In my quest to get back into watching some of the many films that I have on my list, I decided to make a concernted effort to at least stream something once a week (or so) during December. The criteria for what I would stream more or less depended on what I was in the modd for and how much time I had to watch it, so I wound up starting on the shorter end of things, looking for movies that run about 90 minutes and weren’t going to be an emormous commitment. Seeing that I have something like seven subscriptions to streaming services, I had a lot to choose from. It’s complete coincidence, then, that I wound up choosing four movies that traded in nostalgia and in some cases nostalgia for decades-old music.

I’m serious when I say it’s a coincidence because I didn’t sit down and say “I want to watch things that made me think of times past”; I simply looked at the description of a movie and said “This looks good” and it really wasn’t until I was done that I realized I’d kind of bounced around the same area, and that said area was one of my comfort foods.

Because let’s face it, I’ve always had a love for smaller-sized movies that are character pieces or even nostalgia pieces. I think it comes from practically living at the video store when I was younger as well as being aware of the not-so-blockbuster films that were coming out based on hours of watching Siskel & Ebert or reading Entertainment Weekly. I’ve always liked taking a chance on something that was written well and might even feel kind of good but didn’t get much hype.

Too bad that they’re not all winners.

I’ll start with the film that was the biggest disappointment, which was 2014’s About Alex. It was written and directed by Jesse Zwick, who I want to say is the son of producer Edward Zwick of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life fame. What drew me to it was both the concept and the cast. Starring Jason Ritter, Maggie Grace, Max Greenfield, and Aubrey Plaza (among others), it’s about a group of friends getting together at a house in upstate New York for a weekend after one of them, Alex (Ritter) attempts suicide. If that sounds familiar, it’s more or less The Big Chill, except that in that film, the Alex in question (played by the body of Kevin Costner) died by suicide and the college friends are reuinting for his funeral.

The fact that the character’s name was Alex should have been a red flag but I’m always up for a spin on a movie that I’ve loved, so I gave it a try. And that was kind of a mistake. Honestly, I probably could have shut it off about 20 minutes in when Greenfield’s character Josh made his umpteenth stuck-up comment about the state of the world and pop culture. Or how every single character seemed to be disappointed with how life had turned out so far even though they were all … 25? 26? Quarterlife crisising more or less. So yeah, it’s kind of a Millennial Big Chill, not very well executed, and kind of insufferable in many cases. Ritter sort of gives the the best performance because he knows that his character has to spend 90 minutes being shouted out by the bullshit of the others. Skip.

Then, there’s the dead boyfriend story, which is 2024’s The Greatest Hits. This one combines nostalgia with time travel in a way that’s less sci-fi and more something like Sliding Doors (a film whose concept I’ve always loved but whose execution just dropped the ball big time) and VH-1’s Hindsight (a TV show I still mourn). Harriet (Lucy Boynton) is a record producer whose boyfriend died in a car accident and now has to wear noise-canceling headphones because every time she hears a song that reminds her of her dead boyfriend, she travels back in time to the moment she associates with it. Often, she does this deliberately because she’s trying to change the past so that he stays alive, but it never works.

Since this is also a romance movie, she meets a guy named Justin (David Park), who is dealing with his own issues of letting go of the past–mainly, the things his parents left behind to him and his sister–and the two of them start to fall for one another. I won’t spoil too much more because I really enjoyed this, especially as someone who has had way too many moments in life where a song reminds me of a place and time in the past. The performances are really good as well, which is important because this is the type of plot that could get really gimmicky or be up its own ass (after all, the characters have impeccable music taste), but Boynton and Park along with Austin Crute, who plays Harriett’s best friend Morris, carry the film really well. This one is streaming on Hulu at the moment and I recommend it. Watch.

With my third movie, I just realized that all three of these have something in common other than nostalgia, which is death. Granted, nobody actually died in About Alex, but that was the “dead friend” movie; The Greatest Hits was the “dead boyfriend” movie,, and 2021’s Mixtape is the “dead parents” movie. It’s also much different from the other two because it’s a tween movie.

Gemma Brooke Allen plays 12-year-old Beverly who lives in Spokane toward the tail end of 1999 with her grandomother (played by Julie Bowen). Her parents died when she was very young and she has little to no memory of them. She’s also kind of a nobody in her middle school. Then, she finds an old mix tape that her mom had made, and seeing that it might be a clue as to who her parents were, she tries to listen to it. And the Walkman she has also found promptly eats the tape. So begins a quest to find each song on the tape and figure out if there’s any meaning behind each of them. This, as so often happens in coming of age movies, leads to Beverly making friends with two other girls–Ellen (the geeky Asian girl played by Audrey Hseih) and Nicky (a rebellious girl played by Olga Petsa). Along the way, they find each song one by one, sometimes with the help of a record store owner named “Anti” (Nick Thune).

This reminds me of the coming-of-age movies that were popular in the early 1990s, right around the time my sister would have been Beverly’s age. Movies like Now and Then were right there for tween girls who had grown up reading books like The Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High and could see themselves in some of the characters on the screen the way boys of the same age related to the characters and storyline of The Sandlot. Beverly is a sweet kid who is not precocious and that makes her not only likeable but someone whose story you become emotionally invested in. Julie Bowen, who spent the better part of a decade playing a mom on Modern Family does a good job as well. She’s a young grandmother–her daughter had Beverly when she was in high school–and as we see, has never fully processed all of the grief from her death. Or maybe she thought she had but there were things left unexplored and now that Beverly is growing up she’s not able to face things.

Plus, the music that her parents loved is some great punk, new wave, and alternative stuff, and exploring this character through the mix tape is not only a great concept but makes for a great story. I’d say this is a good one to watch with your tween because it’s a solid family movie without being too cheesy or schmaltzy. It’s a Netflix joint and easily accessible. Watch.

Finally, the exception to the rule–at least as far as dead people are concerned–is Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, which was produced by HBO and is a retrospectinve of the soft rock subgenre that picked up the moniker Yacht Rock sometime in the mid-2000s. The film traces its entire history and has extensive interviews with some of the bigger names of that late 1970s/early 1980s period: Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, members of Toto, and people who worked with Steely Dan.

I more or less grew up listening to this because my parents loved the Lite FM station. By the time I was in high school, I’d heard “Sailing” and “What a Fool Believes” as many times as I had listened to “Welcome to the Jungle” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I hated it back then, mainly because it was lame-assed parents music. Then, at some point, I took an “ironic” liking to it because I was trying to look cool in some way (even though I’m not), until I finally admitted and accepted that there was no irony in my rocking out to Toto’s “Africa”. So I was pretty psyched when this documentary came out, although a little wary.

You see, I’m a huge fan of late 1990s/early 2000s VH-1 when they were airing pop culture countdowns, I Love The … specials, and a lot of Behind the Music. However, there were a number of those shows where the panelists/talking heads were comedians whose job was not to talk about the topic at hand but to offer up snarky commentary. You didn’t really like “This is It”, did you? No. It’s cheesy and you can make silly jokes at its expense.

That became the norm for those shows and the quality dropped off pretty quickly. Going into this movie, I was worried that was going to be the case. Thankfully, I was proven wrong. The documentary is an exploration of the genre’s history and an appreciation for it. Yes, there’s some serious cheese in places–you cannot look at 1970s variety show performances and not chuckle at least a little–but for the most part, I watched this film and appreciated the music. Plus, it made me want to listen to it (and I blasted “Africa” while driving home from lunch this afternoon). It’s fun as well and a definite Watch.

I don’t know what my next set of flicks is going to be after I whittle down my list. Hopefuly they’re worth the stream, though.