Brad reviews RETURN TO ME (2000), starring David Duchovny and Minnie Driver!

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Bradley Crain

I’m a sucker for a good romance. Every year during tax season, I like to stream romantic films while I prepare my clients’ tax returns late into the evening. They make me feel good and help my mood as I work the necessary 80 to 90 hours every week leading up to April 15th. My list of favorites includes movies like HITCH (2005) with Will Smith, NOTTING HILL (1999) with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, and YOU’VE GOT MAIL (1998) with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. I also really enjoy the period romance movies based on the novels of Jane Austen, films like Ang Lee’s SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1995) and the five-hour mini-series version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1995) starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. There’s a decent chance that if you walk into my office at the end of one of these films you might even catch me wiping a tear from my eye as the obstacles finally clear, and we’re left with two people in love embarking on their specific “happily-ever-after” together. One such movie, that I don’t hear mentioned very often, but that I personally love, is the 2000 romantic film RETURN TO ME.

RETURN TO ME opens by introducing us to two families. First, we meet Bob Rueland (David Duchovny), a successful architect, and his wife Elizabeth (Joely Richardson), a kind-hearted zoologist, who are clearly very much in love. We follow the couple as they attend a fund-raising dinner that’s been organized to help expand the zoo’s gorilla habitat, a cause that’s very dear to Elizabeth’s heart, with Bob volunteering his own time and talents to design the new facility. The evening includes many sweet words and some quality slow dancing. Next, we meet Grace Briggs (Minnie Driver), who is very sick and in need of a heart transplant in the worst possible way. Her Catholic family and her friends, which includes her loving grandpa Marty O’Reilly (Carroll O’Connor) and her best friend Megan Dayton (Bonnie Hunt), are a wonderful support system, but without the new heart, she won’t be able to live much longer. On the same night that unspeakable tragedy strikes the Rueland’s on their way home from the fundraiser, Grace and her Grandpa’s prayers are answered when they get the call that a healthy heart is now available. A year later, Bob and Grace meet by chance at Marty’s business, O’Reilly’s Italian Restaurant. Bob has been a shell of the man he once was as he’s been unable to deal with his wife’s passing, while Grace has attempted to figure out life with her new heart. There’s just something about Grace though, so Bob asks her out and, after a series of sweet dates, it seems the two may be falling in love. But when Grace accidentally discovers that the heart that Bob is falling in love with was once beating inside the chest of his deceased wife Elizabeth, Grace doesn’t know how to tell him. Feeling guilty, as well as fearful of how Bob may respond to the shocking information, Grace decides she has no choice but to tell him. Will their blossoming love survive this unexpected and tragic revelation?

I love RETURN TO ME, and the main reason is that I love the characters, and especially the world that director Bonnie Hunt creates inside the film. The love story at the center is played well by Duchovny and Driver, but the greater love of family and friends is what sets this movie apart for me. In a way, Hunt creates a world that contains the kind of friends and family that we’d all love to have in real life. She does this by spending a lot of time with the entertaining supporting characters, showing them to be kind and decent people, the kind who make our lives valuable. As an example, O’Connor’s performance as the doting grandpa to Grace is wonderful, but we also get to see the interplay between Grace, Marty and their “family” at the restaurant, played by such great character actors as Robert Loggia, Eddie Jones, William Bronder and Marianne Muellerleile. Hunt herself is excellent in the role as Grace’s best friend Megan, but the time we spend with her blue-collar husband, played perfectly by James Belushi, and their kids are some of the best and funniest of the film. Based on the time and attention to these characters, as well as the time spent at “O’Reilly’s Italian Restaurant,” Hunt has created a scenario that feels like we’re watching real family and friends, in the best possible way. I never watch this film that I don’t want to go eat a big plate of spaghetti afterwards. The relationship between Bob and his best friend Charlie (David Alan Grier) isn’t quite as successful, but it has its moments as well.

