From the Couch Hole: I Did All My Best to Smile

Previously on FTCH, this woman’s work was to send help to the Muppet Show at the bone temple. We got vertigo from the teriyaki potato chips. This week was lots of Winter Olympics, and I’ll miss most of these sports until I see them again in 2030. The real heroes were those drone drivers. I hope they get some rest before the Summer Olympics. This week we sung the ballad of Wallis Island to the siren who said, “Welcome to Derry, if I had legs I’d kick you.” The train dreams were of supreme pizza potato chips. Remember, FTCH has updated its terms and conditions.

Pop Culture Ephemera

• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) (Directed by Mary Bronstein): “I just want someone to tell me what to do. No one will tell me.” – Linda. There’s something either common in films these days, or more likely, self selected as the films that I enjoy watching. This movie just stops. Rose Byrne does what should be an award-winning acting job as Linda. She starts the film with her life already in chaos. Her daughter has a mysterious illness, her husband is away, and her ceiling is literally falling in on her. Things that haven’t unraveled start unraveling. Linda’s life is lots of yelling at men, “Don’t you hear me?” There are some interesting supporting characters including a young mother (Danielle Madonald) that she has in her therapy and a neighbor in the hotel, James (A$AP Rocky). We never get to understand these characters because it’s about Linda’s journey. I love the mix of ultra-reality and dreamlike sequences. In the end, there’s rarely a reprieve from the anxiety and that might be too much for some viewers.

Buy IT: Welcome to Derry:The Complete First Season

• IT: Welcome to Derry – “In the Name of the Father” (S.1 E.6) (HBO) (2025): “Oh, you know what they say about Derry, dear. No one who dies here ever really dies.” – Ingrid Kersh. I’m meandering my way through this series, not because I’m bored, but I’m happy to let the story play out slowly. This is the best episode since the first one. The three eras are slowly being tied together. This concept of the show exploring in detail the two main backstories of the book (the Black Spot and the Kitchener Ironworks explosion) and linking them to the characters of the films, is playing out as I had hoped. The Black Spot has a major Sinners (2025) vibe. It’s just that movie didn’t have a 12-year-old white boy playing jazz drums. There are definitely some issues with the children’s dialog at times, but the series is doing the original book proud so far.

Buy This Mortal Coil – It’ll End in Tears

• This Mortal Coil – “Song to the Siren” (from It’ll End in Tears) (1983): “Did I dream you dreamed about me?” Pat Boone had already covered this Tim Buckley song when Buckley performed it on the series finale of The Monkees. It was a more traditional folk performance by Buckley. This Mortal Coil is half of the Cocteau Twins, and you’d be forgiven for mistaking this as one of their songs. That folk song becomes an ethereal masterpiece. Elizabeth Fraser’s vocals are haunting. It’s no surprise that David Lynch was such a huge fan of this song. He eventually used it in Lost Highway (1997), but it would have felt comfortable in most of his films. Truthfully, I didn’t know this song until I had discovered the Cocteau Twins around 1987 and through them made my way back to Tim Buckley in the late ’90s.

• Train Dreams (2025) (Directed by Clint Bentley): “The dead tree is as important as the living one.” – Claire Thompson. This is just the type of movie that I expect to have “Oscar-nominated” next to its title. It’s somewhere between a movie and a poem. Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) lives a life of balance in the early 20th Century. The railroad is expanding and trees are being cut to feed the demands of the cities to the East. This life that Robert lives is on the edge and allows him to meditate on the power of nature and people through some tragic events in his life. I’m not always a fan of narration in a film, but here Will Patton’s voiceover adds a calmness and sense of danger at the same time to Robert’s life. There’s so much to love here, from a brilliant small role by William H. Macy to the quiet scenes in the forest that allow us to hear the heartbeat of nature. Dreams is a perfect word for the film.

