Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.16

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.

Promised Land (2012) — 9/10

Matt Damon and Frances McDormand are fracking-company representatives, combing the midlands of America to buy up land rights. They are extremely sleazy salespeople, unwinding a giant line of bullshit just to get the agreements their company needs. They dress up in “local” clothes (which fools no-one) and promise state-of-the-art high schools from tax revenues and potential millions in individual returns, all delivered to desperate, desperate people primed to hear what they want—what they need—to hear. It’s also obvious that the class divide plays an enormous role: when you promise a community that they could get $15 to 20 million, they think that that’s a tremendous amount of money, but it’s nothing to the company, even to the salespeople.

After threatening the town supervisor with utter destitution if he doesn’t get on board, Steve (Damon) meets Alice (a local teacher) in a bar and takes on a serious drinking challenge, waking up in her house the next morning. Steve is starting to get into this little community. Hal Holbrook is also a local teacher and he’s dead-set against fracking. The town meeting does not go Steve’s way and they decide to vote in 3 weeks’ time.

Sue (McDormand), Steve’s sales partner, is furious. She can’t believe he let the deal slip away like that. She doesn’t seem to care about damage to the environment, or what the truth about fracking is, it’s “just a job to her”—selling out the lives of dozens of thousands of people—so that she can go home to her son. She throws away all of those lives for just her precious son.

This is the face of evil. The prosaic, inexorable evil that people do, just to make sure their own future is more certain. She must know on some level that these communities are going to go bankrupt and become cancer clusters. She doesn’t care. Her son is the only thing that matters. That what she does is unethical or immoral doesn’t matter. And Steve’s really no better. This part is really well-done: with the company telling them “it’s all or nothing” to push them to sell and commit leases for all of the other landholders. They are now in panic mode and any misgivings are also cleared away as they work to save their own skins/jobs.

An environmentalist Dustin Noble (John Krasinski) shows up to team up with Yates (Holbrook). Rob (Titus Welliver), the proprietor of Guns, Gas, Guitars and Groceries starts playing Sue while Alice keeps playing Steve. It’s tough to figure out who’s going to play who here. The environmentalist beats them at their own game on open-mic night, so Steve and Sue confront him when he gets back to his motel. They threaten him, telling him that he “doesn’t know what he’s dealing with”, then try to bribe him. He takes the money and has a bunch of Global Go Home signs made.

Dustin continues to convince the town while Steve and Sue continue to try to shore up their position. Steve at least seems to feel bad about having spent only $5,000/15% on one guy’s 1.8 acres while Sue laughs about how he’s getting “free money”. The arrogance is perfect. The next guy Steve talks to tells him,

“See Steve, you and I both know that the only reason you’re here is we’re poor. How many wells y’all got up there in Manhattan? Or Pittsburgh? What about Philadelphia? It’s OK. I get it. That’s what us folks are here for, right? Listen Steve, you ain’t gonna get what you came here to take from me. And, to be honest, I don’t even like the fact that you’re here tryin’. You can see yourself out.”

Steve faces down some local farmers at a bar and he gives them a full-on Gordon Gecko speech and he gets knocked out for his trouble. “Asshole.” Steve comes up with the idea to have a town fair. Dustin tips his hat to that before leaving for a night out with Alice, who Steve also had his eye on. Steve and Sue put in a ton of work—with the help of Rob from GGG&G and his friends—but it rains buckets and no-one shows up. Frank (Holbrook) picks them up out of the rain (their car won’t start, again) and feeds them. Steve is really having second thoughts.

He gets a package from Global showing that Dustin’s back-story is bullshit—he’s ruined and the story will get out and the town will vote against him. Steve finds out that Dustin actually works for Global—nefarious plot twist, by the way—and that Dustin was sent to give Steve the lever he needs. It’s not about right and wrong, right? It’s about winning.

It’s great seeing Damon and McDormand play against character, against who they are in real life. Written by Krasinski and Damon. Recommended.

Yellowbrickroad (2010) — 8/10

A group of seven people from different fields meet to investigate a trail up which an entire town walked in 1940, only to disappear forever. The leader of the group tells them that they are taking part in “turning a legend into recorded history”. The guy at the movie theater where they think the trailhead is (back in 1940, of course), asks them “what are you guys? Retarded hikers?” I’m hoping the movie goes in the first direction, but fear it will go in the second.