RETURN TO ME is the kind of romantic film that we don’t get to see very often these days. A snarky, cynic would probably have a field day with this film, with its outrageous set-up, its old-fashioned values, and even older-fashioned characters. But that’s what I love about this film. As an example, this is the kind of movie where characters ask each other to pray, they do it, and the only purpose of it being shown is so we know how much these people care about each other. That feels very old-fashioned for 2025, but based on my own experiences in life, it’s something I can completely identify with.

Ultimately, RETURN TO ME is not a perfect film. Clocking in at almost 2 hours, there are definitely some scenes that could have been shortened or eliminated all-together. And it may seem like a criticism that I find the central love story of the film less appealing than the love shown by the main characters’ family and friends, but it’s really not. RETURN TO ME is a movie I return to every year because, at the end of the day, it’s an entertaining film that helps me appreciate the love of a family and the possibility that sometimes love is just meant to be.

The Unnominated #19: The Terminator (dir by James Cameron)

Posted on July 30, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences claim that the Oscars honor the best of the year, we all know that there are always worthy films and performances that end up getting overlooked. Sometimes, it’s because the competition too fierce. Sometimes, it’s because the film itself was too controversial. Often, it’s just a case of a film’s quality not being fully recognized until years after its initial released. This series of reviews takes a look at the films and performances that should have been nominated but were, for whatever reason, overlooked. These are the Unnominated.

First released in 1984, The Terminator was the one of the top box office hits of the year. It’s the film that established James Cameron as a filmmaker. It’s the film that made a bona-fide star out of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s a film that was imitated a thousand times before it even got its first official sequel. It’s a film that’s still celebrated today. 41 years later, people are still saying, “I’ll be back.” Would Arnold Schwarzenegger ever have become governor of California if he hadn’t first played a killing machine? There’s a reason why his political nickname was the Governator.

And yet, The Terminator was not nominated for a single Oscar. For all of the explosions and the gunfire and the screaming, it wasn’t even nominated for Best Sound. Some of the special effects may now seem a bit hokey in this age of rampant CGI but it’s still a surprise that The Terminator was not nominated for Best Visual Effects. The breath-taking action scenes did not result in a nomination for Best Editing. Linda Hamilton was not nominated for her fantastic performance as Sarah Connor, a young woman who finds herself being pursued by a killer cyborg from the future. Arnold Schwarzenegger was not nominated for playing one of the most memorable villains of the past 40 years. Those who claim that Schwarzenegger was just playing himself are being overly glib. Anyone could have said, “I’ll be back.” It took Schwarzenegger’s delivery to make it a great line.

The lack of nominations aren’t really not a surprise, of course. The Academy has only recently started to show an openness to nominating genre films for major awards and, even now, a genre film has to be considered a “cultural event” to even get a nomination. Black Panther, Get Out, and even Mad Max: Fury Road and Dune were all nominated because it was felt that they had transcended their genre origins. The Terminator is a sci-fi action movie and it’s proud to be a sci-fi action movie. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it could be argued, transcended its genre origins but it was released in 1991 and Silence of the Lambs was destined to be the genre nominee that year.) It’s also so relentlessly paced and intelligently written and directed that it’s a film that, even after all these years, it can still leave you breathless. Nominated or not, The Terminator is a film that grabs your attention and holds it for a full 107 minutes. There’s not many films that can make that claim.

The Terminator is a film that has held up surprisingly well. (It’s certainly held up better than some of its more recent sequels.) The performances of Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger still work. It’s still terrifying to watch as The Terminator relentlessly kills everyone that he comes into contact with. (One thing that always gets me about the Terminator is that, even though he’s huge and superstrong and could probably physically rip anyone he wanted to apart, he still carries and uses a gun. This makes him seem like even more of a bully.) The Terminator is a machine and what makes him especially intimidating is that he doesn’t care if people see him coming or if they witness his crimes. He has one function and that’s all he worries about. When Michael Biehn first shows up, you can’t help but wonder why this guy, with his slight build and his somewhat nervous mannerisms, would be sent to try to stop the Terminator. Of course, by the end of the movie, you understand.

