Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.1

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 around 1600 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 and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

Legion S02 (2017) — 9/10

I really like the characters, the plot, the scenery, the costumes, the ambitious way of showing what life would be like for a being who can access the astral plane—timeless, ageless, positionless, all at once. The poor people surrounding such beings—clever and well-grounded and emotionally stable as they are—have no chance of staying on their feet nearly any of the time.

David (Dan Stevens) tracks Farouk (Navid Negahban)—in the form of Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) and Oliver (Jemaine Clement))—to a nightclub in the astral plane. Farouk is looking for his original body, which was captured and buried by monks of a special sect. Cary (Bill Irwin) builds an amplification chamber for David’s power, where he spends a lot of time.

The narrator (Jon Hamm) provides wonderfully animated and rendered interludes of philosophical musing in about half of the episodes.

In this one, we see Farouk manipulate everyone into thinking that he’s the good guy. He even does such a good job of it that his power reaches right through the TV and affects the viewer. But has he really changed? David begins working with him, partially because a future Syd (Rachel Keller) tells him its the only way to save the world.

The monk is infecting people with a tooth-chattering incapacitation. The monk’s death releases everyone from their entrapment. David spends an episode in Syd’s mind, exploring her past and how she grew into the person she is now. Lenny gets out of Farouk’s mind prison and shows up at Division 3. She and David piece together how she got there—in his sister Amy’s body, which Oliver and Farouk had “converted” to Lenny.

David continues exploring astral space and multiple realities and possibilities, one where he eventually becomes the richest and most powerful man in the world, another in which he’s a drugged-out conspiracy theorist, another where he’s killed in a shootout, or killed by Kerry, or living as an old, addled man cared for by Amy, or living with Amy as an addled younger man.

Farouk is confused as to why David is helping him. He travels forward to ask future Sydney why she wants David to help Farouk. It’s because she knows that David, his power, and his rage will combine to lead him to end the world. A mind-worm planted by Farouk (before he had a change of heart) continues to wreak havoc at Division 3. Eventually, they stop it, but not before it sacrifices Ptonomy’s mind. He is resurrected as part of the Vermillion.

They figure out where Farouk’s body is: it’s in a weird, ever-changing desert called Le Désolé. Everyone is involved here, with Oliver, Melanie, Lenny, and Clark working together to get everyone to the desert and set up for the final act. Farouk continues to bounce between bad and good, and hops from Oliver to Melanie. Melanie/Farouk convinces Syd that it’s hopeless and that David must be destroyed.

David and Amahl Farouk finally clash on the astral plane. Lenny shoots a giant tuning fork, which throws off all of their powers. Syd tries to shoot David because she knows what he will become. Lenny’s bullet stops that fatal bullet and David manipulates Syd’s mind before she fully recovers from the shock. Farouk knows what happened and restores Syd’s memories, turning her against David once again. Cary also sees what happened in a “replay”. David is put on trial, trapped in a cage. He blows his way out of the trap—angry that they think they could even get him to do something he doesn’t want to do—and escapes with Lenny.

Archer S12 (2021) — 8/10

Another solid entry in the long-running and seemingly indestructible series about a spy organization run by Mallory Archer (Jessica Walter) and starring her son Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin). The gang’s all here: Cheryl (Judy Greer), Pam (Amber Nash), Cyril (Chris Parnell), Lana (Aisha Taylor), Ray (Adam Reed), and Krieger (Lucky Yates). We get a minor part for Barry (Dave Willis) as well as a cameo for Ron Cadillac (Ron Leibman) in the final episode.

Leibman died a few years ago and his real-life wife Jessica Walter just died this year. This was her final episode, so the show ended with a sweet moment where Mallory retires to an island with never-ending cocktails and Ron Cadillac by her side, lying in chaise longues on the beach, looking into the sunset. Walters was able to voice the full season. The final conceit was that Sterling read the letter she’d written before she vamoosed,

“Do you remember what I told you on your very first day of training?

“You probably don’t, but it was ‘Always know where the exits are.’

“And with all the chaos and confusion of late, I thought I would fix to make my own exit, in my own time, on my own terms and in a way that I could never be found by my enemies, or all my lovesick paramours who are literally countless.,

“So I’ve decided that it’s time to pass the torch; try not to burn yourselves with it.”

The story arc of this season was that the agency had to navigate a changing world (again) and were up against a very corporate and very organized IIA (International Intelligence Agency) headed up by Fabian Kingsworth (Kayvan Novak). He has a pretty strong speech defect—he tends to pronounce Ws instead of Rs or Ls—and it’s got to be a meta-joke that no-one ever mentions it.

Ray is actually working at IIA because their snacks are amazing (and he’s not sure whether the Agency is going to survive, so he’s covering his bases). Lana is fighting with her husband Robert, who’s also the billionaire benefactor keeping the Agency alive. We find out more about Mallory’s backstory when she was an agent, teamed up with an Indian Brit agent in London. Stuff happens: Cheryl is loony, Pam is actually relatively tame compared to previous seasons, Cyril has an identity crisis because Archer is back out of the coma and Cyril is no longer awesome, Krieger is still Krieger.

