Agent Palmer

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A group of friends reconnects for the weekend after the attempted suicide of their friend Alex.

Ok, so it’s not The Big Chill, but About Alex is close, so close in fact that it may well just be The Millennial Big Chill. For those who enjoyed The Big Chill, the word “millennial” in front of it is not a detractor of the quality of the writing or the similar plot, but it does lead to some big shoes to fill in this timeshifted movie.

It feels like I have known Tim Matheson my whole life. The man is the voice of Jonny Quest, the actor behind Eric “Otter” Stratton, and Vice President John Hoynes. In between and since, I’ve seen him in Miami for Burn Notice and as an old curmudgeonly Doc in Virgin River.

Generally speaking these are my connections and touchstones to Matheson and his career. I thought, therefore, that I knew what I was heading for when I cracked the pages of “Damn Glad to Meet You: My Seven Decades in the Hollywood Trenches.”

If you are a regular viewer of this blog, you may be thinking to yourself, “Palmer reviewing a Coupland book about Marshall McLuhan? Hasn’t this already been done before?”

It has! Back in February of 2024, I reviewed Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland. But the thing about reading through an author’s biography is that sometimes they cover a subject more than once.

It’s easy for the uninitiated to look at Tim Minchin’s Time Machine as an odd assortment of greatest hits. But it really is an emotional and artistically brave revisiting of older material.

Minchin’s announcement on his website about the album states, “All 11 songs were written in my 20s, now reimagined and finally properly studio-recorded for the first time. Some have been played on stages all over the world, and some have barely ever been heard; some are pretty silly and some are very chill; but all are tunes that I think have stood the test of time… ish.”