(And what an ending! The sight of those clouds, Linda Hamilton’s delivery of her final line, and the feeling that the future has already been determined, it all definitely makes an impression that has managed to survive every sequel after Judgment Day. There’s a reason why Skynet — much like “I’ll be back” — has taken on a cultural life of its own.)

There were a lot of very good films that were nominated for Oscars in 1984. The Terminator, much like Once Upon A Time In America, was not one of them but it will still never be forgotten.

Previous Entries In The Unnominated:

Retro Television Reviews: Puppetman 1.1 “Pilot”

Posted on March 14, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Puppetman, which aired on CBS in 1987. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, we have the pilot for Puppetman, a sitcom that was created by the people behind the Muppets.

Episode 1.1 “Puppetman”

(Dir by Alan Rafkin, originally aired on July 3rd, 1987)

Gary (Fred Newman) is a puppeteer who spends most of his day hiding beneath a cardboard wall while speaking in the voice of a naive dragon. Much like the guy from the Police Academy films, Gary does a lot of other sound effects as well. Who needs to pay for an SFX department when Gary can perfectly duplicate any sound that’s needed? Gary works on a PBS puppet show that is hosted by the mercurial Rita (Julie Payne). His co-puppeteers are Del (Richard Hunt) and Holly (Lisa Waltz). It would seem that he has the perfect life, though it’s hard not to notice that Gary seems to be a lot more comfortable expressing his emotions through his puppets than through face-to-face conversation.

Gary’s ex-wife calls and explains that she has an audition for a play. She asks if Gary can look after their six year-old son, Zack (Michael Patrick Carter). Gary agrees, though he worries about whether or not he’ll be as good a full-time father as he was a part-time father. At first, Zack is excited to spend time with his father but then he’s bitterly disappointed when Gary has to keep abandoning him because of the demands of his job. Gary is good at holding the show together but he’s less skilled at meeting the emotional needs of a six year-old.

Gary’s going to have to get better at it, though. When his wife calls and says that she got the part and she’s going to be on the road for the next six months, she asks Gary to take Zack. Gary agrees but first, he has to ask Zack. And what better way to ask Zack than to have a puppet do it for him?

The Puppetman pilot was co-written by Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets. Perhaps not surprisingly, the pilot is at its best when it deals with what goes on behind-the-scenes of a PBS children’s show. The stuff with Zack is rather rudimentary but the pilot actually comes to life when it deals with temperamental grown-ups and idealized puppets. When Rita decides to sing a song without giving anyone any advance warning and the puppeteers decide to upstage Rita by having one of the dragon puppets sneeze on her, it’s obvious that Henson was writing from his own personal experiences.

To be honest, this was kind of a depressing pilot. Gary is a nice guy and he’s likable and he wants to be a good father but it’s obvious that he can only express his emotions through his puppets. As a result, Zack is far more comfortable talking to the puppets than talking to his own father. Throughout the whole pilot, one gets the feeling that Gary has been so deeply wounded in the past that he’s scared to open up. Even the show’s laugh track sounds kind of sad.

Perhaps that explains why only one episode of Puppetman aired. Gary agreed to watch Zack for six months but America would not be watching either one of them.

Music Video of the Day: Girlschool by Britny Fox (1988, dir. ???)

Posted on July 19, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

Of course there’s a video by a band named Britny Fox called Girlschool that came out in 1988. It wouldn’t be the weird world it is if that didn’t happen the same year as the band Girlschool did a cover of Fox On The Run.

I thought this was going to be a short post, but there’s a fair amount of info here.

First, yes, yes they were really there. According to an interview with bassist Billy Childs, they must have used some sort of cloth because he remembers being able to see the girls in the room while they were playing their part. He doesn’t know how it worked. Although at least as recently as 2015, he still wants to know exactly how they pulled that off. I’m assuming it operated the same way as a two-way mirror. That’s as far as I can go, short of digging into physics. It’s something that you see when you’re in a brightly-lit room, and don’t see if you are in a darkly-lit room.

While I can’t explain exactly how it works, I can show you some of the seams.

The clock is flat.