Legion S03 (2018) — 9/10

“The universe acknowledges you, that you exist and that your existence is important.

“I can see that you have suffered. That people you love have suffered. And you want to know that it meant something.

“It did. It does. Nothing of value is ever lost.”

—Switch

After having declared war, David escapes and lives on the lam, amidst fervent admirers that he’s cultivated in his…erm…cult. We meet Switch, a Chinese/American/Japanese girl trained by her father to hone her time-traveling ability.

David eventually manages to hitchhike with Switch back to the point in time before his father—Professor X—fought Farouk (and thought he’d defeated him). Instead, Farouk had allowed himself to appear defeated while he piggy-backed on an even more powerful Omega-level mutant, David.

Cary and Sidney think they’re making headway, but the time-eaters are robbing them of time even very far down the continuum. David, on the other hand, is so focused on fixing “himself” rather than helping anyone else that he may be the bad guy after all? His voice sometimes sounds like the big-headed blob’s. He uses and abuses Switch, whose adulation and devotion make her nearly kill herself to help him—and he takes it. She announces “I’m home”, when she gets to Farouk’s lair and then calls him “Daddy” later—or so it appears. Legion appears, with a multiplicity of Davids, confronting Xavier in David’s mind.

Xavier and David finally see eye to eye and agree to team up, though I suppose Xavier still doesn’t like the smile on David’s face. Farouk, on the other hand, has managed to extricate his future self from the zone of timelessness Le Désolé—so it looks like it will be two on two.

Charles and modern-day Farouk square off, but this Farouk…has changed. He doesn’t want to fight anymore. He wants to convince Charles to work together to help David become a better version of himself. That is, Farouk spent thirty years inside of David and grew with him. He mellowed. He saw the error of his ways. In so doing, he damaged David nearly irreparably. Now, the new, improved Farouk wants to show the old Farouk how much better off David would be had he never been occupied by the parasite. In this way, he will redeem himself, to a degree. David will have lived twice: once with Farouk, during which Farouk terrorizes him, but also grows into the person who will travel through the astral plane—and time itself—in order to stop himself from ever having infected David in the first place.

Other stuff happens, but mainly this is about David leaving his anger behind. Switch eventually succumbs to her time-inflicted wounds, but she is buoyed by her father, who is some sort of time-lord. He shows her how to leave her mortal vessel and become a time-god herself. She dispels the time-eaters that were advancing on and plaguing Sydney, Gabriella (David’s mother), and Kerry. The time-eaters were depicted quite well, with stuttering and repetition throughout the editing to simulate the effect of time “slipping”.

Seinfeld: S01–S04 (1989–1992) — 10/10

Jerry Seinfeld, George Costanza (Jason Alexander), Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) star in this comedy set in New York, starting in 1989 and running through 1997. It is a “show about nothing”, as Seinfeld was famous for noting. Larry David co-wrote and produced the show.

The four are Manhattanites. Their major concerns are low-rent apartments, dating, and work. Each show generally follows the same structure: one of them commits an act of petty duplicity and then spends the rest of the show making it worse in attempts to make it better. It’s like watching a kid try to clean up spilled honey with a paper tissue. Especially George, but Elaine and Jerry are also masters of the craft. The most meta joke in the show is that, of Jerry and all of his friends, he, as the stand-up comedian, is the most successful and financially secure. Bits of Seinfeld’s stand-up comedy act are sprinkled throughout the show.

One of the nice things is that this format doesn’t have an overarching story arc. Things that go wrong—sometimes drastically—are either repaired by the end of the show—often without any pretense of realism, which is kind of part of the joke—or…they’re just forgotten in the next show. The central mission is laughs, not continuity, so they often sacrifice the latter.

Perhaps the most egregious of these—for the modern viewer, at least, who has been trained to expect a modicum of continuity in all forms of entertainment (e.g. video games, films, TV, comics) unless explicitly rebooted—is when, in the second season, Elaine and Jerry get back together in a serious way for a single show and then they just forget about it completely in the next show. Wonderful.

There will be some things that change, but very slowly—e.g. introducing new characters, like George’s or Elaine’s new bosses—and only if it makes the show funnier.

Jason Alexander is very good—he’s the one I remember the most. But on this full, second viewing, it is Michael Richards as Kramer who stands out as a superlative physical comedian and actor. He is completely without artifice or pretense. By the second half of the seasons, though, it is Elaine whose sharp wit shines the brightest.

Newman (Wayne Knight) makes his first appearance in S03E15. He starts to feature more prominently in a few storylines. Uncle Leo is a recurring character, as are Jerry’s parents. We met Elaine’s father one time—he’s a gruff author. We’ve only heard of George’s parents a couple of times, but they’ve yet to make an appearance.

In S04E06, Jerry does a bit about how people don’t ever want to talk to anyone on the phone, but they’re desperate to see that blinking light on the phone machine. It’s very prophetic of how we apes would adapt to the increasingly online world. To wit: nothing has changed. The bit still stands. As to why we crave that blinking light that tells us someone tried to reach us—for gens Y and Z, think the “badge” indicator on your app that tells you how many unread messages or…whatever…you have.

