every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the J’s, with anti-alphabetical cheats)
Jefferson Circus Songs (1975)
Jelly Baby (2024)
Jeom (2018)
The Jerk (1979)
The Jerk, Too (1984)
The Jerky Boys (1995)
Jerry, Jerry, Quite Contrary (1966)
Jerry Maguire (1996)
Frank (2014)
Promethius Is Back, Baby (2025)
Jefferson Circus Songs (1975)
I’m not savvy enough to label or describe the animation tricks and spectacular but obviously homemade imagery that underlie this 16-minute short, so I’ll just say Wow.
A woman rides a train, children play adults, a floral wolf licks its lips ominously, a nurse feeds Easter eggs to a spoon-monster, a headless torso rolls by, a woman shows her intestines and fetus, and there’s a tea party for one but two are invited. Set to a calliope score, some of this is hilarious, all of it’s irresistibly strange, not a frame of it looks ordinary, and when it’s over, conjoined twins sweep up.
Made by Suzan Pitt, and I want to see more of her work.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Jelly Baby (2024)
With a mix of what looks like stop-motion and 3D-modeling, this 3-minute short tells a wordless story of a toddler’s journey to the counter-top and higher, to reach a jar of jelly. The film is clever and concise, and probably would’ve impressed me more if I hadn’t just seen Jefferson Circus Songs.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Jeom (2018)
Four minutes of animated imagery telling a story I couldn’t understand. Shortverse says, “A father and a son both have the same big birthmark on their butt,” which seems as plausible as any other theory, but after watching something, the viewer shouldn’t need to read a blurb to begin understanding it.
Verdict: MAYBE.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Jerk (1979)
Steve Martin plays Navin Johnson, adopted and raised by black sharecroppers, so of course he thinks he’s black. He works at a gas station, joins the circus, and invents non-slip glasses. There’s also cat juggling, Bernadette Peters, and Carl Gottlieb as Iron Balls McGillicuty.
Martin was by far the most popular comedian of his time, and this was his big jump to the movies. Everything is calculated to appeal to fans of Martin’s absurdist stand-up, and there were millions of them, including me.
Directed by cross-eyed Carl Reiner, this is low-brow brilliant, equal parts funny and stupid, leading to laughs and exhaustion, but mostly laughs.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Jerk, Too (1984)
You didn’t know there was a sequel to The Jerk, because Steve Martin isn’t in it, so instead of being funny and stupid, it’s simply stupid.
Verdict: NO.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Jerky Boys (1995)
Back in the pre-cell era, when placing a call didn’t reveal your phone number, Johnny and Kamal became famous for making prank calls, and made this movie at the height of their success. The story has them making a prank call to a mobster, which spirals into pranking him in person, which gets them in deep trouble.
If you’re a fan of the lost art of prank calls (I am) or the Jerky Boys (they’re new to me, but fun), you might like this. It’s an unambiguously bad movie, but sometimes it’s the fun kind of bad.
Verdict: MAYBE.
♦ ♦ ♦
Jerry, Jerry, Quite Contrary (1966)
The Jerry of the title is a mouse, nemesis of a cat named Tom. You’ve probably heard of them.
Jerry the mouse goes sleepwalking, and harasses Tom the cat despite being asleep. There’s great music, and some amusing gags.
Produced and directed by Chuck Jones.
♦ ♦ ♦
Jerry Maguire (1996)
Jerry Maguire is a hot-shot sports agent who gets a flash of conscience or inspiration, and writes a 25-page memo (“It’s a mission statement”) demanding more ethical sports agentry. The movie gives only the airiest whiff of what he’s written, but gosh it’s ethical, so it gets him fired.
Unlike any job in the real world, despite being fired, Jerry’s allowed back into his office, to spend an afternoon phoning his clients to try to get them to follow him to a new sports agent shop. He only snags one client (Cuba Gooding Jr, as a too-scrawny pro football player), but more important to the story, he snags Renée Zellweger. She quits the unethical sports agent shop, to be Jerry’s secretary & squeeze at the new, ethical shop.
