Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.2

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.

Townies S01 (1996) — 7/10

This is a one-season sitcom about a group of friends in Gloucester, Massachusetts. They’re all in their late 20s and all still living in town (hence the name of the sitcom). Carrie Donovan (Molly Ringwald) is the more practical one, still living her parents Mike (Dion Anderson) and Kathy (Lee Garlington) and starting up a relationship with Curt (Ron Livingston), who’s been begging her to go out with him for a long time. Shannon (Jenna Elfman) is the free spirit who sleeps with a lot of guys. That’s not a shot at her: that is literally the archetype she plays. Denise Callahan (Lauren Graham) is somewhere in between: she marries Frank (Billy Burr) in the first episode—and they already have a baby together. All three of the ladies work at the local diner, run by straight-talking Marge (Conchata Ferrell).

As can be expected from a sitcom, the main characters get into hijinks in each episode, which driving a bit of a seasonal story-arc forward. It’s honestly not the worth 80s/90s television I’ve ever seen. The actors are pretty talented, at any rate. Jenna Elfman and Molly Ringwald are both very funny.

We watched a VHS rip because this series is so old and so unpopular and so short that no-one ever released it on DVD. I became interested in this show because Billy Burr is in it, but he’s not in it nearly as much as the other characters. He only shows up sparingly, although he does a respectable job of it. It was his first acting role ever, coinciding in 1996 with his first comedy-show credit ever.

“Callahan: It’s nothing against you Grimaldis, Linda. It’s just southern cultures are a little slower. The sun feels so nice—who feels like workin’?
Linda: Ah, yes, the hardworking Irish. Between bending their elbows and flapping their gums, I’m surprised they even have the strength to gamble.”

“Mountie: You’ve mistaken my good manners for a lack of resolve.”

“Cary: Picture it: a cold, dark night. Three women, with nothing to lose. … A peach.”

Rick & Morty S05 (2021) — 10/10

The first episode introduces Mr. Nimbus (Dan Harmon), the lord of the seas. It also introduces “Hoovy”, a dog who helps Morty (Justin Roiland) carry some wine back to his own dimension after Rick (Justin Roiland) had thrown it there to age for a few centuries. Typical R&M madness. Hoovy returns to find his wife had died in the intervening hears and that his son had waited for him, to kill him on his return. The son founds an empire with the sole purpose of destroying Morty should he return. Morty has to return a few times because Nimbus keeps drinking the wine he’s trying to bring to Jessica (Kari Wahlgren), who’s actually on a date with him. The dog race, progeny of Hoovy, continue to evolve, achieving incredible heights of technology, enough even to eventually strip Rick of his powers and almost his life. Morty has to return to rescue Jessica, who’d been taken captive centuries ago (in her timeline), but frozen in place, observing but not aging. She is now beyond such prosaic things as dating Morty. “Fuck off. I’m a Time Lord.”

The second episode is about Rick’s “decoy families”, with one after another getting destroyed by squid people, who turn out to be other decoy families in squid costumes. It turns out that decoy families have also created their own decoy families. The copies of copies are increasingly damaged and … wrong. This continues in a visual and tempo-spatial orgy of detail and confusion until you can do nothing but lean back and enjoy it, no longer even trying to keep track of who the real family is. It’s a wonderful commentary on cloning and simulation (a common theme).

The third episode is a take on Captain Planet, with Morty becoming Planetina’s girlfriend. Planetina turns out to be a bit more … vehement … about saving the planet than Morty is as she torches an entire coal-mine full of people. Meanwhile Rick and Summer are taking a week off for debauchery and rippin’ and tearin’. Summer grows weary of Rick’s attachment to a girlfriend he’d made on the first of three doomed planets that they’d visited.

The fourth episode is about Morty’s sperm staging an assault on the planet. What happened was Morty visited his mother at work and found the horse-milking machine and spent a week pleasuring himself with it before Rick picked up a barrel of what he thought was horse serum in order to use it to create a bomb to destroy the CHUD (Cannibalistic Horse Underground Dwellers), but it’s not equine, so his equipment blows up instead, releasing giant, mutated versions of the sperm that attack the whole neighborhood. They barely escape to what looks like Norad to meet up with the president (Keith David). Long story short, the CHUD save the day, Rick is the rather of the scion of the royal family, Morty is deeply chagrined and Morty and his sister Summer’s (Spencer Grammer) gross, giant incest baby is shot into space, where it assaults an astronaut. What the actual hell.

The fifth episode was one of the weaker ones, but still pretty good. The sheer number of “sets” that they design and draw and animate is nearly bewildering. There is so much to see and hear. In this one, Morty and Summer team up to impress the new kid Bruce Chutback, who’s aloofness is nearly impenetrable. They manage to steal Rick’s spaceship and take off on a galaxy-wide tear with it, tangling with the police and then getting kidnapped by the ship in order to help her to lose her virginity (in exchange for not telling Rick that they’d hijacked her). Meanwhile Rick is “friends” with Jerry, but only in order to let the hell-demons to whom he owes a huge debt revel in his cringe. Beth tracks them down, chastises Rick for mocking Jerry, then joins in because the hell-drinks are so good. When Jerry gets wind of the scam, he’s annoyed and stop being “fun” for the demons. They kidnap him and take him to hell. Beth and Rick disguise themselves as demons, infiltrate hell, and rescue Jerry.