“Why? It’s very important for human beings to feel they are popular and well-liked amongst a large group of people that we don’t care for.”

In S04E10: The Contest

“Sex is great, but you don’t really want to think about the fact that your life began because somebody might have had too much wine with dinner.”

In S04E11: The Airport, we hear a disembodied Larry David on the airplane. He’s the guy who ordered the kosher meal but had forgotten that he’d done so, so he had Elaine’s mail instead.

In S04E15,

“Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun. You get a sense of it, then you look away.”

In S04E21, George’s father Frank (Jerry Stiller) shows up for the first time. George’s mother Estelle (Estelle Harris) was in a couple of episodes before that. In S05E08: The Barber, we hear, for the first time, Jerry’s sotto voce “Newman!”

In S05E14: The Marine Biologist, George, posing as a marine biologist, regales the group with a tale of how he relieved a whale of its breathing difficulty by removing Kramer’s golf ball from its blowhole. From Seinfeldism,

“The sea was angry that day, my friends − like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli. I got about fifty feet out and suddenly the great beast appeared before me. I tell you he was ten stories high if he was a foot. As if sensing my presence, he let out a great bellow. I said, “Easy, big fella!” And then, as I watched him struggling, I realized that something was obstructing its breathing. From where I was standing, I could see directly into the eye of the great fish.”

George Tells The Beached Whale Story | The Marine Biologist | Seinfeld (YouTube)

In S06E04, we see Larry David for the first time, as Frank Costanza’s lawyer—wearing a cape. In S06E05, a very young Patton Oswalt appears as the video-store clerk. In S06E08, Bryan Cranston makes his first appearance as Tim Whatley. In S06E09, Larry David returns as George Steinbrenner’s voice.

In S07E01, George says what we’re all thinking,

“I’m much more comfortable criticizing people behind their backs.”

There are a bunch of great shows in season 7, including the trip to Minnesota to return bottles (“The Bottle Deposit”), “The Wig Master” (Kramer as pimp), “The Cadillac” (Jerry buys his father a car), “The Soup Nazi”, and George’s long engagement to Susan. There are a bunch of familiar faces: Cary Elwes, Debra Messing, Brad Garrett (Robbie from Everybody Loves Raymond), and even Marisa Tomei, playing herself.

In season 8, S08E19 (“The Yada Yada”) stands out as an absolute top-notch episode, quintessentially Seinfeld. In season 9, S09E03 (“The Serenity Now”) is wonderful, with Elaine being pursued by multiple people, all of them Jewish. She visits a Rabbi who lives in her building.

“Elaine: Rabbi, is there anything I can do to combat this Shiks-appeal?
Rabbi: Ha! Elaine, shiks-appeal is a myth, like the Yeti, or his North American cousin, the Sasquatch.
Elaine:: Well, something’s goin’ on here, ‘cause every able-bodied Israelite in the county is driving pretty strong to the hoop.”

S09E20 has Lamar (Chris Joyner) in a maroon Golf, which looks exactly like a VW Rabbit I used to have, Fritz.

The parade of Jerry’s girlfriends includes Jennifer Coolidge (Stiffler’s Mom), Teri Hatcher (Desperate Housewives), Marlee Matlin (Children of a Lesser God), Helen Slater (Supergirl) and Anna Gunn (Skyler in Breaking Bad).[1]

I’d completely forgotten that most of Seinfeld was filmed in front of a live studio audience. They didn’t seem to do too many re-takes either, judging by how often Jerry (and sometimes Elaine) is seen suppressing smirks or laughter. Usually it’s at Kramer, who, as I mentioned above, is an absolute comic genius on this show. His physical comedy; his timing; the way he oozes charisma; how he always lands on his feet. He’s a “hipster doofus” but he’s a cool cat. Elaine is also a great physical comedian—her two-handed push, in particular, is genius.

Foundation S01 (2021) — 5/10

This a bit woker than I remember the books being. The lead character is a Tom-Cruise-like better-at-everything-than-everyone-else star, but it’s a slight, black young woman/girl. There’s the pool scene that, were the roles reversed, there’d be an uproar. She basically humiliates her boyfriend intellectually, then taunts him when he says he can’t swim, then she throws him in the water and tells him to “relax”. Then she seduces him into having sex in the pool. I honestly can’t tell if they’re being ironic or if they really think that reversing the roles is progress.

I like the concept and the visuals are wonderful, but it’s just crazy how a show that takes place over giant time spans (a few decades is the smallest) spends so much damned time on fleeting love affairs. This is silly. I only watched the first three episodes before giving up on it.

I would, a year-and-a-half later—and on the advice of a good friend—try again. See my follow-up review.

The Witcher S02 (2021) — 6/10

Geralt (Henry Cavill) is back, with Ciri (Freya Allen) at his side, traveling back to his training grounds Kaer Morhen, the castle where he became a witcher. On the way, they stop at an old friend’s house, where they discover he’s in a co-dependent relationship with a monster that can’t stop killing, but truly does love him. It matters not because the monster is a monster and tries to kill Ciri, so Geralt lops off its head.