• The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025) (Directed by James Griffiths): “Because artists don’t whiten their teeth – because that’s the definition of being an artist.” – Herb McGwyer. The British have a wonderful way of dealing with pain through comedy. I would consider this film a comedy even though a majority of the film deals with the ability to move on from painful events that happen in your life. Charles (Tim Key) is a two-time lottery winner who owns an island off the coast of Wales. He invites folk musician Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) to do a one-man, single-audience performance for him. About 20 minutes into the film, I doubted that it had a 100 minutes of material. I was wrong. There’s a comfortable and lovely way that we are introduced to Herb’s backstory and that we learn about the inhabitants of the island. Tim Key’s performance is John Candy-ish in that his awkward enthusiasm masks some painful loneliness. I worried at times that it would devolve into romantic-comedy territory, but it clings to the themes of moving on from difficult circumstances right through the end. This is just a lovely, underappreciated film from 2025.
  

Buy The Ballad of Wallis Island

Best of the Rest

• Tim Buckley debuted his song “Song to the Siren” on the series finale of The Monkees in 1968. It’s hard to imagine that the chaos of that comedic show would feature such a heartfelt song. His voice has such a pleasant tone, I can’t believe I wasn’t familiar with his work until so much later in life. I only have a vague memory of this episode.

• There was 15 years between initial release by Tim Buckley and This Mortal Coil’s version of “Song to the Siren.” The song had another life as a This Mortal Coil version and then all of a sudden it became fair game in the 2000s to be covered by everyone from Robert Plant to Garbage to Third Eye Blind. The two best covers came from dearly departed artists, Sinead O’Connor and George Michael. I love Sinead’s voice, but George Michael’s version serves to highlight the depth of his talents that aren’t featured on his hit songs. I don’t remember hearing this 2012 cover until that last few years. It exists somewhere between the Buckley original and the This Mortal Coil version. It’s lovely.

• “Get your domain before you lose it.” This wasn’t a great year for comedic ads during the Super Bowl. I’d even say it was a poor year for ads in general. The one that stayed in my mind for a couple of weeks past the game was this Squarespace Film Noir ad with Emma Stone directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Squarespace exists in a weird space where I don’t even know their current competitors in the market, so do they even need to advertise? Previous years they’ve featured Adam Driver and last year Barry Keoghan. This is by far the most memorable because you can feel Stone’s frustration. She obviously needs to do a modern film noir for her next project, maybe with Jesse Plemons.

Sunday Morning Tuneage Flashback

• Sunday Morning Tuneage from 3/7/2010, the very last basketball of the season was happening and one more Christian team loss would officially make it baseball season for both boys. The 82nd Academy Awards were being hosted by Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin and my rooting prediction was for Up in the Air. I was enjoying Archer (FX) and looking forward to Dinoshark (SYFY) which wasn’t too bad with Mexico being terrorized by the titled dinoshark. Bonus points: this was recently shown on House of Svengoolie. My Top Ten of the Week is definitely an ever evolving best of list. I’ll try not to just make it a Wes Anderson list.
  
  My #73 Top TV Show of All-Time was Good Morning America (ABC) (1975-Current): The most obvious thing is that I wouldn’t pick game shows, reality shows or news programs. Those would each be their own separate rankings. One thing about growing up in the ’70s was brand loyalty for news programs. We were a CBS nightly news family with Cronkite and then Rather at night. It was ABC and Good Morning America on weekday mornings. Born out of the remnants of AM America, this show was the one I started watching before school when I felt too old for Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo. The David Hartman and Joan Lunden pairing was good, but for me the show became my morning favorite when it became Charlie Gibson and Joan Lunden. I don’t watch any of them today, maybe the Today Show (NBC) from time to time, but in the ’80s and ’90s, these were how I spent my mornings. I was still watching GMA as late as 2001 where I first saw the World Trade Center bombings.
  