Tom Cruise stars, and I dislike him as an actor and human. He’s usually OK on screen, but here I never believed any moment where he’s playing vulnerable, self-doubting, or ethical — which is, basically, the entire movie. Zellweger is cute, though, and Gooding is funny, and Bonnie Hunt is here, and makes anything better.
The movie is absolute fluff … but it’s first-rate fluff, written and directed by Cameron Crowe, who’s in the fairy tale business (Almost Famous, Singles).
Same as all fairy tales, this one’s bullshit from beginning to end, but like a vegan having a Big Mac Attack™, everyone needs a fairy tale now and then.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Frank (2014)
Don invites Jon to join an Irish avant-garde band as the new keyboardist, but warns him that everyone in the band is mentally ill. And it’s true.
Don used to play keyboards himself, but now he mostly just hangs around. Clara plays theremin, projects hostility, and hates Jon. Jon narrates the film via social media posts, while the band stays in a rented cabin, working on an album for eleven months but not recording anything. And Frank is the lead singer, who always wears an oversize papier-mâché head.
This is mystifying, semi-comedic, difficult to make sense of, but making sense is overrated. Almost all the dialogue is enjoyably awkward, and the music is intentionally weird and bad, until it’s brilliant. It took a while for me to warm to this kookiness, and then, just as it starts being fun, the band is invited to perform at South by Southwest.
For me, going to Austin for SXSW popped the movie’s bubble. It put me on edge, wondering if I was watching an extended ad for the annual allegedly alternative music and arts festival.
Well, maybe it’s product placement, but not to worry. The flick only grows stranger, more offbeat and enjoyable, whispering a message about the nature of art, the pursuit of success, and mental illness for everyone.
Frank is definitely a winner, but I only fractionally understood what I’d seen until this bit in the closing credits: “Dedicated to Chris Sievey (1955-2010), whose outsider spirit and big fake head inspired this film.”
This of course sent me to the internet, which reports that Mr Sievey created a character named Frank Sidebottom, who wore a preposterous head similar to the one Frank wears in this movie, and fronted a band called Oh Blimey Big Band.
The film is based on an article by Jon Ronson, who played keyboards in Sievey/Sidebottom’s band, and later wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats, and lived Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, and made a butt-load of high-quality British podcasts and documentaries. Amazing what you can learn with a few clicks on the internet.
Almost always, I watch movies knowing as little as possible about what I’m about to see. It eliminates the drag of expectations, makes a movie feel fresher, and ensures that I’m writing my own opinions, not anyone else’s. But just this once, my system doublecrossed me. I would’ve enjoyed Frank more if I’d known WTF it was, so I watched it a second time, and simply loved it, even when it went to SXSW.
It stars Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina) as Jon, Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart) as Clara, Scoot McNairy (Argo) as Don, and Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) as Frank, almost always sheathed in that papier-mâché head. And it might be the best picture I’ve seen in 2025.
Verdict: BIG YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Promethius Is Back, Baby (2025)
This is a sequel to the movie Promethius, one of the lesser sequels to Alien, but it’s inexplicably set in Blade Runner‘s universe, and takes place here and now, in America 2025 (which is basically Blade Runner, now that I think of it).
Sean Young is back as Rachael, and she’s great, but mostly the movie stars a pouting underwear model as the son or grandson of Harrison Ford’s Deckard character, and occasionally there are screaming Xenomorph monsters from Alien.
There are two big problems with this. First, Deckard³ lacks the depth of a circuit board, and everyone — replicants, cops, ordinary ‘little people’, the Xenomorphs, and especially the writer and crew behind the camera — seems to be ‘going through the motions’, so it’s a snooze.
The second problem, even more glaring, is that none of this exists. I dreamed it, dreamed it was playing at some multiplex, dreamed I took the bus and paid admission, even dreamed I was taking notes to write a review to warn you away from watching it. Then I woke up and wrote this, based on my recollection of the movie and those notes, neither of which existed. If this movie ever comes out, though, don’t see it.
Verdict: BIG NO.
Stephen King remembers Rob Reiner
Martin Scorsese remembers Rob Reiner
12/29/2025
Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
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