“I have no desire to die, and I’m not going to die.  What may easily happen is we may fail.  I can come up with 50 reasons to call it off, and fail as a company.  

I am not dying.  No one’s dying on my watch.  Period.”

                                              — Stockton Rush (2023)

And on the pedestal these…

I just really wanted to hear some more Beach Boys music, to be honest, and I knew this was on Disney so here we are.

This documentary is a little frustrating in that 85% of the film deals with the time up until the Beach Boys dropped out of Monterey in June 1967, the other 15% on how even though their sound evolved they became culturally obsolete until Endless Summer gave them a new life with a newer generation who…

Lost Horizon is, from a technical point of view, Frank Capra’s greatest achievement.  The photography is superb, making fantastic use of shadows both created and produced, and with some great effects work.  The sets are a miracle unto themselves, a sort of Art Deco meets fantastical orientalism that I at one point in my life thinking would make the perfect home decor; still not sure I wasn’t completely off the mark there!  And little things like the costume design, the…

Love & Mercy had been on my radar for a long while, but for some reason I’d never gotten around to watching it.  The ing of former Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson led me to this impromptu “in memoriam” viewing.

The film tells the story of Brian Wilson, jumping between two different timelines in the 1960s and 80s, using two different actors in the role.  The earlier timeline features Paul Dano as Wilson, and shows his musical genius reaching its apex while…