I love discovering the etymology of words, so since I’m writing about screwball comedy I was curious about the origin of this expression. I’m at the same time surprised and not surprised to learn it comes from baseball, a sport for which my ignorance is even bigger than for other sports.

When I was little, at home we had a small projector for Super-8 films. We didn’t have many reels to watch; aside from my parents’ wedding ‘video’, we owned a Looney Tunes Road Runner cartoon and a Pink Panther one. I had not thought about these cartoons at all in the last forty years, until I watched What’s Up, Doc?.

This was the week when my self-imposed Oscar duties ended, and the Academy made their choices known. Finally, they decided to grant 5 of my 11 wish, so, it could have been worse. Now we can go back and forget all about it for ten months or so, except for the occasional pub quiz.

It seems that my weekly consumption of films has gone down in the last few months. I would love to claim that that is the result of a conscious choice to spend my time in a different, more creative way, but the truth is that I just don’t seem to find on my streaming services anything that inspires me anymore. I guess the times are a-changing.

A quick bullet point list in order to officially keep track of how much my taste differs from the Academy’s.

After taking a break for a month to digest all of those ‘Best of 2024’ lists, the IndieWeb Movie Club is back, with a variant. [Mark] kindly hosts once again, and he proposes a multiversal version of the club in which each participant must choose their favourite version of a story that’s been adapted repeatedly. I suppose that Romeo and Juliet has been selected because February is Saint Valentine’s month; what better period to immerse ourselves in the most tragic of love stories?