Meanwhile, Yennifer (Anya Chalotra) has been captured by the opposing forces, led by Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni). They are very much on the back foot, though, in no small part thanks to Yennifer’s having used fire magic to vanquish them. They are soon ambushed by elves, who take the two women prisoner after slaughtering all of their guard. The elven leader, Francesca (Mecia Simson), is convinced to join up with them after they find out they’ve all been having the same dream. Some … creature … lures them into its lair, but then grants them wishes? And lets them go? It was a bit confusing.

Meanwhile, Geralt is back at the witcher stronghold, where they’re carousing, mostly because his friend Eskel (Basil Eidenbenz) has brought in a troupe of prostitutes. He’s also brought in some sort of tree monster that has infected him via a hole in his back. The monster takes over and Geralt and Vesemir (Geralt’s teacher and lord of Kaer Morhen) are forced to kill it, despite it being their friend and fellow witcher.

Yennifer is back with the mages, without her powers. They scheme against her, especially the lead mage Stregobor, who tortures her to find out what she’s really up to. The council demands that she execute the Nilfgardian prisoner Cahir (Eamon Farren), but she frees him instead and they both escape on horseback into the night.

Meanwhile, Ciri is training hard, gaining the grudging respect of the other witchers. Geralt tells her that he’s quite sure that she has untapped magical power—which is why she’s been having visions. He tells her to lead him with her visions and they end up at the lair of the leshy, the tree monster that had infected Eskel. This monster is killed immediately by a giant, ugly centipede called a myriapod, which corners Ciri after a chase, but loses sight of Geralt, never a good idea.

The next three shows (e03 to e06) are quite slow, with Cahir and Yennefer escaping to Nilfgard, with the help of Jaskier, the bard. Ciri is learning of her powers, that her blood is Eldar blood. Yennefer is still without power, but she hopes to get it back if she delivers Ciri to the old woman in the woods. A fire mage is also on their trail. Cahir is trying to usurp Fringilla’s hold on Cintra. Fringilla reminds Cahir that she is a mage (by poisoning his four generals).

Geralt hears from Jaskier that Yennefer has lost her power and determines from other information that she is in thrall to the “Deathless Mother”, who is manipulating Fringilla, Yennifer, and Francesca (the elf mage). The demon feeds on pain, so when soldiers sneak into Francesca’s bedchamber to slay her newborn, Francesca’s pain gives it enough power to escape its Witcher-built prison.

The Deathless Mother finds a home in Ciri nearly immediately. She directs her vessel to go to the Witcher citadel Kaer Morhen, where she ends up slaying a bunch of the less well-known ones before Geralt catches her. He deduces that Voleth Meir (otherwise known as the Deathless Mother) is controlling Ciri’s body and tries to ask her what she wants. She slices his face and escapes.

She goes to the tree in the center of the main hall in Kaer Morhen and starts screaming at it, shattering it and revealing an obelisk at the center. She shatters it and summons basilisks to keep the witchers occupied while she faces off against Geralt. Long story short: Yennefer sacrifices herself to rescue Ciri, Voleth Meir leaves Ciri for Yennefer, Ciri screams them to another “sphere”, where they see the “Wild Hunt” and Ciri screams them back to their Kaer Morhen before the pack catches them. Voleth Meir remains with the Wild Hunt. Mission accomplished.

Meanwhile, Francesca is using her magic to slaughter babies in a nearby kingdom that she has blamed for having killed her baby. Fringilla and Cahil are caught in their lie that they had ordered the murder of Francesca’s baby when Emhyr finally returns. He knows this because he was the one who’d ordered the killing. Emhyr turns out to be Duny, Ciri’s father.

Yennefer discovers that her powers have returned—maybe in exchange for her noble sacrifice? Geralt still hasn’t forgiven her, but will allow her to travel with them, to train Ciri in controlling her powers.

It was somewhat strange: there were several episodes in the middle that were long and somewhat tedious and full of exposition by previously unknown characters. It felt like they were trying to force a “Games of Thrones” vibe, but it wasn’t working because we had no idea who most of these people were. There’s a young lady on the council who says “that’s pretty evil, even for me” and we’ve literally never seen her before. It’s more than a bit muddled.

And then, when things start moving again, they feel very hurried at the end. We’ve learned more about Ciri’s power—although it took a long time—and more about the elves, although they’re not the most sympathetic bunch. As in season one, it’s Geralt who holds everything together. When he’s on screen, everything works. When he’s not—you wonder where he is.

No Time to Die (2021) — 5/10

Billy Eilish sings the theme song. She’s in marbles-in-her-mouth mode, so it’s not very good. Neat to see that they gave this coveted prize to a 19-year-old who’s not going to attract any youth audience to a 2.5-hour movie about James Bond. Hans Zimmer did the rest of the soundtrack because, apparently, no-one else is allowed to do anything.

The movie starts in a high-tech lab full of monitors, where all of the techs use pen and paper for everything. I look back at my notes from early in the movie and marvel at my naiveté. I actually thought that scientists sitting at desks with giant screens of data in front of them while simultaneously ignoring their keyboards and scribbling furiously on clipboards was going to be the least believable and most jarring part of this film.

