Announcing 2026's Legends of Western Cinema Week

Gather up your boots and saddles, friends!  Today, on the 119th anniversary of John Wayne's birth, Heidi of Along the Brandywine and I are pleased to announce we are going to co-host Legends of Western Cinema Week next month!

From June 22 through June 26, join us in celebrating western movies and TV shows, anything and everything involving cowboys and celluloid.

As in years past, Heidi and I will provide a blog tag for people to fill out if they so desire.  We'll also do some games or other activities... and maybe a small giveaway.  The rest of the partying is up to you!

There's no sign-up roster or anything like that.  But if you want to discuss a post idea with us, drop a comment on my post or Heidi's, and we'll happily chat!  You can contribute a movie or TV show review, a list of favorites, a character analysis, a game of your own -- whatever your western-loving heart dreams up.

The only real rule is that your posts must have celebratory, not derogatory, attitude toward the western genre.  If you dislike westerns, spend the week thinking about something else, mmkay?

Save and use any or all of these buttons on your own blogs, in your posts, etc.  We'd love it if you helped spread the word about the event so lots of people can join the fun :-)

"The Mandalorian and Grogu" (2026) -- Initial Thoughts

My cheeks hurt from smiling for two hours straight.

I fully expect to see this again in the theater, probably repeatedly.  So I'll write a more complete review of the movie after I've seen it at least one more time.  

For now, just know that this feels exactly like the show, with a bigger screen and a bigger budget.  The vibe is still Spaghetti-Western-with-Spaceships like always, the characters are as lovely and huggable as ever, and the storytelling is still delightfully low on dialog and high on action.

It did feel a bit draggy for about five minutes in the middle.  Second viewing might change my feeling on that, dunno.

But that's it.  That's the review.  If you love the show, you'll dig it.  If you don't love the show, your mileage may vary.

"Blackbeard's Ghost" (1968)

It's a little difficult to describe Blackbeard's Ghost (1968).  It kind of defies genre-ization, and it's astonishingly quirky.  Maybe that's why it's not as well known as some other Disney live-action movies from the 1960s.  That is a shame, because I think it is one of their funniest and most unique films of that era.  It was a big hit at the time, and received well by audiences and critics alike. 

Blackbeard's Ghost is about a morally upright -- even uptight -- college track coach accidentally calling the ghost of Blackbeard the pirate out of limbo and then being dragged into and rescued from a series of mishaps, hi-jinks, and calamities.  That's the best I can do at summing it up in one long and complicated sentence.  

This movie bears some big similarities to both The Shaggy Dog (1959) and The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), two live-action Disney films I grew up watching over and over on VHS.  I think the use of "a mysterious force/thing/person helping a hapless team of wannabes win a sporting competition" is far funnier in Blackbeard than in Professor, possibly because the event has higher stakes within the movie.  And I think the way Blackbeard explores the idea of having a perfectly ordinary person read a mysterious incantation aloud and inadvertently bring about some magical hi-jinks works better than The Shaggy Dog (1959).  In this case, it's funnier because the incantation doesn't turn the reader into a dog... it brings Edward Teach, better known as the pirate Blackbeard, back to life

Well, sorta.  It's complicated.

The story revolves around Blackbeard's Inn, a fanciful old hulk built from bits of wrecked ships that floated to shore over the centuries.  It's inhabited by a couple dozen little old ladies that call themselves the Daughters of the Buccaneers.  These ladies are about to lose their home because they can't pay off a big mortgage on their inn.

A local gangster named Silky Seymour (Joby Baker) is intent on making sure the old ladies don't pay off their loan because he wants to tear down Blackbeard's Inn and build a casino on the little spit of land that houses it.  Some tiny technicality of the law means it is the only place where he could build a legal casino in the state, so... if the Daughters of the Buccaneers can't come up with thousands of dollars by the end of the week to pay off their loan, out they go, and he gets to build his casino.  

As a villain, Silky Seymour feels a little tame, even for an old Disney movie.  He wouldn't stand a chance against Frank Stillwell from The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975), Long John Silver from Treasure Island (1950), or even Vicky from The Parent Trap (1961).

Anyway, enter our hero, Steve Walker (Dean Jones), the new track coach for Godolphin College.  Dean Jones is the perfect choice for this role because he exudes kindness and genuine niceness... but he is also excellent at portraying frustration.  He makes us believe Steve truly wants to do the right thing, to be nice to other people, but that he also doesn't have infinite patience.  That makes him feel human, and his humanity grounds a story that could otherwise devolve into too much silliness.

Steve quickly meets his love interest, Professor Jo Anne Baker (Suzanne Pleshette), who also works at Godolphin College.  She's friends with the Daughters of the Buccaneers and helps them organize a fundraiser to save their home.  The fundraiser does raise quite a bit of money, but not nearly enough to save Blackbeard's Inn.  Pleshette does a fine job acting shocked, incredulous, surprised, and suspicious as called for by the script, but I never really quite figure out why she falls for Steve.  Or why he falls for her.  I think Pleshette and Jones have way better chemistry a few years later in The Shaggy D.A. (1976).

