twitter thread), or Frasier (to which I keep coming back).

And I have never even seen the first one — though I do plan to now!

“After ‘Barbie,’ Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox”:

I.P.-based filmmaking has become so commonplace that Gerwig—who made her name acting in tiny mumblecore projects—was caught off guard by complaints that she’d sold out.

I.P. being, of course, the acronym for intellectual property — amusing, since there is absolutely nothing intellectual about the properties in question. The movies have never been so colorful yet depressing as they are now.

Vulture: Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’:

“Phil [Lord] does have good ideas. He speaks creatively really well, and listening to Phil can be inspiring. But the process is not inspiring.”

Sure, if it were that easy then everyone would do it, but there are no excuses for making people around you feel tiny.

🍿 The Godfather (1972): even better than I remembered it. Somehow, the best of the late 1960s and early 1970s has aged much better than the 1980s’ top of the crop (with all due respect to Back to the Future).

🍿 The Ring (2002), held up rather well, though with more jump scares than I remembered. It’s the lack of gratuitous gore that makes it scarier than some other attempts. Gloomy Washington state standing in for gloomy Japan was an inspired choice.

🍿 Evil Dead, the 2013 version, had nothing of the qualities that made the original trilogy enjoyable. “Thank you”, CGI, for turning a campy gross-out horror comedy featuring plastic puppets squirting purple slime into yet another festival of gore.

🍿 The Hound of the Baskervilles has had many shots at the silver screen, but the 1988 version made for the tube and starring the canonical Sherlock Holmes is yet to be topped — even with Brett being visibly bloated and sluggish from the lithium he started taking the year before.

If Mad Men gave you any kind of 1960’s nostalgia, watching Boston Strangler on Hulu will be a good antidote: dour people living dour lives in dark, musty apartments. It’s no wonder that all those concrete toombs sprang up in the same decade.