The movie starts off with a young Madeleine at home with her alcoholic mother. They are attacked by a man in a semi-shattered clown mask. He kills her mother because of something he muttered about her husband having killed his entire family. It’s hard to tell because he muttered and has a lisp and an accent and he’s wearing a mask. For realism, they made it incredibly difficult to understand what the fuck is going on. This would be a common thread to the sound design. Madeleine shoots him, but he wakes up and chases her out on the ice of a nearby lake. She falls through the ice (she’s a little girl). He follows her out on the ice (a full-grown man who’s just seen a little girl fall through the thin ice) and doesn’t fall through himself. Instead, despite several gunshot wounds, he is able to rescue her.

This was just making things happen to make things happen without selling me on it in any way. I was not invested yet because I had no idea who these people were, only that they were behaving irrationally for unknown reasons. And that they were defying laws of physics or known reality for unknown reasons. For example, why was Madeleine such a dead-eye shot with a pistol? Tight pattern in the trunk. Missed all vital organs, though. Why do I have so much time to think about this stuff during the movie? Oh, because it’s boring so far.

The movie starts off not with a bang, as is customary, but with a long sequence of Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) and James Bond (Daniel Craig) living together somewhere fashionable in Italy, on a coast somewhere. James is attacked by Spectre agents and he believes that Madeleine is involved. He blames her for having betrayed him and banishes her out of his life forever. She clutches her belly as he pushes her onto the train. This is Chekhov’s not-too-subtle gun.

Five years later, James Bond is retired on an island, fishing for a living. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) is in Belmarsh prison. Madeleine is his psychiatrist. She is the only person with whom he will converse.

Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) shows up with Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen), a guy who smiles too much but whom Leiter seems to trust, despite his decades of experience. They’re here to coax Bond out of retirement. Bond says no and leaves the club. Seconds after Bond says he’s not going to fall for a pretty young thing, he jumps onto a scooter with a woman who turns out to be the new 007 and who tells him to stay away from the mission. This scene is pretty cringe-y, but it’s only because I don’t immediately cheer when I see that they’ve “replaced” 007 with a strong, independent, black woman. We have no idea who she is. No backstory whatsoever. She just appears. We’re supposed to identify and adore.

Bond can’t resist the temptation to get back at Spectre, so he agrees to the off-the-books mission. This is a really fun bit that actually feels like a real Bond movie. He meets up with Paloma (Ana de Armas), who is extremely competent and fun and an excellent partner for Bond. They get Russian scientist Obruchev (David Dencik)—inventor of the nanobot killers—away from MI6 and the new 007.

This is after Obruchev has thwarted Blofeld’s plan to kill Bond and instead programmed the nanobots to wipe out every last member of Spectre (except for Blofeld, who is still in prison, but somehow telecommunicating from the high-security wing of Belmarsh). This seems kind of convenient because suddenly … all of Spectre is just gone.

The insidious, global, immensely rich organization that Bond has been chasing for many films is just snuffed out by a completely new villain who came out of literally nowhere. There is no explanation given as to why he’s so powerful, why he’s so wealthy or capable … or anything. They just tell you that he is, so he must be awesome? It’s circular logic. It is, apparently, enough. There is no build-up to let us fear his power, his inevitability. He just is.

Similarly, there is no build-up to Blofeld’s assassination attempt on Bond. Before we can even really tell what’s going on and start worrying about it, we realize that the plan we only just learned about seconds ago has been thwarted and that now all of Spectre is dead. This is childish storytelling.

Paloma and Bond escape with Obruchev, snatching him away from 007. Paloma exits stage left, while Bond bundles Obruchev into a seaplane. They fly to a boat with Leiter and Logan in the middle of the open ocean. Logan gets the better of both of them, mortally gut-shoots Leiter and traps Bond in a burning, bombed boat. Again, Logan came out of nowhere, with no backstory and no reason why he should be able to get the drop on and then best two of the most experienced agents of all time.

There is no tension. Things just happen. We are expected to accept them. Expecting the storytellers (there are four of them) to explain anything to us is futile. Felix Leiter, Bond-movie stalwart since Live and Let Die died for absolutely nothing, killed by a zero. He might as well have tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and hit his head. That would have been darkly funnier. I’m not sure whether that was the message that they were going for (that shit sometimes happens, there’s no explaining it, we are lost in the darkness), but that’s also a pretty jarring change from previous Bond-style films—and it’s also indistinguishable from lazy and/or incompetent writing.

No need to explain or make it dramatic or anything. The movie is almost three hours long, but it somehow manages to introduce gigantic plot points with no drama, while lingering on ephemera for painfully long minutes. They spent longer making it absolutely clear that Q is a gay man and was expecting gay company for dinner and that everybody’s fine with that because we’re all enlightened. Also 007 is now a black woman. Did you get that? You got a problem with that? James Bond as PSA.

Madeleine is visited by Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek). He is a new client of hers. He reveals himself immediately to be the masked man who’d killed her mother. He gives her a gift of the mask. That is the last we hear of the mask. It has no other significance. Literally none.