One broken antique, one funny incantation, and a few special effects later, and lo and behold, Blackbeard (Peter Ustinov) has returned to the land of the living from the limbo realm where his dead wife Aldetha's curse had sent him when he died.

The minute Peter Ustinov arrives on the scene, the movie jolts into high gear.  I sometimes joke that I wonder if they had to pay him anything at all to play Blackbeard -- he is so obviously having the most enormous amount of fun in every scene!  Ustinov plays the pirate as conniving, selfish, bad-tempered, loud... and an absolute softie at heart.  Ustinov rants and roars and chortles and wheedles and yowls his way through the movie, and I love every minute of it.  He might chew up a goodly portion of the scenery, but he stops short of taking bites out of his co-stars, at least.

The comedic chemistry between Peter Ustinov and Dean Jones is perfect.  Watching them play off each other is an absolute delight.  Their every interaction is hilarious and poignant and relatable, and I'm in awe of how they pull off that specific mixture.

Blackbeard and Steve take turns being angry with each other and feeling sorry for each other, and I'm not sure which is funnier.

Blackbeard decides he needs to do something really good to make up for all the bad things he's done in life, and that will enable him to leave reality AND limbo behind.  Bad theology, but a good recipe for a funny movie.  Blackbeard decides he will help the Daughters of the Buccaneers save their home, and that will earn him his ticket out.  He will bet lots of money on Godolphin's track team and then ensure they win their meet.  However, Steve insists Blackbeard cannot and must not use his ghostly powers to make the team win by cheating!  

At one point, Blackbeard opines, "I perceive now how difficult it be to do a good deed in this dirty world."  I think that's a central theme for the movie: that our world and the people in it are in no way better than the world and the people of Blackbeard's day.  Cheaters prosper, so good guys must find ways to cheat the cheaters.  A dubious moral, maybe, but one that provides a lot of laughs.

One of my favorite random things about this movie is this sportscaster, who is played by Elliott Reid.  Reid played an English professor in The Absent-Minded Professor who also taught at a small-town college, and I kind of wish they had tied this movie to that one via this character.  Like, maybe had him be Shelby Ashton, now an ex-professor who discovered being a sports commentator was more lucrative?  And who makes comments about having flashbacks to a really weird basketball game once a few years ago.  They don't do it, so it's just my head-canon.

I can never decide what is the funniest part of the movie.  It might be the track meet, which involves So Many Madcap Exploits and funny sight gags.  Plus, Blackbeard doing a dance with a bunch of cheerleaders, which Ustinov absolutely rocks.

But the funniest part also might be the final showdown with Silky Seymour and his goons, because it involves finger guns.

So many finger guns.

Yes, I agree.  A shocking number of finger guns.  And every minute with them is funny!

All's well that ends well, of course.  It's a classic Disney movie.  All the good characters get a happy ending, including Blackbeard.  

Is this movie family friendly?  Absolutely.  There are a couple of low-level scary moments involving Aldetha's portrait, lightning, and Elsa Lanchester telling a spooky story.  And Silky Seymour's men pull guns out of their coats so they can kill our heroes, but are prevented from doing so.  Also, gambling and dishonesty aren't exactly portrayed as being the worst ideas in the world, which some families may object to.  But there's no cussing, no real violence, and no smut.  I don't think Steve and Jo Anne even kiss.

This is my contribution to the Make 'Em Laugh Blogathon hosted this week by the Classic Movie Blog Association.

"Project Hail Mary" (2026)

Hang on... did Hollywood just release a really good movie?  Like, a really, truly good movie?  A movie I wanted to see more than once in the theater?  A movie I wanted to take my teens to see?

Whoa.

And to think, I almost didn't go see Project Hail Mary (2026) because I've been so busy!

I'm really glad I made time to go see it last Saturday, and was able to go back with my husband and our teens before it left the theaters.  Because this movie was so much better than I expected.  And I say that knowing that it was based on a book by Andy Weir, who also wrote the book The Martian (2015) is based on.  And I really like the movie version of The Martian.  

I really enjoy stories about astronauts and space travel.  I really like stories about figuring out how to survive in dire circumstances with limited resources.  But this movie is so much more than either of those!

In fact, at its core, it's a buddy comedy.  About two super smart dudes working together to save both their home worlds.

But it's more than that, too.  It's a look at the incredible preciousness of life.  It's a study of what it actually means to be brave.  It's an examination of what deep friendship can accomplish.  And it beautifully exemplifies the Biblical principal that "No one has greater love than this: that someone lays down his life for his friends" (John 13:15).

Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) didn't think he could save the world.  He didn't think he could even make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.  Be a good science teacher at a middle school, sure.  He could do that.  But solve the question of why the earth's sun was going dim?  Find a way to fix the problem?  Not him.  He was just too ordinary.  He was not a hero.  He couldn't become a hero.  He didn't even want to try to be one.

Because heroes are big, tough guys like John Wayne and Rocky Balboa, right?  

