Fourthing the sexiness of Gene Kelly.

I saw an interesting oldie yesterday -- Lightning Strikes Twice . "Trev" Trevelyan (Richard Todd) is accused of murdering his wife, Lorraine (who doesn't appear in the movie). After a hung jury (largely because one juror insisted on Not Guilty), the DA dismisses the charges. But the town (Texas desert and nearby ranches) believes he's guilty, even though they believe that Lorraine was no good. So Trev disappears. Then along comes Shelley (Ruth Roman), an actress who's come out to a dude ranch for her health. Shelley runs into Trev by accident. Shelley falls in love. And eventually we find out how Lorraine really died.

There isn't anything new here. At times, this movie feels like Rebecca as done by the junior varsity. And yet, it has so many of the virtues of the post-WW2 B picture. It doesn't try to be a bigger deal than it is. Todd and Roman make a fine pair of romantic leads. Some names among the supporting cast -- Zachary Scott as Harvey, Trev's competition for Shelley, Mercedes McCambridge and Darryl Hickman as Liza and "String," the operators of the dude ranch.

Not great, but satisfying in its own way.

Dammit, I just realized the end to Edge of Tomorrow, though satisfying, doesn't work. I can handwave it to work, but it really doesn't work.

Which part, Zen? The reset to him on the helicopter? Or something else?

Dammit, I just realized the end to Edge of Tomorrow, though satisfying, doesn't work. I can handwave it to work, but it really doesn't work.

Pretty much, yeah.

Steph, yes. Everything else worked, but that last time when he reset, he reset to the helicopter when he was flying in, before he got arrested, before he did any of the things that ended with the Omega's death. Yet the Omega was dead anyway. He would have had to have been killing the Omega the night before, while he was sleeping on the helicopter. But it all happened the same day. It's impossible. The only way I can make it work is to say, instead of each repeated day being an actual time reset, they were all a chain of forward-moving continual do-overs, all "powered" by the Omega. Then when the Omega died it could no longer make resets happen, but because the Omega existed outside of normal time, its death became a "fixed point", so that even though Cage got one last chance to reset the day, the Omega was still dead.

I'm happy to have the ending we got, regardless, because we never got a definitive explanation of how the Omega's time-altering powers worked (and we couldn't have anyway, since no one sat down and had a cuppa with it and asked). All we had was the scientist's guess, which worked well enough but may not have been entirely correct.

that last time when he reset

I was able to explain it when we saw the movie, but I already can't remember how I justified it.

One of the guys at Buzzfeed had an interesting explanation that sort of tracks with Zenkitty's handwave: when the Omega died, the day didn't reset, the entire world reset to its last "save point" (to continue the video game metaphor), which was before Cruise began resetting. But even that still makes no goddamn sense because the Omega is still dead on the same day that it was killed.

Yeah, the only way to make it work at all is to say that the Omega existed outside of time, "above" all the resets, and because its death occurred BEFORE Cage made his last reset, in that last reset it had to be dead. So the company wasn't really there killing it while Cage slept. Instead, at the moment of Cage's last reset, the Omega was dead and thus it had to cease to exist within the reset. Which now that I think on it further, I believe that's the "right" explanation, because remember, on the newscast, when the General was telling people what had happened, he said something like "there was an unexplained huge discharge of energy". The blast that killed the Omega was in fact an normal, totally explainable blast of explosives. If that's what the people had seen in the reset world, they would have said, Whoa, somebody blew something up under the Louvre! not What was that bizarre sourceless discharge of energy?! So now I think that the bizarre discharge of energy was the Omega suddenly ceasing to exist in the new timeline.

25 years ago today Tim Burton's Batman was released.

Raise your hand if you feel OLD.

eek.

All that means is, now Michael Keaton is good to play Old Bruce in a Batman Beyond movie!