Also, yes, that is his fucking name. “Lyutsifer”. WTF. They used to name them tongue-in-cheek as “Dr. Goodhead” or “Pussy Galore”. There was a sense of fun about it. But Madeleine doesn’t even spend a second wondering who the fuck names their kid—or themselves—after the devil. James Bond used to at least smirk at these childish naming jokes. This movie is so deadly serious that you almost feel admonished for enjoying anything. This is not a problem because there’s not a lot to enjoy.

So Safin magically coerces Madeleine into applying nanobots that are targeted to kill Blofeld. It’s a bit unclear why she would do this because Safin is such a mumbler—even though they give him long soliloquies, he mumbles them and you’re left straining to figure out what the hell he’s talking about—but I think he threatened her daughter? Who knows? Who cares? The plot is moving forward! Long story short, Bond shows up and goes to the interview with her, she chickens out, he grabs her hands to ask her what’s going on, she leaves, he touches Blofeld, Blofeld dies. Another wonderful key character easily killed, with neither drama nor tension.

Next, Bond visits Madeleine at her home in Norway (no idea why she lives there, other than that the Tourism Board of Norway probably paid the film to make it happen) and they are lovers once again. Safin finds them because he is all-powerful. There’s a pretty good chase scene through the lush Norwegian forests and flatlands. Bond kills Ash with no ceremony. Safin kidnaps Madeleine and Mathilde with literally no ceremony or problems. She runs out of bullets at just the right time for him to effect his easy win. This guy just can’t lose.

The final scene is at a missile base on a “disputed” island between Russia and Japan. (I have no idea if they were being cheeky about “disputed” islands between China and Korea and Japan in the South China Sea and frankly don’t care because these writers are the last people to whom I would turn for pointed political commentary.) Stuff happens. Madeleine escapes by blinding Primo (the one-eyed guy who seems to be Safin’s main henchman, although I only learned his name afterward), but Primo is still pretty good to fight Bond later, so it’s unclear how blind he became. It literally doesn’t matter. Safin releases Mathilde, but then nothing happens to her and her mother rescues her and they escape with 007 (well, now she’s called Nomi because she “gave” her title back to Bond because they’re friends now, whatever, no-one cares) and they’re immediately safe with no drama or tension or worry on our behalf.

The whole island is a nanobot factory and must be destroyed, so Bond orders an airstrike and M agonizes over the international incident, but orders the strike anyway. This whole “earbud Bond” thing started with Skyfall, I think. I remember how annoying it was to have the whole first twenty minutes of the movie be James Bond being yelled at and directed by M instead of him being awesome in the field on his own. This is now a standard feature because, apparently, we would much rather watch movies of people talking to each other on devices than actually doing things on their own. If they are doing awesome things, then they better also be talking to other people on devices.

Anyway, Bond does a bunch of awesome stuff, kills a bunch of people easily, then gets to the control room of the blast doors that he has to open. Despite Q’s warning that it’s all old tech and that he will walk him through it, Bond easily figures it all out in seconds. I thought that was one of the funnier bits in the movie. To balance that, the script has Bond kill Primo by getting him in a full nelson and then using the super-magnet in his watch to blow up Primo’s artificial eye. Bond’s earpiece? Just fine. Unaffected. In fact, it starts buzzing immediately after the kill. Just. So. Lazy.

Also lazy is just injecting the Deus Ex Machina of Safin into the story whenever he’s needed. The standoff occurs because Bond just runs the hell out in the middle of the widest open space on the island to … kick at closed blast doors? Anyway, Safin shows up, shoots him a bunch, poisons him with nanobots targeted to Mathilde and Madeleine, wheezes and mumbles a bunch in triumph and is unceremoniously killed by Bond.

So Bond gets shot five times (or so) but he takes a licking and keeps on ticking. This is fortunate because he’s literally the only one not wearing any body armor or helmet or anything on the entire island. Whereas those wearing armor drop immediately from one pistol shot, Bond has little trouble moving around after being filled with lead. Again: why are you giving me so much time to notice this shit? It seemed ludicrous during the movie. The whole point of an action movie is to distract me with enough awesomeness and fun that I only notice the gaping plot-holes afterward, when I’m discussing the movie with my friends.

JFC what a dumpster fire of a movie. The cinematics were occasionally lovely. The product placements were once again a bit more subtle. The story was a disaster. It was obviously written by a committee. If not, the writers should be ashamed of themselves. At one point, Safin literally listed bullet points of what had happened so far—I imagine this was a point at which the audience claimed to have been lost in test viewings, so they “fixed it up”.

The main thread was kind of interesting, including the twist at the end with the nanobots coded to kill Madeleine and Mathilde should Bond come into contact with them. That was a neat twist, but they hurried it so much—almost as a throwaway—to get on to the important bit of ending the final James Bond film with a ten-minute phone call filled with “I love yous”. I am not kidding.