Actually, the character of Rocky Balboa comes into play a lot during Project Hail Mary, and it is not an accident that author Andy Weir picked him.  Think about the movie Rocky (1976) for a minute.  A very ordinary guy (Sylvester Stallone), who is actually a loser, a wannabe, a part-time puncher who makes most of his money menacing people for the Mob... has one shot at being something better.  At proving what he can do.  And showing that even a loser like him can stand tall alongside the kinds of people everyone says are winners.

There's a lot of that in Dr. Grace's story too.  He just has to grow into the shoes a little at a time.

And can we talk a minute about Ryan Gosling's acting?  Because, to be honest, I have never had much time for him.  In fact, he's the reason I wasn't necessarily super excited to see this movie, initially.  The only thing I have really seen him in was The Notebook (2004), which I sat through because a) I do love James Garner, and b) I was sequestered on jury duty and it was the movie picked by my fellow jurors to watch in our sealed-off lounge one night.  And that was not my kind of movie at all, and Gosling seemed so perfectly suited to that sort of maudlin fare that I just couldn't take him seriously ever since.  

Yeah, I take him seriously now.  Because wow.  I will start watching movies of his now that I had previously avoided.  

I liked the whole movie so much the first time... and I loved it the second.  Going to have to pick up the soundtrack by Daniel Pemberton -- I already love his scores for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017).

Also, the screenplay is by Andy Wier and Drew Goddard.  Drew Goddard was an important part of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and I was so excited to see he was part of this!  

Is this movie family friendly?  It is!  Okay, there is one little joke about the alien, Rocky, saying an inappropriate variation of the phrase "fist bump," which is not explained and will go over the heads of clean-minded kids.  There's a super-short discussion of suicide by some very minor characters.  Zero cussing.  (For real!)  Zero romance, a little mild violence when some security guys restrain someone.  There are a couple of jump scares, and there are several very tense and dangerous sequences.  So you wouldn't want to take really little kids to it.  But it's remarkably clean.  (As I have repeatedly remarked, lol.)

"The Least" -- A New Story in a New Magazine

If you or someone you know is on the hunt for clean fiction that is appropriate for teen reads, then you definitely need to check out Sparkler, a brand-new online magazine!  Sparkler is devoted to connecting readers in search of clean YA fiction with authors who write exactly that.

Authors like me :-)

In fact, I have a flash-fiction story in their debut issue, which dropped today!  It's all about a young man striking out on his own who has taken what he was told is a shortcut, and he finds something unexpected along his chosen trail... something that forces him to make a difficult decision.  It's called "The Least," and you can read it right here.  It's historical fiction, a cozy Christian western just like you'd expect from me :-)

Guest Appearance on the Tumbleweeds and TV Cowboys Podcast

As you may or may not recall, The Big Valley (1965-69) is my favorite TV western.  Today, I get to be the guest star on the podcast Tumbleweeds and TV Cowboys, in which we discuss my two favorite Big Valley episodes: "A Time to Kill" (1966) and "Showdown in Limbo" (1967).

You can listen to this episode on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts.  

I never really got into podcasts, but Tumbleweeds and TV Cowboys has changed that for me -- at least, for this particular podcast!  Might be the only one I ever listen to more than a couple episodes of, but that's okay.  I'm very much enjoying it!  It's like sitting down and chatting with western film-obsessed friends :-)

Upcoming Blogathons

There are so many cool blogathons coming up!  I'm all set to participate in four over the next couple of months, and I wanted to share those with you in case you're interested in any of them too.

First up, May 4-8, is the Classic Movie Blog Association's spring event, the Make 'Em Laugh Blogathon.  I plan to review Blackbeard's Ghost (1968) for this one.  It's a newer favorite of mine, and one I simply don't get tired of!

CMBA blogathons are only open to members of the association -- but if you are a classic movie blogger and not a member, applications are open this month!  Check out this page for further info.

At the end of May, and extending for a whole week, Quiggy is hosting a celebration of drive-in movies at his blog, the Midnite Drive-In.  So far, he only has a brief announcement post up, but more details will be coming soon.  I already plan to review The Outsiders (1983) because it has a pretty pivotal scene that takes place at a drive-in movie.

Even though I usually try to stick to one blog event a month, I couldn't resist signing up for the Marilyn Monroe -- 100th Birthday Anniversary Blogathon hosted by Hoofers and Honeys May 29-June 1.  I plan to review The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), which I have been meaning to see for years now.  I have a copy on my TBW shelves, and this will be a good reason to make time for it.

And I'll be participating in the Robert Duvall Tribute Blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room, too.  That one takes place June 5-7, and I plan to review Newsies (1992) for it.  My daughters are a teensy bit obsessed with that movie right now, so I've seen it a lot lately and am glad to have a reason to sit down and review it.

You can always find a list of all the blog events I'm planning to participate in on my Upcoming Blog Events page.

Also, just a little teaser for you: Legends of Western Cinema Week will return this summer!!!  Stay tuned for details...