movies Archives - Page 2 of 119 - Ramblin' with Roger

Collections

FantaCo?

Recently, Chuck Miller wrote: “I’m sure you have unique collections of objects in your own personal life.

“I’d like to hear what those are. That’s why I have a comments section.

“Let me know what your collections include and why those objects bring you joy.”

As I contemplate the question, I wonder what constitutes a “collection.” And of course, I’ll post it here, because, you know, I need content.

In rough chronological order:

Stamps – my great-aunt Deana gave me a book of stamps from around the world, which I still have. For a time at FantaCo in the 1980s, I’d tear off the interesting stamps we received. But I never committed to it.

Coins – back in 2009, I wrote about why I hadn’t collected the state quarters released from 1999 to 2009, because my childhood collection had been stolen. Yet eventually, I DID collect not only the state coins but also the Presidential dollars.

Still, I lost interest in the America the Beautiful coins, in part because I couldn’t feel the rhythm. The states were in the order in which they entered the Union. Presidents were, of course, by their time in office.

Not incidentally, there wasn’t a Jimmy Carter presidential coin in that series because 39 still alive. (The notion that we have a $250 bill with FOTUS on the face was absurd, and Scott Bessent’s defense of same was disingenuous.)

Baseball cards – I had a collection that was stolen from my grandmother’s house in the 1970s. I dabbled subsequently, but I had no heart in it.

Yugoslavia

Maps – my grandfather Mac had a subscription to National Geographic, and they usually contained maps, which he would give to me. This stopped shortly after I went to college, but I STILL have them. Maps are like automobiles: they go from being out of date to being antiques.

LPs – that I still have, except for the ones stolen from grandma’s place, but I haven’t added to it.

Books – is it a collection, or do I just acquire them? And what does that mean? I will note that within the collection is a shelf of hymnals, possibly not enough to be a “collection” as such.

Comic books – I definitely had a collection from 1972 to 1994, when I sold it for about $1000 because I had no real income. The comic material I still have is books of Marvel comics, Swamp Thing, and the like.

Compact discs – I make an effort to play all of them at least once a year.

Hess trucks – I’m still getting them.

Ultimately

If I have anything approaching a collection, I suppose it’s from FantaCo, the comic book/convention/mail-order/publishing place I worked at from 1980 to 1988. I have all of the publications that came out. But I also kept the newspaper clippings, T-shirts, even my little Rolodex. That thing had names of comic book distributors, writers, and artists; it practically tells a story.

Moreover, I have hundreds of photos from that time: everyone from the staff to customers to artist/writer signings to our UPS guy and merchants on our street, including World’s Records when it was at 22 Central Avenue.

The Young Rascals – Collections – Full album – 1967. Playlist. The second Rascals album and the second one I owned, after Groovin’, the third album. My favorite song on the album: Love Is A Beautiful Thing.

Movie review: The Sheep Detectives

crimessolvers

My daughter and I saw a Wednesday matinee of the film The Sheep Detectives at the Spectrum Theatre in late May. Initially, we were the only people in the theater, but eventually two groups of three joined us.

One of the television ads featured a pull quote calling the movie a cross between Babe and Knives Out. That was a useful observation, as it let me know that we would have a bunch of talking animals.

“George (Hugh Jackman) is a shepherd who reads detective novels to his beloved sheep every night, assuming they can’t possibly understand. But when a mysterious incident disrupts life on the farm, the sheep realize they must become the detectives. As they follow the clues and investigate human suspects, they prove that even sheep can be brilliant crime-solvers.”

Of course, it is easier to solve a book crime than an actual one, as sheep Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and the others (voiced by, among others, Patrick Stewart, Bryan Cranston, and Regina Hall) soon discover. And then, how do they convey the information to Officer Tim, the only cop in town?

There are a half dozen suspects: a couple of competing farmers, the shopkeeper who steals something from the letter carrier, maybe even the minister. How about that young woman new to town? Is the lawyer (Emma Thompson) on the up-and -up?

Big thumbs up

I adored this movie. It was smart and compassionate. The description one sheep made to others about the nature of God and the church was LOL funny to me. Those sheep had their own myth about death, which is no weirder than the one people you know have. The sheep have to get out of their comfort zones, physically and otherwise.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it received 95% positive reviews from critics and 96% from audiences. Recommended for someone 8 to 80. Warning: you may get a little teary-eyed.

Review: The Devil Wears Prada 2

didn’t see Michael

My wife, daughter, and I went to see the film The Devil Wears Prada 2 at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany on a Saturday afternoon in mid-May. It’s been a while since the three of us did that; I have no idea when, or what we saw.

It was fine. The initial “reunion” between Miranda (Meryl Streep) and Andy (Anne Hathaway) was on point. Andy and her frenemy Emily (Emily Blunt) were mostly entertaining. And we finally see Nigel (Stanley Tucci) come into his own.

What we see in the consolidation of media and how powerful manipulates the marketplace is definitely there. It was fun to see all of the cameos at one party. The fashion was interesting to see.

And yet, I found that the movie wasn’t always maintaining my attention, or my daughter’s; she rested her head on her mother’s shoulder for a time. I wouldn’t say the movie, at two hours, was too long.

David Nusair of Reel Film Reviews wrote that the “picture eventually segues into an almost impossibly sluggish midsection rife with needless subplots and digressions.” The Milan scenes, in particular, meandered, although it was Nigel’s shining moment.