The trailhead is not in the movie theater, but Teddy finally gets someone from the town to reveal some more information. It’s New Hampshire and the accents are nice and thick.

They head up the road, mapping as they go. After about 65 miles, they start to hear music, the music of the cinema, but from 1940. Were the original walkers seeking a wizard, perhaps? Following the yellow brick road to get their wishes granted? More days of travel and the music stops. They push on, but grow dispirited, demoralized.

They throw a party for themselves, drinking and dancing in the dark, dank woods. Soon after, their native guide (she’s from the town of Friar) confesses that she knows why the walkers walked. The next morning, the music starts again. They press on, hiking and driving their 6x6 (how does it still have fuel?). One couple starts to fight and it escalates drastically, to the point where the husband slaughters his wife.

This movie is pretty freaking scary, at least the first 40 minutes of it. The eeriness is very Stephen King-like—with the blaring, source-less music in the middle of the deepest woods—as is the first part of the fight, the escalation. But, once the slaughter starts, it gets a bit campy. That music, though.

None of their scientific instruments work correctly anymore. The GPS is dead, the compasses useless. The sightings and numbers they logged tell odd stories of mismatching distances traveled. They try to flee. The music becomes a physical assault. Their path takes them north anyway.

In front of a giant pile of brush, they find the body of the woman from their party who was killed, tied up on a post to look like a ghoulish scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. They can’t figure out how to get home. It gets cold. The murderer steals their jeep, things get very surreal. Teddy leaves to go north over the brush-wall. The rest continue what they think is west. They’re all walking around as if stunned or high or both.

Cy confesses to Liv that “It’s happening to me, too, what happened to Daryl. […] If the music keeps up and we don’t find a town soon, I’m going to do something to you that’s unspeakable. […] I’ve been thinking about it for miles…all the things I’m gonna do”. This is very, very much like Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, with minds being twisted by otherworldly forces. As Ted crawls closer to the end of the road, the music crescendos hellishly and then stops. He is back at the cinema. Liv lies in the woods on her back, revealing nothing about why they all walked. Recommended.

Lola (1981) — 8/10

Not one minute in and I’ve already learned a new dirty word in German.[1] This is a bawdy, drunken movie about Lola, a brothel worker. It’s directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and is the second in his “economic miracle” trilogy. It stars Armin Mueller-Stahl as Von Bohm, who falls in love with Lola (Barbara Sukowa, who is stunning) without knowing her profession. Karin Baal (also quite striking) as her mother is also very good as she manages the relationship. Udo Kier also appears briefly as a waiter. Mario Adorf as Schukert is a giant presence. The film follows the blossoming relationship between Lola and Bohm.

There was a dinner scene where Schukert’s wife very loudly declaimed that the dinner was “inventive”, not “good”, but “inventive”. Then she asked whether the host’s cook was from “around here”. He answered that she was from elsewhere in Germany, to which the harpy responded that “the influx of refugees has led to an enrichment of Germany’s kitchen culture but sometimes it’s just … inventive.” So nice to see the racism stretching way back over 35 years. One of the other guest’s responds “Was den Bauern nicht kennt” and Schukert finished “das frisst er nicht!” Schukert apologizes for her, but she keeps right on coming, asking questions about the housekeeper in the third-person right in front of her. I’m not sure how to translate “bitch on wheels”, but alte Drache seems almost too tame.

Poor Von Bohm discovers that the girl for whom he’s bought an engagement ring is Lola, “meine Privathure” as Schukert calls her. He finds out at her club, where Schukert has taken him out for a drink. Von Bohm wanders off in a daze. Schukert parades Lola around the club on his shoulders. Von Bohm declares war first on Schukert then on the entire society in which a man like Schukert—der parfümierte Teufel—can become so rich. He aims to destroy everything, to tear down the whole dirty, capitalist system where the poor are exploited by the rich for a few crumbs. Replacing capitalism with socialism, in other words.

When he sees that no-one else cares, he gives up, gives in, goes to the brothel get Lola, pays for all the extras, drunk and suffering. He capitulates entirely, getting Schukert to help him marry Lola. Schukert even gives them the brothel for a wedding gift. The system goes on, life goes on. And Schukert mustn’t even to forgo his baby-mama/Privathur: he’s immediately in the bedroom with Lola as von Bohm takes a post-marital constitutional.

This movie is basically about the corruptibility of man and perhaps the futility of even trying to do anything good. It’s very existentialist. It’s wonderfully acted and wonderfully filmed. A dark comedy. Saw it in German. Recommended.

