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MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – It’s time for summer movies in downtown Middletown.

The Middletown Area Merchants Association is presenting the summer “Movies in the Park” once again, and is kicking off the season with a showing of “Ralph Breaks the Internet” on Saturday, June 8.

The film begins at dusk in the park in front of the Middletown Senior Center and Library, 21266 Calistoga Road.

The film is free and open to the public, and suitable for the whole family.

Bring chairs, blankets and a picnic.

The June film is hosted by Jesus Christ Fellowship Church and sponsored by Hardester’s Markets and Hardware.
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The landscape for broadcast network television keeps changing as more and more viewers seek choices outside of the traditional schedule.

Video-on-demand and online streaming are great options for personal convenience.

Streaming services, including most prominently Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, are programming so many original shows that the marketplace is being flooded with content that continues to undermine the heretofore supremacy of the big networks.

The FOX network, just like its counterparts at CBS, NBC and ABC, is feeling the effects of diminishing returns on the programming of new scripted series. Networks are looking more to sports and other live material.

Beginning on Oct. 4, FOX won’t be filling its evening time slots with original series. Instead, “WWE’s SmackDown Live” takes over as a two-hour live event that will air 52 weeks a year.

The “SmackDown” offers fans what is called in a press release a “unique combination of edge-of-your-seat action, unpredictable drama and world-class athleticism.” The public relations department is certainly creative with its choice of words.

The network is apparently banking on the history of “SmackDown” launching the careers of pop-culture icons Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena, Undertaker, Tripe H, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and The Bella Twins. Who are the next big wrestling celebrities?

Even if networks cut back on new series, the FOX fall season has three new shows on the docket. “Prodigal Son,” airing on Monday nights following “9-1-1,” is a fresh take on a crime franchise with a provocative and outrageous lead character and a darkly comedic tone

Tom Payne (seen in “The Walking Dead”) stars as the son of a convicted serial killer (Michael Sheen “Masters of Sex”), who has made hunting murderers his life’s work. Other stars in the series include Lou Diamond Phillips and Bellamy Young.

Following “The Masked Singer” on Wednesday nights, “Not Just Me” is a dramatic story of an unusual family formed through extreme odds, exploring such hot-button issues as identity, human connection and what it truly means to be a family.

Brittany Snow’s only child finds her life turned upside down when her father (Timothy Hutton) reveals that, over the course of his prize-winning career as a pioneering fertility doctor, he used his own sperm to conceive upwards of a hundred children, including two new sisters.

As these three young women (including Emily Osment and Megalyn Echikunwoke) slowly embrace their new reality, they will attempt to form an untraditional bond as sisters, even as they must welcome a tidal wave of new siblings into their rapidly expanding family.

Bookended on Sunday nights between “The Simpsons” and “Bob’s Burgers,” the new animated comedy “Bless the Harts” joins the cartoon lineup that includes “Family Guy” as the last half-hour show of the night.

“Bless the Harts” follows the Harts, a Southern family that is always broke, and forever struggling to make ends meet. They one day hope to achieve the American dream, but they’re already rich – in friends, family and laughter.

The series features the voices of known actors Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph (both of whom starred in “Bridesmaids”), along with Ike Barinholtz (“Blockers”) and Mary Steenburgen (“Curb Your Enthusiasm” and a slew of movies).

Further down the line during the winter’s midseason, “9-1-1” expands its reach to the city of Austin, Texas with a special two-hour night event, following the NFL’s NFC Championship game, in “9-1-1: Lone Star.”

Rob Lowe (“The West Wing”) stars as a sophisticated New York police officer who, along with his son, relocates to Austin and must try to balance saving those who are at their most vulnerable with solving the problems in his own life.

On the midseason schedule is “Deputy” which brings the spirit of a classic Western and a gritty authenticity to the modern cop drama. When the Los Angeles County Sheriff dies, an arcane rule forged back in the Wild West thrusts the most unlikely man into the job.

The new sheriff in town is a fifth-generation lawman (Stephen Dorff), more comfortable taking down bad guys than navigating a sea of politics and who won’t rest until justice is served.

