Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Midnight Run (1988)
(SPOILERS) Midnight Run has a lot to answer for. It gave Robert De Niro the impression he was great at comedy. He is great in Midnight Run. It’s easily his funniest performance. But that performance is a consequence of the alchemy of co-stars, script and director and, most fundamentally, that De Niro isn’t playing for laughs. Sure, he’s been funny in stuff since, mostly he’s been mugging off his taciturn tough nut persona, a one-trick pony show that’s usually been milked in undemanding and inconsequential material. Midnight Run is something else entirely; a buddy movie with genuine heart, a road trip that never feels like its simply pushing formula buttons, an action comedy with genuine stakes and drama. It’s a very, very funny movie, with probably the highest quota of memorable lines per scene that side of Tarantino. We should all be grateful a sequel hasn’t had the chance to besmirch its memory.

Well, one kind of has. Make that three. Six years later a trio of TV mo…

Jeeves and Wooster 1.2: Tuppy and the Terrier
Episode Two includes some comic gems, particularly an uproarious set piece at the conclusion, but it feels much more as if it has been stapled together than the opener. That maybe have been inevitable as, unlike The Inimitable Jeeves, Wodehouse didn’t thread any connective tissue through the three short stories sourced from Very Good Jeeves.

The first of these takes the meat of Chapter 3, Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit, and a visit to Skeldings, but it isn’t Christmas in this version. Bertie is still “in love” (a rare case, generally he is running from any suggestion of congress) with Bobbie Wickham (Nina Botting, later played by Niamh Cusack) but he isn’t out for revenge on Tuppy. Instead Barmy (Adam Blackwood) acts as Wooster’s antagonist in a duel of hot water bottle holing (this is probably, understandably, because Tuppy is central to the third act).

Consistent is Jeeves’ disapproval of Miss Wickham, “a young lady with a keen sense of hu…