• BEST BILL MURRAY MOVIES OF ALL-TIME (2010)
  • 10. Meatballs (1979)
  • 9. Lost in Translation (2003)
  • 8. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
  • 7. Groundhog Day (1993)
  • 6. Scrooged (1988)
  • 5. Stripes (1981)
  • 4. Rushmore (1998)
  • 3. The Royal Tenenbaums (2002)
  • 2. Caddyshack (1980)
  • 1. Ghostbusters (1984)
    
• BEST BILL MURRAY MOVIES OF ALL-TIME (2025)
  • 10. Mad Dog and Glory (1993): De Niro plays the good-guy photographer and Murray plays the gangster. Somehow it all comes together to be an underrated favorite of mine.
  • 9. Meatballs (1979): It has the feel of an extended Saturday Night Live character that Murray might have played. What works for me is that he sets the tone here for the great straight characters he would play in the future. “It just doesn’t matter” is one of his best monologues in any of his films.
  • 8. What About Bob? (1991): Dreyfus and Murray have some serious comedic chemistry that I wish had been explored in more films. It’s amazing to read that they didn’t get along on the set.
  • 7. Moonrise Kingdom (2012): This Wes Anderson film has really grown on me with multiple viewings. Bill loses his wife, Frances McDormand to Bruce Willis. The put-upon husband is a great role for him.
  • 6. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009): Not a huge role, but is there anyone else you would cast as a badger than Murray? This fits him so much better than his voice roles as Garfield or Baloo.
  • 5. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004): I can’t explain why I didn’t love this film upon first viewing. Now it’s one of my favorite Wes Anderson films and definitely one of Murray’s most hilarious characters.
  • 4. Ghostbusters (1984): We’re into the top four where any of these could be number one depending on my mood that day. As Peter Venkman, I can’t think of a character that has more memorable/quotable lines in a single movie than Murray in this classic.
  • 3. The Royal Tenenbaums (2002): He is not more than the fifth most important character in the film, and yet, I can’t get his performance out of my head.
  • 2. Groundhog Day (1993): The character isn’t too removed from his character in Scrooged (1988), but this one continues to live on in popular culture while the other fades away. Once again, it’s a shame that off-set, Murray and Harold Ramis had a falling out because they work so well together. “What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.” – Phil Connors
  • 1. Rushmore (1998): There was a weird vibe around Murray in the ’90s. Take away his 1993 films and he was just not present in our minds as a film star. Then Wes Anderson found the perfect role for him in this anti-romance opposite Jason Schwartzman. We can point to this as the climb back up the hill for Murray. He needed this to jumpstart all of the great roles he would play in the 25 years afterwards. I had to leave so many great films off of this list including his only Oscar nomination. These were all important films to me in my fandom of him, and I don’t think any are more representative of the depth he could bring to a comedy more than this one.

Buy Rushmore (Criterion Collection)

1976 in Review

• February – Batman #272 (DC Comics): Cover by Tatjana Wood. Written by David Vern Reed. Art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. I think we’ll find that even comic books weren’t immune from two themes in 1976. They would either be about the Bicentennial or the Olympics (remember, in these days the Winter and Summer Olympics were in the same year). This issue started a storyline where criminals from different areas of the world came to Gotham to complete an assigned crime. In this issue, the South Americans only manage a 20 out of a 100 points possible.
• February 20 – Muhammad Ali knocked out Jean-Pierre Coopman in the fifth round to defend the title he won at the “Thrilla in Manilla” in October of 1975.
• February 7 – TV Guide: Art by Jack Davis. In the middle of its second season, Barney Miller (ABC) was already a Thursday night must-see. Detective Fish (Abe Vigoda) was garnering enough attention that he would get his own spin-off show next year in February 1977. This month would debut Lt. Scanlon of Internal Affairs who would have a big supporting role in future seasons. Consistently ranked in the high Thirties, the series would jump to the Top Twenty by Season Three.

What the Hell Did I Put in My Mouth?

“And you sang, “Sail to me
Sail to me; let me enfold you
Here I am, here I am
Waiting to hold you” – Tim Buckley