“Filthy Rich” is a southern Gothic family drama in which wealth, power and religion collide. Gerald McRaney is the patriarch of a mega-rich Southern family, famed for creating a wildly successful Christian television network.

When the patriarch dies in a plane crash, his wife (Kim Cattrall) and family are stunned to learn he fathered three illegitimate children, all of whom are written into his will, threatening their family name and fortune.

Not uncommon to the soap opera genre, “Filthy Rich” presents a world in which everyone has an ulterior motive and no one is going down without a fight. Shades of “Dynasty,” “Dallas,” and any other primetime show featuring the family squabbles of the well-to-do!

“Empire” returns for its last season in the fall. There’s no word on whether Jussie Smollett is coming back. He may have to stage another late night mugging outside a sandwich shop just to get noticed.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
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Ted Kooser. Photo credit: UNL Publications and Photography.

I don't suppose there are many of our younger readers who have started to worry about the possibility of memory loss, but I'd guess almost everybody over fifty does. Peter Schneider lives in Massachusetts and this is from his book Line Fence, from Amherst Writers and Artists Press.

Lost in Plain Sight

Somewhere recently
I lost my short-term memory.
It was there and then it moved
like the flash of a red fox
along a line fence.

My short-term memory
has no address but here
no time but now.
It is a straight-man, waiting to speak
to fill in empty space
with name, date, trivia, punch line.
And then it fails to show.

It is lost, hiding somewhere out back
a dried ragweed stalk on the Kansas Prairie
holding the shadow of its life
against a January wind.

How am I to go on?
I wake up a hundred times a day.
Who am I waiting for
what am I looking for
why do I have this empty cup
on the porch or in the yard?
I greet my neighbor, who smiles.
I turn a slow, lazy Susan
in my mind, looking for
some clue, anything to break the spell
of being lost in plain sight.

American Life in Poetry does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. It is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2006 by Peter Schneider, "Lost in Plain Sight," from Line Fence, (Amherst Writers and Artists Press, 2006). Poem reprinted by permission of Peter Schneider and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2019 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
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Ted Kooser. Photo credit: UNL Publications and Photography.

Austin Smith lives in rural Illinois and is an acute observer of the world at hand.This poem is from his book Flyover Country, published by Princeton University Press.

Cat Moving Kittens

We must have known,
Even as we reached
Down to touch them
Where we'd found them

Shut-eyed and trembling
Under a straw bale
In the haymow, that
She would move them

That night under cover
Of darkness, and that
By finding them
We were making certain

We wouldn't see them again
Until we saw them
Crouching under the pickup
Like sullen teens, having gone

As wild by then as they'd gone
Still in her mouth that night
She made a decision
Any mother might make

Upon guessing the intentions
Of the state: to go and to
Go now, taking everything
You love between your teeth.

American Life in Poetry does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. It is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2018 by Princeton University Press, "Cat Moving Kittens," from Flyover Country by Austin Smith, (Princeton University Press, 2018). Poem reprinted by permission of Austin Smith and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2019 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
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Judy Garland and James Mason star in the 1954 classic, “A Star Is Born.” Courtesy photo.


LAKEPORT, Calif. – The 1954 musical drama, “A Star Is Born,” starring Judy Garland and James Mason, screens at the Soper Reese Theatre on Tuesday, June 11, at 1 and 6 p.m.

Entry to the film is by donation.

Directed by George Cukor with score by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, this is a film of grand scope and intimate moments, featuring what most critics believe to be Garland's greatest performance.

It’s a dark, weighty fable of the price one pays to be at the top, a theme that is given ironic significance by what would become Garland’s own real life experiences.

The film was nominated for six Academy Awards.

The movie is sponsored by Classic Film Fans. Rated PG. Run time is 2 hours and 55 minutes.

The Soper Reese Theatre is located at 275 S. Main St., Lakeport, 707-263-0577, www.soperreesetheatre.com .
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JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 – PARABELLUM (Rated R)

The “John Wick” franchise has provided Keanu Reeves with the perfect opportunity to seamlessly merge his cinematic persona with the taciturn intensity of the titular character letting action speak louder than words.