The Skin I Live In (2011) — 8/10

This movie is told non-sequentially, with flashbacks. Antonio Banderas stars as an off-kilter plastic surgeon named Robert working in Madrid. He is interested in developing improved skin-grafting technology because his wife was killed in a flaming car accident. He has another woman living in his home, trapped, under surveillance, away from the world, in a room wallpapered in yoga poses and cryptic admonitions written in a cramped script. She swears fealty to him, but he is a bit of an odd bird. He also lives with his mother, who tells him that his “this one also has to die.”

This balance is disturbed by the appearance of the mother’s other son, Zeca. He is comically dressed as a tiger for Mardi Gras. At first he seems like a harmless oaf, a perpetually down-on-his-luck black sheep loved only by his mother. He becomes more ominous when he forces himself into the house, ties up his mother, seems to recognize the trapped woman and hunts her down and rapes her. Robert walks in and shoots Zeca to death as they lie post-coital. End scene.

Next we see the good doctor lying with the woman. He dreams of six years ago. His daughter was raped at a party by Vincent. He finds out who it was a hunts the guy down, slapping his motorbike to the ground with a van at over 120kph. Vincent rolls twice and pops up unharmed (yeah right), but is darted and taken captive.

The good doctor keeps him captive for a long time before deciding to … transform him. Slowly but surely, with much psychological conditioning and surgery, he turns Vincent—the man who sent her spiraling into a permanent catatonia—into the captive woman we saw in the first scenes. First he transforms the genitals and instructs him/her on how to care for them. Then he works on the face, breasts, hips and more. Most of all, he perfects the skin.

The doctor is not obsessed just with revenge for his daughter’s murder, but also for the death of his wife. It was Zeca’s fault that Robert’s wife died—they’d been having an affair and were escaping in that car. That’s why Zeca attacked the woman—Robert had created a replica of his dead wife using his daughter’s attacker as raw material. To boot, Robert’s invented a fireproof skin.

Eventually Vincent breaks his chains, kills everyone and returns to his mother. And, conveniently enough, to the woman who works with his mother. She’d rejected his many advances when he was Vincent (male) because she was a lesbian. But now?…

Saw it in Spanish with German subtitles.

Michael Che Matters (2016) — 9/10

This dude is funny. Great set. Talks about living in New York, the homeless, Jesus being black and being a bad carpenter, about heaven and hell, Donald Trump being a cooler friend than Barack Obama, about pornography and violence, how women are creepy because they have sex toys, fearless white girls with pit bulls with sweaters named Nicole, white girls taking over neighborhoods, growing up poor in Harlem, which is now a rich, white neighborhood, some pretty good crowd work. A pleasant surprise. Highly recommended.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) — 7/10

The film starts off with a naked, dead woman in the woods. Then we see Harry finishing up lunch at a diner. First sign that he’s deranged: he buys a pack of Kools with his check. Menthol cigarettes are a clear sign of mental illness. Next, we see several more scenes of death interleaved with Henry driving his shitty car through Illinois (Chicago?).

Henry has a roomate, Otis. Otis’s sister Becky moves in with them. Henry and Becky get to talking over a game of cards and start one-upping one another with horror stories from their youth (a la The Four Yorkshiremen but not as funny). The next day Becky goes shopping and then at dinner that night wants to show them her new T-Shirt. It says “I <3 Chicago” on it. Henry has to ask her what it says. Otis tries to kiss his sister after browbeating her into getting him a beer. Henry intervenes. He may be stupid, but he’s not an animal like Otis.

Becky sends them out to have a drink. They—of course, because why wouldn’t you?—pick up prostitutes instead. They go first-class all the way, parking their super-beater, rusted-out car in an alley in an industrial area,Otis with one lady up front and Henry in the back with the other. Henry kills his date, then kills Otis’s when she tries to scream. Otis is mortified, but doesn’t even consider turning Henry in.

Quite the contrary. When Otis breaks their TV, they go “shopping” for a new TV at a fence, then end up killing him when he gets pissed that they only have $50 to spend. They team up to kill him and steal a camcorder and color television. Otis gets a taste for it and Henry takes him out on the town to kill some random guy. Henry tries to teach Otis the ways of the serial killer: don’t leave a pattern, don’t leave a trail, keep moving. Henry suddenly seems much more intelligent, crafty, especially for a guy that can’t read.