Also, per IMDb, “Miranda hosts a large dinner directly beneath Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In reality, access to the room is strictly limited, and food, candles, and any form of smoke are prohibited to preserve the fragile artwork.” I didn’t need to be an art historian to know that was true.

Yet I did like the payoff. Rotten Tomatoes critics were 78% positive, while the fans were 84% positive.

DNS

The next day, my wife and daughter saw the biopic Michael at the same venue, with Jermaine’s son Jaafar playing his late uncle. I had seen the jukebox musical MJ at Proctors Theatre in December 2024 and didn’t feel the need to see the film, but my family liked it.

The movie’s Rotten Tomatoes scores were 39% among critics but 97% among fans. One critic wrote: “A banal, airbrushed portrait that plays like a jukebox musical and, except for a few snide winks, ignores the controversies that have long swirled around the singer.”

Movie review: Project Hail Mary

based on an Andy Weir book

My wife and I had not seen a movie at a cinema in TWELVE weeks. So we went to an Easter Monday matinee of Project Hail Mary at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany.

I should note that the Artemis II crew was still in space at the time. Did that influence my enjoyment of the film? I dunno. But I liked it a lot. And so did a lot of folks.

From Slate: “Project Hail Mary is now Amazon MGM’s highest-grossing movie ever and the highest-grossing movie of 2026 so far. And the new movie, from Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, isn’t going away anytime soon: Audiences are clearly falling for Ryan Gosling’s teacher turned astronaut and the crablike alien he makes his friend, ensuring that the movie earns not just good reviews but the kind of word of mouth that will keep it in theaters for weeks to come. (The movie received a near-perfect A grade from the audience-polling firm CinemaScore.) At a time when it can feel as if only franchise films ever rake in hundreds of millions at the box office, Project Hail Mary really might have seemed like a long shot, but it’s found a way to connect.”

Yeah. I saw trailers for the new Mandalorian film and some other franchise that day, and I thought, “Meh.”

Teacher

The story starts in a junior high classroom, with Ryland Grace’s (Ryan Gosling) students concerned about the Earth’s sun dying. He answers honestly but not without hope. Then he discovers, to his disbelief, that the powers that be believe that HE is a large part of the solution.

Despite his jousting with the project director, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), he finds himself in space, just trying to figure things out, doing sciency stuff to try to save his world.

But then he meets an unlikely companion, Rocky, “played” by James Ortiz, who was born in Albany, NY, in 1984. The interaction between Grace and Rocky, as well as the flashbacks between Grace and Stratt, propel the joy and the seriousness of the situation.

I never read the book by Andy Weir on which the movie was based. Here are the Top 10 Differences Between the Project Hail Mary Book and Film. Based on viewing a number of videos, even the science geeks, such as Hank Green, weren’t taken out of the film by a few science mistakes, most notably the centrifuge thing.

I loved the Sandra Hüller character. I’d only seen her in heavier fare, such as The Zone Of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall. She’s serious here but with a twist. Ryan Gosling is just right as the VERY reluctant hero. Lionel Boyce, as Carl, Grace’s security handler, was fun.

The movie brought me joy and hope, and that ain’t nothin’.

“The Librarians” FILM SCREENING

Big Jim and the White Boy

Purloined from the NYS Writers Institute email

“The Librarians” FILM SCREENING, 7 p.m., Friday, February 20, 2026

Page Hall – University at Albany Downtown Campus
135 Western Avenue, Albany, NY 12203 See map.

(United States, 2025, 92 minutes, color. Directed by Kim Snyder)

Here’s the official trailer.

Join us for a screening of this surprise hit documentary film, followed by a conversation and Q&A with a panel of local librarians, including:

Alicia Abdul of Albany High School
Roger Green of the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library
Amanda Lowe of the University at Albany Libraries.

The film profiles librarians across America as they face and combat book-banning— defending intellectual freedom on democracy’s frontlines amid unprecedented censorship in Texas, Florida, and beyond. The film features librarians who have been fired for refusing to remove books from the shelves, or simply for questioning the directive to do so.

The New York Times said, “From its superb opening-credits sequence paying tribute to card catalogs of yore to its sharp selection of vintage clips and intimate reportage, ‘The Librarians’ is as well-crafted as it is profoundly alarming.”

Cosponsored by the Capital District Library Council (CDLC)

FFAPL

Speakers for the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library, Tuesdays at 2 pm at the 161 Washington Avenue branch.

January 27 | Book Review | These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore. Reviewer: James Collins, PhD, Prof. emeritus, Anthropology Dept, Program in Linguistics & Cognitive Science, U. at Albany, SUNY.

February 3 | Book Review | The Trial, the 1925 German novel by Franz Kafka. Reviewer: Joshua Bovee, copy editor and local author.

February 10 | Book Review | An Afternoon with the “Slow Horses,” Mick Herron’s Spy Thriller series in Books and TV. Reviewer: John Rowen, former president, Friends of APL.

February 17 | Illustrator Talk | Marcus Kwame Anderson, Deputy Director, Underground Railroad Education Center, discusses his most recent graphic novel, written with David Walker, Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined.

February 24 | Author Talk | Avery Irons, prize-winning author, now a local but born & raised in central Illinois, discusses & reads from her new book, Belonging to the Air.

First Pres, Albany

Beacon In The Park is a two-day arts celebration at First Presbyterian Church of Albany, featuring a juried art show, a Gershwin concert, docent-led tours, and a special lecture on Tiﬀanyʼs inﬂuence in the Capital Region.

Free and ticketed events welcome all ages.