During the transition you can still see the bulletin board and clock.

The band is hiding behind Bach.

This part is kind of amazing to me. The band manager at the time had the foresight to film behind the scenes during the shooting. Here is the general behind-the-scenes stuff.

Now comes two people you might recognize in this video.

The first is the lady with the headphones. That is Kim Anderson who apparently did work on numerous videos, and is still remembered to this day along with other famous women from heavy metal videos. The band manager also edited together footage that included her.

You can see a super-short interview with her below.

The second is the teacher. That is Marianne Muellerleile. You may know her from one of her current 224 acting credits. The one that comes to mind is probably the wrong Sarah Connor from The Terminator (1984). However, she’s one of those actors who if a show had some success, then she was probably in at least one episode of it. My thanks go out to Billy Childs for bringing up where she was from in that aforementioned interview. It wasn’t coming to me.

The last is a quote from I Want My MTV. It’s from Kari Wuhrer talking about a time they shot the show Remote Control in Florida:

Kari Wuhrer: We shot in Florida during the third season, and Britny Fox were on the show as contestants. It was the height of hair metal. I hit on their singer. The next thing I knew, I was getting tattooed and I was on tour with them. He was so dumb, my father called him “the house plant.” As soon as the tour ended, I never heard from him again.

There you go. It’s one of the dumbest metal videos I’ve ever seen. At least Cherry Pie by Warrant was meant to be a parody. Yet, this does have some nice effects work. I just don’t know why it’s in this.

Enjoy!

Shattered Politics #77: Thank You For Smoking (dir by Jason Reitman)

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have always hated those Truth.com commercials. Truth.com is an organization that claims to be dedicated to eradicating smoking. Their smug commercials are essentially the height of hipster douchebaggery, a bunch of self-consciously cool people wandering around and harassing random people about whether or not they smoke. And then, of course, there was the commercial where they all gathered outside a tobacco company and pretended to be dead. Of course, the truth about Truth.com is that they are essentially the same people who, in high school, would get offended whenever anyone wore a short skirt. I really can not stand people like that. (And don’t even get me started on those assholes who appear in the Above The Influence commercials.) Myself, I don’t smoke because I have asthma. But, seriously, whenever I see a Truth.com commercial, I’m tempted to run down to 711 and start.

And so maybe that’s why I like the 2005 comedy Thank You For Smoking.

The hero of Thank You For Smoking is Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, who is first seen appearing on a talk show and winning over a hostile audience by announcing that the tobacco industry is going to be investing millions in researching way to keep young people from smoking and shaking the hand of a teenage honor student who is dying from lung cancer. Over the course of the film, Nick shows us how he does business, everything from defending tobacco companies on talk shows to convincing a former Marlboro Man-turned-cancer-patient to drop his law suit. When Nick isn’t working, he’s hanging out with his best friends (who are lobbyists for both the liquor and the gun industries), trying to bond with his son (Cameron Bright), or having sex with a reporter (Katie Holmes).

Now, in most movies, Nick Naylor would be the villain. However, in Thank You For Smoking, Nick becomes a hero by default, if just because everyone who disagrees with him is even worse than he is. Add to that, Nick has the benefit of being played by Aaron Eckhart while all of his opponents are played by balding actors with ugly beards.

Another reason that I liked Thank You For Smoking was because the main villain was a senator from Vermont and it’s about time somebody stood up to the tyranny of Vermont. Ortolan Finistirre (William H. Macy) has built a career out of campaigning against the tobacco industries and why shouldn’t he? Who, other than Nick Naylor, is willing to defend them? Finistirre’s latest plan is to change the law so that every pack of cigarettes has to be branded with a skull and crossbones warning.

When Nick and Finistirre finally face off, it’s a battle between those who believe in allowing people the freedom to make their own choices and those who hide their totalitarian impulse behind claims that they’re working for the greater good.

Thank You For Smoking was Jason Reitman’s first film. And while it may be a bit too episodic and it frequently struggles to maintain a consistent tone, it’s still a lot better than both Labor Day and Men, Women, & Children.