They take their show on the road, taking the camcorder with them. Otis takes to this life like a fish to water. Henry plays out the line, staying more stoic versus Otis’s fevered enthusiasm. Otis and Henry have a falling-out because Otis is too out-of-control. Henry and Becky don’t have a falling-out, but Otis interrupts them. Henry was looking distinctly uncomfortable anyway. He goes for a walk, stopping to talk to a lady who uses wordplay and sarcasm—woooosh, right over his head.

Henry comes back to the apartment to find Otis having his way with his sister, pinning her face-down to the floor. Henry kicks him off of her. Otis gets the best of him and is about to stab him when Becky stabs Otis in the eye. Henry leaps on Otis and finishes the job as Becky looks on. The door to the hallway is open the whole time. The neighbors are really lenient, I guess. With all the screaming, you’d think someone would have hit the ceiling with a broom handle. Anyway, Henry chops up the body and they flee the scene, disposing of the parts in a garbage bag over the side of a bridge. Otis deserved no more than that.

They stop at a motel. Henry is uncompromising in his philosophy. Only Henry wakes up. Becky ends up in a piece of luggage by the side of the highway.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) — 10/10

Joel and Ethan Coen wrote and directed another lovely movie, full of interesting dialogue, subtle twists and colorful characters. Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a down-on-his-luck folk singer who’s just scraping by. He plays at a “basket” club, where the performers play for a part of the basket of money collected from the crowd. He goes out in the back to see a man looking for him. There he gets the crap kicked out of him for heckling another performer while very drunk the night prior.

He needs money so badly that, even when he gets a gig, he takes the $200 and forgoes royalties. You know he’s going to regret it. But that’s OK, because you get the feeling that he regrets everything. He’s a bit of music snob, looking down his nose at any music that’s not done for art’s sake. It’s hard to take him seriously seeing as how bad at life he is.

He crashes at a friend’s place, then lets the friend’s cat out by mistake. He carries the cat on the subway to the village, where he tries to crash with friends, a folk-singer couple, the wife Jean (Carey Mulligan) with whom he’s slept and possibly knocked up. Bob (the husband, Justin Timberlake) doesn’t know. Either way, they’re not thrilled to see Llewyn again. His agent’s a hack with no faith in him. He crashes at an even dumpier place with a guy he just met that morning while he tries to figure out where he can scape up the cash for the abortion (no pun intended).

While he’s chatting with Jean, he sees the cat sail by the diner and tears off to catch it. When he does, he says, “boy, am I one lucky bastard.” I think this says a lot about Davis’s own view of what an outside observer would consider a very precarious position.

We finally meet his friends, the Gorfeins and they’re having a dinner party. They are an odd bunch, as you’d expect. Ethan Philips plays Gorfein (I last saw him on Benson in the 80s). They ask Llewyn to play guitar, but it goes south and he flies off the handle. This is a very dark comedy. The wife flees the room, only to discover that Davis brought back the wrong cat.[2] This dark comedy gets only funnier the farther he falls.

The next chapter finds Llewyn taking that ride out of town to Chicago because he has nowhere else to go. The wrong cat goes with him. There he meets Roland Turner (John Goodman).

Turner: Grown man with a cat. Is that part of you act?
Davis: No.
Turner: What’d you say you played?
Davis: Folk songs.
Turner: Folk songs. Thought you said you were a musician. Folk singer with a cat. (pauses) You queer?
Davis: Look, it’s not my cat. I just didn’t know what to do with it.
Turner: So, did you bring your dick along, too?

The conversations on the ride to Chicago are magic.

Turner: In jazz, we play all the notes. Scale has twelve notes not just three chords on a ukulele. (drones) C-G-C-D-C-G-C. Well, if you make a living at it, more power to you.[3] (pauses) Solo act?
Davis: Yeah, now.
Turner: Now? Used to…what? Play with the cat? Every time you play a C major, he’d puke up a hairball?
Davis: I used to have a partner.
Turner: What happened?
Davis: Threw himself off the George Washington Bridge.
Turner: (long pause) Well, shit, I don’t blame him. I couldn’t take it either, having to play Jimmy Cracked Corn every night.

We were all thinking it.