Reeves’ assassin John Wick, who wanted to be left alone to seek a quiet life in which to remember his wife, re-entered the killing fields in the first film when mob-connected Russian thugs cruelly killed his beloved dog.

Since then, and more so now with “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum,” Wick has seemingly dispatched more bad guys to their deaths than what feels like the cumulative total of the body count in all of the James Bond, Jason Bourne, and “Rambo” films combined.

There is no exaggeration to the analogy that “John Wick 3” is running on adrenaline-fueled action so overheated that the film’s pace moves like a race car redlining to maximum speed.

At the end of the previous film, Wick killed an Italian mobster at the Continental hotel, a sanctuary for assassins where the unbreakable rule of the underworld is that no blood may be shed on the premises.

The third installment picks up with Wick having only an hour before he is declared in the words of Winston (Ian McShane), the Continental’s manager, to be “excommunicado” with a $14 million bounty on his head.

The code of the underworld is governed by the High Table, a council of high-ranking crime lords, who mete out their own brand of justice, sending the Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon) as the enigmatic messenger of their decisions.

Desperately running through rainy streets, Wick ends up in the New York Public Library only to be attacked in the stacks by a towering giant (NBA player Boban Marjanovic) in a fight settled by the imaginative use of a classic book.

The streets are so perilous that it almost seems as if every other random person is a contract killer eager for a big payday. In no time, Wick is chased through alleys and subways, ending up in a stable before riding a horse across a bridge pursued by a deadly motorcycle gang.

Not everyone has turned on Wick, though even the doctor who tends to his wounds fears that he cannot hide his transgression from enforcers of the High Table’s dictates.

Less concerned is the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), who dares to render assistance to the fugitive assassin, convinced, perhaps foolishly, that his turf is safe from any meddling by the cabal of crime lords.

Reverting to his Belarusian roots, Wick calls in a marker with the inscrutable Director (Anjelica Huston), his former mentor who now trains ballerinas and martial artists, so that he can get safe passage to Casablanca.

Once in Morocco, his old colleague Sofia (Halle Berry), who runs the local branch of the Continental, is less than happy to see a wanted man to whom she owes a favor, but she does oblige in a big way.

Wick’s quest is to find the leader of the High Table in order to negotiate his return to the good graces of the ranks of professional killers, for peace of mind and to set foot on the Continental grounds once again.

With the help of Sofia and her pair of vicious German shepherds, Wick visits Berrada (Jerome Flynn), a power broker who can reveal the location of the High Table hideaway of the Elder (Said Taghmaoui).

But before trekking across the Saharan desert to see the Elder, a pitched battle with Berrada’s turban-wearing minions pits Wick, Sofia and the canines in another wild set piece of deadly confrontation.

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan the Adjudicator is delivering punishment to those who dared help Wick to escape New York and enlisting the sushi-chef Zero (Mark Dacascos), a skilled knife fighter, for the climactic bloody skirmish.

Fittingly, the setting of the final showdown is inside the Continental, where first of all Winston and the hotel’s unflappable concierge Charon (Lance Reddick) must choose sides between Wick and the High Table’s army of warriors.

Above all, Wick understands that “parabellum” is part of a Latin adage that translates into “prepare for war,” and he is always ready to employ his lethal skills for the next challenge even when having to cleverly improvise with whatever can be used as weapons.

Keanu Reeves’s John Wick is an unstoppable force of nature, his fight scenes choreographed so brilliantly that “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum” is the most operatic of action films in recent memory, if not ever.

It takes much more than well-orchestrated fighting movements on the part of Keanu Reeves to make the “John Wick” franchise so exciting. The actor inhabits the role so perfectly that he is truly indispensable and irreplaceable to its success.

Fans of the “John Wick” franchise are going to be thrilled with the spectacular stunts and the surfeit of breathless fights with guns, swords, and the martial arts, even when a few scenes are shockingly brutal and gruesome.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

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