Wilder S04 (2022) — 8/10

This final season takes us back to Rosa Wilder’s (Sarah Spale) hometown of Unterwies in Switzerland, where she’s retired from policework and working the farm with her father. One night, a local policeman is killed after he breaks up a fight at the Restaurant Sonne. Rosa’s father was involved in the fight, but the other guy was very drunk, and was picking on him because he’d “murdered” those kids in S01.

Rosa is pulled out of retirement until another officer can be found. She agrees to help investigate while the trail is fresh. They call up Kägi (Marcus Signer), who’s also retired. He agrees and heads up the mountain with his airstream trailer and his mom’s poodle Henry in tow.

There were a couple of weird incidents that night. The same night that the policeman was killed and the drunk guy started a fight, the same drunk guy cut off a boar’s head and threw it through a window. Elias, a young man who looks like he has a learning disability of some kind was involved in the whole thing somehow. Either he observed the crime or crimes or he perpetrated them. In the final scene of episode one, he’s wearing the policeman’s baseball cap.

At the same time, there’s Robert Räber’s accountant (Liechti) who owes local criminal Rainer lots of gambling debt. Liechti delivers a lot of dirt on a local cartel/family that’s been bribing their way into and then skimming massively off of construction contracts. Kägi meets up with a woman who’s more than willing to talk about that, as well. Another member of the cartel/family happens to be Wilder’s baby-daddy, Dani Räber.

Wilder jumps back into investigating, teaming up with Kägi. They find out with the retired police chief Res that Elias didn’t have anything to do with it. He’d picked up the cap and tried to return it to Betsch while he was roughing up Zingg outside the restaurant. Zingg goes to Wilder and Kägi to confess to his activities on that night because they actually exonerate him.

Betsch had been trying to have a kid with his wife Isabelle for three years—to no avail. Isabelle is actually Res’s and Charlotte’s daughter, who’s Elias’s sister. Neat, because Elias and Res’s daughter had a kid when she was fifteen—but they gave it up for adoption. It was only later that Elias fell on his head and lost his faculties.

Dani Räber fools Rainer into giving him the blackmail materials back for only CHF10,000 instead of the CHF350,000 he’d demanded. Räber’s accountant Liechti swears to Rainer that he’d been tricked and that those papers were worth a lot more. Dani’s a real hard-ass, taking after his father. He got his girlfriend Julie pregnant (doesn’t this guy ever use birth control? He fathered Wilder’s kid as well.) He pisses off Julie by being unbelievably rude about finding out he’s going to be a father. Julie takes off in a huff, gets into a motorcycle accident, and Dani walks it back a bit.

Zingg gets a bunch of cash from Dani’s father and is told to take a vacation. He decides to head for Thailand, but looks like he has somebody to shoot before he catches his flight. What he is, in fact, doing, is going to the new dam to commit suicide spectacularly during the dedication ceremony. Robert is annoyed that his moment in the sun is ruined, but also seemingly legitimately heartbroken by Zingg’s death. Zingg’s estranged wife Nora storms into the ceremony, accusing Robert of being a murderer.

She’d read Zingg’s suicide note, which detailed all he’d done over the years with Robert, which was basically cartel behavior between Zingg’s and Nora’s brother’s gravel company as well as pretty much all local businesses. Zinng also writes to her of having bludgeoned his own brother-in-law (Nora’s brother) in the back of the head to keep him from leaving the cartel, after which Robert suggested that they “finish him” under tons of gravel to make it look like an accident. This was all swept under the rug years ago. The guilt was what drove Zingg to suicide.

Kägi and Wilder don’t know to what degree Dani was involved, so Rosa puts the moves on him but can’t get at his phone to get at his data. Kägi accuses her of chickening out, but really—what were the odds that Dani was going to leave his phone unlocked and unattended for long enough for her to clone it? Oh, actually pretty good, I guess. That’s weird. When you have as much to hide as Dani, isn’t it odd that you just leave your phone lying around without even a passcode? When your girlfriend is a notoriously nosy cop? No? That’s just how people are? Especially those egomaniacs like Dani who think nothing can touch them? Ok, then.

In other news, Rainer Strunz kidnaps Rosa and Dani’s son Tim, leading to a high-speed chase to the gravel-processing plant where the local police trap him and try to talk him out. He’s actually kidnapped Rosa’s dad Peter and Tim, so Rosa’s super-level-headed about it. Hahaha, just kidding. She’s terrible and whiny and nearly jeopardizes the whole situation, simply lucking out that Rainer isn’t actually willing to kill or even really harm his hostages. I wish this part had been handled with a bit more aplomb—i.e. as Kägi handled it—but it is what it is. Rainer gets away, but runs into Dani and Liechti, who tackles and kills him with his own gun. Lucky that.

Liechti ends up seeing a video of Zingg and Robert murdering Nora’s brother, as does, eventually, Dani. The cops don’t see this video despite having gotten a warrant to toss the Räber offices. Dani and Robert use their prodigious political connections with a senator (Kantonsrätin) who is deeply involved in the cartel to get the police off of their backs. Kägi is not happy with it and swears he’s going “drain the swamp, sooner or later.”