The Coen brothers’ eye is so good, their framing and pacing so good. They’re so manipulative, too. when circumstances lead Davis to be trapped in a car with the cat and Turner (who’s passed out, on the nod) and no car keys, he stares for a long while at the cat, then leaves them both. But we’re twisted into caring that he abandoned a cat he barely knew rather than a fellow human being, a fellow musician.

He gets to Chicago, and meets Mr. Grossman (F. Murray Abraham). Another burst-out-laughing moment. Davis sings a sad, sad but poignant and touching, nearly a-cappella song for Grossman. When he finishes, it’s a beautiful moment, the room still echoes with his soft, yet full voice. Grossman says, “I don’t see a lot of money here.”

Davis leaves Chicago, hitching a ride back. He drives throw a snowstorm while the other guy sleeps. Drives past Akron, where he knows he has a kid. Sees the cat. Slams on the brakes. It’s not the cat. He’s hit a fox. He sees it, by moonlight, hobbling back into the woods, most likely mortally wounded.

Back in New York, he decided to fall back on his seaman’s license (Master’s Mate and Pilot) and probably give up on music for a while. But his sister threw out his papers and he’s now flat broke because he can’t get his dues back. He’s playing the Gaslight again, for his friend Pappi (Max Casella), who’s a delightful pig of a man. He heckles a performer, deep in his cups and is thrown out. He plays the next night. Again, his performance is soul-wrenching and passionate but he barely seems to notice how good he actually is. He goes out the back to meet a man who wants to see him…Davis cannot escape. The only difference this time is he played a different song, one his long-time partner used to sing.

Highly recommended.

Reggie Watts: Spatial (2016) — 8/10

I’d only ever seen short clips of Watts before. The last thing I would have expected to say after seeing this special was: Reggie Watts has a really nice singing voice. His voice in general is a finely tuned instrument. He dons and remove accents like hats. His humor and act is far less a classic stand-up than a vaudeville show. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I would have rated it higher, but some of the material was a bit flat. The songs were outta sight, though. He’s very talented and his slips of the tongue are very much on purpose, I think. I can’t remember the line now, but I remember him saying a word with an “m” in it rather than a “w” … he misspoke it upside-down. That had to be on purpose.

Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (de, 1982) — 8/10

This is the third in the series Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “economic miracle” trilogy, this time in black & white. The cast is almost completely different—the jocular American G.I. played by Günther Kaufmann is back for the third time[4] and Armin Mueller-Stahl makes another appearance as Veronika’s ex-husband—but the feel is similar: a woman lost in her sins, this time heroin-addiction. Pills, booze, the works. Veronika is a fading actress—she once had an affair with Goebbels, culture minister under Hitler—who doesn’t want to face reality. It’s unclear whether she even knows how. Her behavior is very erratic, but that doesn’t stop sports journalist Robert from getting close to her, even from becoming her lover.

Veronika keeps returning to her doctor, who keeps her well-supplied with morphine, but also keeps her on a tight leash. Robert grows suspicious. At the doctor’s office there is always a radio on and there is always American music or radio programs playing. The G.I. shows up again, at breakfast. He seems to work at the clinic. In one scene where Veronika claims she will start working again, the doctor tells her to stop being ridiculous, the G.I. is in the background, counting morphine ampules and singing “sold my soul to the company store” to himself. All the time, something like a disco ball is throwing shards of light all over the all-white room.

Veronika is forced by her pride and lack of liquid cash to go to her casting call without a fix. It goes catastrophically badly. Her ex-husband and Robert both watch it unfold, then meet up later, with the ex-husband sympathizing with Robert’s love for her. They get deep into their cups at a bar, where a similar light effect splashes across them. They are nearly blind-drunk and discussing Veronika’s “problem”.

Robert vows to rescue her and bring down the clinic. His partner goes undercover as a rich, ennui-ridden lady who would like a morphine prescription. She calls from a public booth near the clinic, the doctor’s assistant sees her and hurries out to mow her down with a car. Robert rushes to the clinic with the police to demand retribution, to prove that the clinic prescribes morphine. Instead, there is no proof; the prescription was for Baldrian/Valerian. Veronika Voss arrives on the scene, but denies even knowing Robert more than as a passing acquaintance.

Next, we see Veronika singing Memories are Made of This (YouTube) with piano accompaniment in a husky, German-tinted, Marlena-Dietrich–style. Chills. Next, she’s in a clinic, looking like at death’s door. Then we see the doctor taking her out to a party where Robert and her ex-husband are also in attendance. Her downward spiral is not complete, but it is inexorable.