As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1998’s Top Of The World!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Top of the World on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!
On this date, 115 years ago, Lon Chaney, Jr. was born in Oklahoma City. At the time, Oklahoma wasn’t even a state. His father was the actor Lon Chaney Sr.
Originally named Creighton Chaney, Lon Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps. Like many sons of famous men, he often struggled to escape his father’s shadow. While he would never be mistaken for a man of a thousand faces, Lon Chaney, Jr. did make a name for himself, first as Lenny in the Oscar-nominated 1939 film version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and then as Larry Talbot, the unfortunate man who found himself cursed to turn into the Wolf Man whenever the moon was full. Chaney spent the majority of his career appearing in horror films and, later, westerns. Not only did he play The Wolf Man but he was also one of the many actors to take a shot at playing both Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula. Later, he would appear in a series of low budget horror films that were often a far cry from his best-known films. In his later years, he was a favorite of producer/director Stanley Kramer, who cast him in both High Noon and The Defiant Ones and who once said that Chaney was one of the finest character actors in Hollywood. His deep voice and craggily face made an undeniable impression in those later films. Looking at him, you could see had lived a tough life but he had the heart of a survivor.
In today’s scene that I love, Larry Talbot learns the facts about being a werewolf. From 1941’s The Wolf Man, here is Lon Chaney, Jr in his signature role.
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to director Alexander Payne! It’s time for….
4 Shots from 4 Alexander Payne Films
Election (1999, dir by Alexander Payne, DP: James Glennon)
Sideways (2004, dir by Alexander Payne, DP: Phedon Papamichael)
The Descendants (2011, dir by Alexander Payne, DP: Phedon Papamichael)
Nebraska (2013, dir by Alexander Payne, DP: Phedon Papamichael)
Whoops! I was so tired after returning home from some much needed hot tub time that I fell asleep before I got a chance to do my full week in review! Here’s an abbreviated summary.
In previous years, after the Super Bowl, I’ve listed my favorite ads of the night. I’m not going to do that this year because, quite frankly, I don’t have enough ads to list. This year, the Super Bowl was boring. The game was boring and the ads were boring. There were barely any new movie trailers. In previous years, Leonard and I exhausted ourselves trying to keep up with and share all of the Super Bowl movie spots. This year, we could take things easy.
As for the game …. listen, I’m not a football person. Our longtime readers know that. Usually, when I’m bored with a football game, I assume it’s because I’m just not into football. But this year, the game was so slow that even my colleagues here at TSL got bored with it. While the biggest game of the year was being played in New Orleans, we largely used the game as background noise as we talked about everything from HBO’s True Detective to whether or not it was acceptable to nuke all of your enemies in Civ. Once I realized that there weren’t going to be any big commercials, I immediately started thinking about relaxing in a hot tub for an hour or two. It turned out to be a little less than an hour because it’s cold outside, folks!
Actually, now that I think about it, there was one commercial that I really liked, just because it featured a horse.
I’ve seen some speculation online that the commercials were safe and predictable this year because ad agencies are still adjusting to how to advertise in the second Trump era. That’s possible. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Super Bowl commercials that were so determinedly nonpartisan. In the past, I think the general assumption that advertisers made was that the country was full of politically active young people with a lot of spending money and, as a result, it only made sense to tailor commercials to them. Hence, we got Zachary Quinto dramatically reading the ending of 1984 for Amazon Audible and Kylie Jenner defusing tensions at a protest by giving a Pepsi to a cop. We got a commercial for a migraine medicine in which the main character was able to go to a protest because her migraine cleared up. There was even a commercial featuring a teenage girl leading an environmental rally because she had the confidence that went along with having clear skin. All the online complaining was taken as a badge of honor. “We’re making the right people mad,” as the saying goes. But, with the recent elections, it’s now kind of obvious that the supposedly leftward tilt of the country was much overestimated. It felt like the ads this year were trying to reclaim the middle, nonpartisan ground that was originally abandoned in 2017. They did so by playing everything safe. As a result, none of the commercials this year were controversial but, at the same time, none of them were particularly interesting either. It says something about how bland things were that the most talked about commercial was another one of those flaky “He Gets Us” commercials, which feel like almost a parody of the shallow understanding most people have of theology.
(Incidentally, we watched the game on Tubi. Tubi did a very good job of streaming the game, with none of the trouble that Netflix has had with its live events.)
In other words, the Super Bowl was boring this year but I did enjoy watching it with my TSL colleagues. And I love horses! And now, on with the rest of 2025!
Don’t ask me to explain why the M3Gan 2.0 Super Bowl spot was the same as the teaser that’s already been out for a few days. I’m still trying to understand why there’s been so few Super Bowl movie trailers this year. It feels like the end of an era.
How To Train Your Dragon is getting a live action remake. I loved the animated film but I’m not sure why we need a live action version. I mean, the dragons are still going to be animated, right? Anyway, here’s the Super Bowl teaser!
It’s Super Bowl Sunday, which means we’ll be getting a lot of trailers and commercials for upcoming films. I just saw a spot for Jurassic World: Rebirth. Here’s the spot!
Through the Shattered Lens