Julie Willis
Judy Carne
Julie Willis
Love on a Rooftop
5.0
1966
1 Season • 30 Episodes
Comedy
Overview
Newlyweds Dave and Julie Willis struggle to survive in San Francisco on Dave's apprentice architect's salary of $85.37 a week. Matters are complicated by Julie's rich father, who doesn't approve of their less than luxurious lifestyle and often takes it upon himself to try to improve it, much to Dave's chagrin.
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Reviews
✦ AI-generated review
The Bright Solipsism of July
The shadows are what stick with you. Long before the lasers start firing or the White House gets turned into flaming toothpicks, Roland Emmerich’s *Independence Day* hooks the audience with that slow, oppressive darkness creeping across the world's most famous landmarks. The whole thing actually began with a throwaway remark. During the *Stargate* press tour, a reporter asked about aliens; Emmerich said he didn't believe in them, but then started riffing on what it would feel like to see fifteen-mile-wide ships parked over our cities. That single 'what if' changed the DNA of the summer blockbuster forever. It’s anything but subtle. Emmerich acts like a hype man for the apocalypse, forcing our gaze toward a scale of destruction that literally swallows the sun.
Take that moment when the clouds start to churn and split. The movie isn't in a rush here; it lets a wall of atmospheric fire peel back to show the jagged, metal bellies of those massive destroyers. You can feel the weight of them. Since Emmerich mixed old-school miniatures with early digital work, the ships have a physical presence that modern CGI often lacks—they seem to drag the air down with them. And when the cities start to go, it's not some weightless digital blur. The fire surges through the streets of New York and D.C. like a flood of molten liquid, flipping cars and crushing skyscrapers with a sound you can almost feel in your teeth.
Roger Ebert famously pointed out the total absurdity of the physics in his original review. He mentioned that an object that massive sitting in low-Earth orbit should have triggered massive tidal waves just by existing, even without the lasers. I’ve always appreciated that point because it gets to the heart of what kind of movie this is. Emmerich wasn't trying to pass a physics exam. He was staging the world's biggest fireworks show, happily ditching science for the visceral shock of looking up at a sky made entirely of hostile machinery.
All the spectacle only lands because we care about the people on the ground looking back up. Will Smith’s turn as Captain Steven Hiller is the moment everything changed for his career. Before the summer of 1996, most people still basically knew him as the *Fresh Prince*—that lanky kid from the neon sitcom. In this movie, he finds a new center of gravity. He carries himself differently, with squared shoulders and a walk that feels earned. But he never loses that sharp comic edge. Think of him dragging that slimy alien through the desert by its parachute, kicking it and grumbling about a ruined barbecue. In that one dusty, grueling scene, you’re watching a TV personality transform into a legitimate movie star. He grounds the alien invasion in something as simple as human frustration.
Then there's Jeff Goldblum, leaning into his frantic, brainy persona while tapping away at a bulky PowerBook to take down an alien mothership. Opposite him, Bill Pullman gives us a President Whitmore who looks genuinely beaten down by the end of the world. For most of the movie, Pullman is slumped and exhausted, his eyes bagged and his tie hanging loose. But then he picks up that megaphone on the runway. He finally stands tall, his voice shaking at first before turning into a full-on command. It’s a speech so ridiculously earnest it should be cheesy, but Pullman is so committed to the bit that you buy every single word of it.
At its core, the movie is a pure American power fantasy. It’s the idea that if the world actually faced extinction, we’d all just drop our baggage and team up—with the U.S. military leading the charge, of course. How you feel about that probably depends on how much 90s flag-waving you can stomach. If you stop to think about the politics for even a minute, the whole logic falls apart. But as a piece of pure pop-culture myth, it still hits hard. It turns the apocalypse into something entertaining and gives us that comforting, slightly dumb hope that we can just punch our way out of the darkness.
The shadows are what stick with you. Long before the lasers start firing or the White House gets turned into flaming toothpicks, Roland Emmerich’s *Independence Day* hooks the audience with that slow, oppressive darkness creeping across the world's most famous landmarks. The whole thing actually began with a throwaway remark. During the *Stargate* press tour, a reporter asked about aliens; Emmerich said he didn't believe in them, but then started riffing on what it would feel like to see fifteen-mile-wide ships parked over our cities. That single 'what if' changed the DNA of the summer blockbuster forever. It’s anything but subtle. Emmerich acts like a hype man for the apocalypse, forcing our gaze toward a scale of destruction that literally swallows the sun.
Take that moment when the clouds start to churn and split. The movie isn't in a rush here; it lets a wall of atmospheric fire peel back to show the jagged, metal bellies of those massive destroyers. You can feel the weight of them. Since Emmerich mixed old-school miniatures with early digital work, the ships have a physical presence that modern CGI often lacks—they seem to drag the air down with them. And when the cities start to go, it's not some weightless digital blur. The fire surges through the streets of New York and D.C. like a flood of molten liquid, flipping cars and crushing skyscrapers with a sound you can almost feel in your teeth.
Roger Ebert famously pointed out the total absurdity of the physics in his original review. He mentioned that an object that massive sitting in low-Earth orbit should have triggered massive tidal waves just by existing, even without the lasers. I’ve always appreciated that point because it gets to the heart of what kind of movie this is. Emmerich wasn't trying to pass a physics exam. He was staging the world's biggest fireworks show, happily ditching science for the visceral shock of looking up at a sky made entirely of hostile machinery.
All the spectacle only lands because we care about the people on the ground looking back up. Will Smith’s turn as Captain Steven Hiller is the moment everything changed for his career. Before the summer of 1996, most people still basically knew him as the *Fresh Prince*—that lanky kid from the neon sitcom. In this movie, he finds a new center of gravity. He carries himself differently, with squared shoulders and a walk that feels earned. But he never loses that sharp comic edge. Think of him dragging that slimy alien through the desert by its parachute, kicking it and grumbling about a ruined barbecue. In that one dusty, grueling scene, you’re watching a TV personality transform into a legitimate movie star. He grounds the alien invasion in something as simple as human frustration.
Then there's Jeff Goldblum, leaning into his frantic, brainy persona while tapping away at a bulky PowerBook to take down an alien mothership. Opposite him, Bill Pullman gives us a President Whitmore who looks genuinely beaten down by the end of the world. For most of the movie, Pullman is slumped and exhausted, his eyes bagged and his tie hanging loose. But then he picks up that megaphone on the runway. He finally stands tall, his voice shaking at first before turning into a full-on command. It’s a speech so ridiculously earnest it should be cheesy, but Pullman is so committed to the bit that you buy every single word of it.
At its core, the movie is a pure American power fantasy. It’s the idea that if the world actually faced extinction, we’d all just drop our baggage and team up—with the U.S. military leading the charge, of course. How you feel about that probably depends on how much 90s flag-waving you can stomach. If you stop to think about the politics for even a minute, the whole logic falls apart. But as a piece of pure pop-culture myth, it still hits hard. It turns the apocalypse into something entertaining and gives us that comforting, slightly dumb hope that we can just punch our way out of the darkness.