every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the J’s, with anti-alphabetical cheats)

Joy House (1964)
Joy Ride (1976)
Joy Ride (1977)
Joy Ride (2021)
Joy Street (1995)
Joyful Partaking in the Sorrows of Life, or One Damn Thing After Another (2001)
Jsme si o smrt bliz (2022)
Breaking the Spell (2000)
Pee-wee Goes to Prison (2003)

Joy House (1964)

Mark is a young man who’s good at tennis but better with the ladies. He’s porked a mobster’s wife, though, and the mobster sends tough guys with orders to bring back Mark’s head. It’s still attached as he narrowly escapes, and good thing cuz he’ll need it, after landing an incognito gig as chauffeur and dandyman for two women, who might be more dangerous than the hit men.

Alain Delon, Jane Fonda, and Lola Albright dans un film de Rene Clement, but it’s in English.

This flick is a rhapsody of kookery that should be better known. Such a wild ride, with great imagery, action, and intrigue, while the writer (based on a novel by Day Keene) tries to outsmart the audience. He outsmarted me.

There’s not much joy in this Joy House, but it’s slick, clever, and juicy, with rockin’ music by Lalo Schifrin. Your mouth, eyes, and ears will be open wide at the audaciousness of it all.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Joy Ride (1976)

Two teenage boys talk each other into stealing a car for a joy ride, and you’ve already guessed what happens. 12 minutes trying to convince kids not to steal cars, with ‘hip’ faux rock of the era as musical accompaniment.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Joy Ride (1977)

Exactly average 1970s exploitation, in which young white people make lame jokes, screw each other, dance to rock’n’roll, and trade classic lines like, “I hope we can find a shower around here. My nuts sure itch.”

The main characters are all new in town, but land jobs immediately, but then there’s trouble, blah blah. The town is in Alaska, but the movie was filmed in Roslyn, Washington, making no effort to cover signs identifying the Roslyn Hotel, Roslyn Post Office, etc.

Joy Ride is a monument to nepotism: The four main actors are Desi Arnaz Jr, son of guess who; Robert Carradine, son of John; Melanie Griffith, daughter of Tippi Hedren; and Anne Lockhart, daughter of June, granddaughter of Gene.

Produced by Sam Schulman, then-owner of the then-Seattle Supersonics.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Joy Ride (2021)

Comedians Bobcat Goldthwait and Dana Gould have been buddies for decades, and went on tour together, doing standup and getting into a nasty car wreck. This is the feature-length documentary that came from that tour and wreck, and as you’d expect, it’s smart and funny. A Down syndrome field trip and some KKK fashion tips are so funny it sent me on a two-minute coughing jag.

I was already a Bobcat fan, now I’m really a Bobcat fan, and a Dana Gould fan, too.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Joy Street (1995)

This is 23-minutes of weird from Suzan Pitt, and there’s no explaining art but it’s art and I like it. Highlights include a disillusioned woman, an unanswered phone call, bloody skewered fingers, a dancing mouse, an army of insects, and the same woman not so disillusioned.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Joyful Partaking in the Sorrows of Life, or One Damn Thing After Another (2001)

Joyful Partaking happens on one city block in Seattle, going into neighbors’ homes and glimpsing their lives, frustrations, disappointments, and even a dream or two.

In a cast of dozens, meet the hard-drinking unemployed racist, the woman who’s fallen and can’t get up, the high school kid babysitting a mentally-disabled man, a heck of a lot more, and my favorite, the depressed ex-weatherman whose mistaken forecast led to his son’s death.

Ensemble films are tricky, especially when a drama follows more than merely several characters. The best example that comes to mind, of a film that follows a crowd of characters, is John Sayles’ City of Hope, and this isn’t going to challenge that.

With a large cast and no budget to speak of, Joyful Partaking sometimes sputters, but it’s a generally successful study of ordinary human desperation, sprinkled with bits of hope. Written and directed by William Moreing — his first, last, and only film — this is exuberant when it connects, and it connects enough (especially at the end) to earn a recommendation.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Jsme si o smrt bliz (2022)
a/k/a Love Is Just a Death Away

Two junk yard dogs fight over a dying bird, until one of the dogs dies, and a parasite that had lived in its body searches for love and meaning in a landfill.

This is a 10-minute animated short, and obviously, it’s pretty cool.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Breaking the Spell (2000)

From the good anarchists at CrimethInc, this opens like a primer on how to make a shitty documentary: Wordless footage of chaotic protests, accompanied by piercing beeps rising and falling on the soundtrack. The earsplitting tones gave me the beginnings of a headache, and urged me to turn this off.

Glad I didn’t, because after five minutes of high-pitched cascading noise, the annoyance fades away, and the rest of this is a very good fly-on-the-sidewalk perspective on 1999’s anti-WTO protests in Seattle.

Protesters shout and dance and talk to the camera about their anger at living in a system designed to empower the rich and enweaken the poor. After the protests become a slight riot, 60 Minutes weeps for a Starbucks and a bank branch that were vandalized, for skyscraper pillars spray-painted “Capitalism kills,” but the activists rightly explain how the smashed windows and words of wisdom were justified, and that there should’ve been more.

The doc doesn’t say this, but I’ll add that the total damage done to those chain shops and offices didn’t amount to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of one day’s profits for any of those corporations.

We’re shown vivid police brutality — there’s the rioting — and the joy of making the rich and powerful squirm ever-so-slightly for an afternoon or a weekend, before they resume stomping their boots on our faces forever.

And we’re shown more ‘mainstream’ protesters, who decry bricks being tossed through windows, and chant that protest must be non-violent, non-violent, non-violent. Because, you know, look around at all that’s been accomplished thanks to non-violence.

Here’s an unidentified man wearing a full-face ski mask and glasses, delivering an impromptu but perfect explanation, as protesters swirl all around him:

Thank you, masked man, and thank you, CrimethInc. This flick doubles my regret at not being in Seattle when WTO ’99 went down. I’m here now, though, and more than ever we need a rerun of all this, only with more broken windows and bigger crowds.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Pee-wee Goes to Prison (2003)

Using Pee-wee’s Playhouse collectible dolls, this imagines an episode of the show that’s more real than surreal. Soon as Conky the robot delivers the secret word of the day — “Justice” — a police SWAT team kicks down the jigsaw doors and handcuffs Pee-wee.

He’s an innocent man, but that rascally Randy has fingered Pee-wee as running a Yohimbe-manufacturing and distribution ring on the TV show’s set. Pee-wee deals with cops and the justice (everybody scream!) system, same as Paul Reubens did, and it’s still the opposite of justice (everybody scream again!). Can Cowboy Curtis and Miss Yvonne, the Most Beautiful Woman in Puppet Land, get Pee-wee out of prison?

This is a clever and woke 11-minute short, filmed by John Humphrey on a toy Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camcorder, but Paul Reubens himself could’ve made it.

Verdict: YES.

1/18/2026

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
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