Palm Springs

 Palm Springs was a great movie. It was very funny, but also profound. If you have Hulu you should definitely check this movie out if you haven’t already. I was lucky enough to start this movie completely ignorant of the premise. That was a great experience. If you are still pure, stop reading and go watch the movie. 

You can assume the rest of this post is going to spoil Palm Springs. 

You learn about the premise very early on in the movie, but those first 10 minutes are something special if you have no idea what is happening. 

This is the newest entrance into the sub-genre of movie that I will just call a Groundhog Day film. The protagonist is cursed to live the same day over-and-over again. Typically he is the only one experiencing the repetitive nature of the day. 

In Palm Springs, Nyles (Andy Samberg) is forever reliving the day of his girlfriends friend’s wedding… in Palm Springs. He seems pretty numb to his existence until he inadvertently gets the bride’s sister Sarah (Cristin Milioti) stuck in the same time loop. 

This is the first repeating day movie where it has really dawned on me what a metaphor for our existence they are. We are all stuck in our daily routines, becoming numb to the things that really matter the most in our lives. This has never been more true than over the last 10 months as the entire world has struggled through COVID-19. 

Palm Springs turned out to be a perfect metaphor for life right now. It really highlighted how lucky some of us are to be going through that life with people you love. 

It was a phenomenal movie that I will surely revisit in the next several weeks. I want to watch it again with my wife. I think she will really like it. My only real criticism of the movie is that I wasn’t sure how I felt about the extremely scientific resolution. I didn’t dislike it, but it also felt strange. Maybe I can grapple with that a little more on my second watch. 

I have read a couple of articles about the movie that state that is supposed to be open-ended at the conclusion. I didn’t get that at all. I also don’t feel like it could even be read as open-ended based on the interaction with the family. I’d love to hear from you if you can explain a reading of the film where they didn’t both get out of the time loop. 

I guess if you really don’t like Andy Samberg you might want to avoid Palm Springs. It is filled with his brand of humor, and he is on screen almost the entire time. For me those were both a positive. I loved it!

Bart Simpson Mania

This episode of Decoder Ring had me thinking about The Simpsons: Decoder Ring explores the Bart Simpson panic of the early ’90s, bootleg Bart T-shirts, and George H.W. Bush’s attacks on the Simpsons family.

I can distinctly remember the first episode of The Simpsons. I think it came out when I was about 8 years old. My oldest brother wanted to watch it, but we were going to be gone that evening for something. We set the VCR to record it. 

I watched that episode of The Simpsons several times. We usually gathered around the TV most weeks to watch The Simpsons all together. I didn’t think of it as a big deal or controversial at all. I do remember Bart being seen as a “shocking” character early on. As a very respectful and obedient child he was quite a curiosity for me. 

At some point I bought a Bart t-shirt from the local gas station. I have to imagine it was a bootleg. I know I had one with Bart skateboarding that said “cowabunga dude”. I feel like I also had a shirt with his famous catchphrase “Eat My Shorts”, but that could have been just a fantasy. 

Looking back on it, it seems strange that I was allowed to watch the show considering all of the controversy described in the podcast. I continued watching it for the next few years, but I wasn’t a diehard fan like many of my peers. At some point I moved on to watching South Park & Bevis and Butthead. 

My daughters are both around the same age as I was when I started watching the Simpsons. For the last several years I have said that I was going to re-start watching The Simpsons and see if I could make it through those supposedly magical fist 7 seasons. I have put it off long enough where now I feel like I want to bring my daughters along on that journey with me. 

For some reason I still feel like I shouldn’t let them watch it. I cannot explain why I feel that way. Surely The Simpsons is much tamer than most of the kids shows these days. I really can’t say. I guess we will find out.