Podcast Tuesday: "Garry Marshall Drops the Ball"

Zac Efron and Michelle Pfeiffer in New Year's Eve (2011).

A vintage matchbook.

Are you a New Year's Eve person? Does that holiday mean anything to you? I can't say that December 31 holds too many special memories for me, fond or otherwise. For the last few decades—not just years, but decades—I have stayed home on the last day of the year and only intermittently glanced up at the countdown festivities on TV. So a movie like Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve (2011), in which a bunch of celebrities celebrate the titular holiday in various wacky ways, does not have a lot of intrinsic appeal for me. File it alongside Rudolph's Shiny New Year (1976). Nice try, but I'm not terribly interested.

However, if I rummage through my own storehouse of memories in search of ones related specifically to New Year's Eve, I can zero in on a now long-gone restaurant called The Greenery in Clio, Michigan. A classy place, the kind you might take your grandparents for an evening out. The food there was pretty bland, and my family definitely didn't go there on a regular basis. But, for whatever reason, my parents took us to The Greenery every New Year's Eve for years. The place's best feature was an extremely generous and varied dessert bar. That was definitely the highlight of December 31 for me. (The lowlight was the drive home, since there always seemed to be a winter storm raging that night.) Other than that, I can't say I'm for or against this particular holiday.

Nevertheless, in this week's edition of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we are tackling the aforementioned New Year's Eve movie from 2011. As with Valentine's Day (2010), Garry Marshall assembled a boatload of TV stars, movie stars, and pop stars and put them in little, interconnected vignettes, all happening on one special day. If you've ever wanted to see Jon Bon Jovi, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Robert De Niro, and Ludacris in one movie.... well, here's your chance. Our review is included below. Do me a favor and listen to it. Thanks.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 262: B-Movie Maniacs (2014- )

Some of the Ed Wood movies featured on B-Movie Maniacs.

It's tempting to say that social media has been nothing but a blight upon the human race. And it's not difficult to find evidence to support that argument. People tend to revert to their worst selves online, and social media platforms allow us to spread gossip, hatred, and misinformation at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, thanks to Instagram and TikTok, we're chasing after material possessions we don't need and body types we can't attain. Even when we're not attacking our neighbors or draining our bank accounts, we're rotting our brains by doomscrolling through photos and videos for hours on end.

No doubt about it, social media has done some terrible things to us as a species. It may even be the invention that ultimately dooms the human race, accomplishing what nuclear bombs, automobiles, and cigarettes couldn't do. It could be deadlier even than Solaronite. I'm definitely part of the problem. I mean, just look at the sidebar on this blog (it's that column of text on the right side of the screen). You'll see that I have accounts on over a dozen different platforms. I'm as addicted to this junk as you are. Maybe more.

To be clear, I'm no fan of Mark Zuckerberg or what he has created. For me, Faceboook is mostly a nuisance, a place where my old high school classmates post their alarming political views and brag about how well their lives are going. Yuck. But Facebook also has an active Ed Wood fan community, and that has played a major role in the history of this series. Social media has allowed Woodologists to get in touch with me and share information, photos, articles, and more. Without those fans, I might have been tempted to ditch FB and many other platforms years ago. (So, yes, you guys are enabling my addiction.)