And then nothing happens! OMG so dark! This is actually pretty well-played: the rich guys all get away with their plots and self-enrichment and the government can’t touch them. Yet. Fingers crossed for Robert and Dani Räber’s comeuppance in season five? At the very least, we got to see Dani use his knowledge of the video to finally blackmail Robert into stepping down, not only as CEO, but also as the leader of the cartel. He’s out. Dani’s in. A real Godfather moment.

Speaking of Dani, he’s back with Julie, who backs out of being with him, admitting that the child is not his, but Bertchi’s. This is where it all goes a bit off the rails. Isabelle had the incest-child, but Charlotte and Res took it away, supposedly to put it up for adoption. Instead, they stopped along the long road out of the valley and went to a lake where Charlotte drowned it. Elias was on a nearby slope, watching the whole thing. He confronted Res later, but there was some shoving and then Elias wasn’t … Elias anymore. He remembers something, though, because he returns to the lake again and again, striding fully clothed into the wintry waters, almost as penance.

We’re not done: Isabelle had find out that Betsch was cheating on her with Julie and confronted him in his police car. He yelled back that she wouldn’t even sleep with him anymore. She apologized (!) because she’s kind of severely damaged, I guess. Then Elias appeared in the road out of nowhere and Betsch screeched to a halt. They all got out to confront Elias, but Isabelle immediately went to comfort him. Betsch was beside himself and told her to be with Elias, if she likes him so much. This hit a bit too close to home. Betsch capped it off by mocking Isabelle with the news that he and Julie were pregnant and that he was going to be a father. Isabelle lustily bludgeoned him to death with his own flashlight.

We find this out only after Res and Isabelle had found the bloody flashlight in Elias’s cabin—planted there by Isabelle, who was going to let Elias take the fall. But Elias had committed suicide in front of Charlotte’s Postauto as it exited the avalanche gallery. Rosa, Res, and Isabelle witnessed that directly and it got Rosa asking questions whereupon Charlotte and Res finally admitted what had really happened.

Phew! That was a lot of pretty dark stuff. To lighten the mood a bit, Kägi picks up his mother’s dog Henry from the kennel, where he’d left him “forever” a few days before. Rosa stays in town. They are all reunited at Paul’s funeral an unspecified time later, just in case the mood was too good.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) — 4/10

This movie was such a letdown from the first version. Sequels are often letdowns, but this one is just so phoned in. There are so many good actors in this sequel, but the script—and the dialogue—is so terrible and stilted and ham-handed that it’s hard to imagine how it even got made with a straight face.

Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is back, as are Harry Hart (Colin Firth) and Merlin (Mark Strong). There’s now apparently a Statesmen group in America that corresponds to the Kingsmen group from England. In that group are Tequila (Channing Tatum), Ginger (Halle Berry), Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), and Champ (Jeff Bridges). Poppy (Julianne Moore) is the billionaire bad-ass who’s trying to drug the world. I also spotted Emily Watson phoning in a performance somewhere. Elton John plays himself. Everyone is awful, seemingly fully aware of how needlessly stupid this movie is.

Eggsy is in a weird-ass relationship with Princess Tilde (Hanna Alström). There’s an excruciatingly emaciated femme fatale Clara (Poppy Delevingne), who looks like she’s actually malnourished, older than she should be. It’s all so awful. Everything is highly technological. Everyone is super-rich. This is just so bad. There is no tension. The plot is basically that Poppy is trying to blackmail the planet into buying an antidote for the drug that she’s peddled to all four corners of the Earth.

I can’t imagine how much money they had to pay these people to get them to take part. They even used CGI for a campfire in a cabin. They couldn’t even do that on location somewhere. This looks like a children’s movie, except that people really die and they curse a lot.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Merlin sacrifices himself to save Eggsy, but not before he delivers a terrible rendition of Denver’s Country Road. Julianne Moore is campy AF and almost convinces me that this movie is a joke—but everyone else is so deadly serious. Except for Elton John, who now breaks into Saturday’s All Right for Fightin’ as background for the next giant fight. This fight features for flawless and impossible technology as well as martial arts from Elton. I just don’t know what to say. There is, for no apparent reason whatsoever, a female robot in the fight. There are also robot dogs. There’s also a guy named Charlie (Edward Holcroft) with a robot arm. I’m kind of losing track of who lost what bet in this movie.

I was going to raise the rating by a star for the campy battle and Moore’s histrionics, but then Eggsy killed someone in cold blood for … reasons … and then Galahad spent two minutes explaining everything in painful detail. And then they killed Poppy with a drug overdose, pretty much also in cold blood. I’m surprised they didn’t make any prison-rape jokes; maybe I missed it.

Death Race (2008) — 7/10

It’s Jason Statham in a hyper-driving action film in a Mad Max-like prison race more than ably directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. There’s a bad warden named Hennesey (Joan Allen) who runs “death races” that are televised. It’s kind of like Running Man: the prisoner that wins the race earns his freedom. There’s a decent cast, with Statham’s Coach (Ian McShane), a rival Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson) and Statham’s co-pilot Case (Natalie Martinez). The visuals are pretty good, even if the plot is utterly predictable.