The sixth episode is a loose take on the movie National Treasure with Keith David returning in the role of the president, being awesome and kicking ass in a giant feud with Rick. Rick’s plan is, as ever, to get himself a presidential pardon by pretending to be a turkey on Thanksgiving. The first forty-five seconds of the show has more jokes and zingers than most shows pack into thirty minutes. There is a throwaway reveal that the Statue of Liberty was actually was a trojan horse—Morty’s shot releases a robot that takes over New York in the name of France, all “[…] on America’s birthday, or whatever the fuck Thanksgiving is supposed to be.” Morty and Rick infiltrate the turkeys as turkeys, but the president also turns himself into a turkey and gets the upper hand, but then Rick gets the upper hand, but then the turkey who is injected with the President’s DNA who takes over the country makes more turkey-based super-soldiers. Rick, Morty, and the president kill spider-FDR and wake the pilgrim and native-American super-warriors who are kept in hyper-sleep until needed in order to take the country back. It sounds absolutely crazy on paper, but it was one of the best episodes yet. Really super-fun and clever.

The seventh episode features Rick’s obsession with GoTron, a giant robot built out of other robots (*cough* Voltron *cough*). Instead of panthers, they’re ferrets. As usual, the plot goes mad with layers upon layers, involving other Smith families from other multiverses, and building larger and larger versions of the GoTron, until they reach a planet-sized Ultimate GoTron. They end up using Morty and Summer’s giant incest baby Naruto to defeat the usurpers who’d taken over the Ultimate GoTron from Rick.

The eighth episode has Rick diving into Birdperson’s memories to cover a lot of backstory that fans have been begging for. We learn that Birdperson distanced himself from Rick because Rick’s portal gun made relationships meaningless because, not only could any reality exist, but they were all equally accessible, rendering them equally meaningless. We learn that Tammy and Birdperson had a daughter before Tammy killed Birdperson.

The ninth episode transforms Rick into a Crow-based superhero. He replaces Morty with crows, living for decades like this, regretting nothing. Morty, on the other hand, spills portal fluid on himself and gets into a dangerous relationship with Nick, the man on the other end of his portal, who’d also spilled portal fluid on himself. Rick remains with the crows, having left Morty behind for good.

The tenth episode really ties everything together. Rick is still the anime-style crow-leader/hero with a giant Japanese/Final Fantasy-type sword. Rick eventually learns that the crows are using him and he goes back to Morty, who’d aged himself in order to get back at Rick. The end up at the Citadel, inhabited solely by Ricks and Mortys from all across the continuum. There is an incredibly detailed flashback sequence that tells Rick’s story (finally!) in a hallucinogenic experience where the details are clear as you see them, but disappear 1/8 of a second later as the next detail appears to replace it. This goes on for a good two minutes, with a lot happening. In the “real world”, President Morty of the Citadel makes a power play and ends up in his own continuum, where portal guns are yellow and he rules supreme. Rick, meanwhile, escapes with Morty and several other Ricks and Mortys as the Citadel collapses into a black hole.

As always, Rick and Morty is a wild ride. This might have been the strongest season yet. Looking forward to seasons six and seven. This writing and animation team is fun and creative and smart and they make stuff that is though-provoking and unique and beautiful.

Upload S01 (2020) — 8/10

Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell) is an app developer with every privilege: he’s attractive, he has a nice family, he has an attractive, very rich girlfriend. He’s on his way to his girlfriend’s house when his self-driving car slams into the back of a parked truck, wounding him mortally. He’s in the hospital when his girlfriend Ingrid Kannerman (Allegra Edwards) finds him and gets him to sign a contract to “Upload” himself into her rich family’s swanky after-life digital paradise.

Nathan starts up a virtual relationship with his “angel” Nora (Andy Allo). He is torn between her and Ingrid, who is slowly becoming a better person. There are a few characters in the virtual world who help Nathan try to figure out what happened to him. It turns out that he was not a nice guy and that he wanted to sell his software—a way for poor people to upload—to his potential father-in-law, who already has more money than he knows what to do with. Nathan had spent the season suspecting his partner of having screwed him. Instead, his partner Jamie (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) had been avoiding him because he’d slept with Ingrid once.

At the end, Nathan has downgraded himself to the 2GB floor, where he burns through his whole allotment in the first day, professing his love for Nora, while Ingrid shows up to rescue him. It’s a bit complicated and unclear where it’s heading—which is a good thing.

The real world is very tongue-in-cheek weird, with the people enjoying incredible privilege with no self-awareness. There are a lot of nice little touches, some of them quite zany (like putting bees on Ingrid’s face as she’s preparing for Nathan’s funeral, or that she has to turn down a vaginoplasty at the same time).

I eventually warmed up to it and it was pretty well-made. The ideas and concepts hit a bit too close too home now, but with the metaverse increasingly becoming a thing that idiots think they want, it is probably all too predictive of what’s in store for us.

Titane (2021) — 5/10

The movie starts with Titane (Agathe Rousselle) and her family getting into a car accident that results in her having a titanium plate implanted into her head. After being released from the hospital, she is more empathetic to the family car rather than to her parents. Years later, a grown-up Titane dances seductively at car shows. She is also a serial killer—we see flashbacks of her taking her first victims as she takes her most recent one: an avid fan who confronts her in the parking lot outside the show. She re-enters the convention hall to shower and ends up fucking one of the cars. No, that’s not a typo.

Titane still lives with her parents, but her crimes are starting to catch up to her. After a spree in which she kills several people and, after discovering that she’s pregnant with the car’s baby (she’s leaking motor oil), she smashes her nose, shaves her head, tapes down her breasts, and makes herself look like a waifish man. She impersonates a boy who’d gone missing years earlier and her weird “father” Vincent (Vincent Lindon) totally accepts it. He’s in charge of a fire station and EMT service. He gives his “son” a job there. This causes issues with the other team members, but Vincent doesn’t give a shit.

Vincent is none too stable, injecting steroids several times (also pretty cringe-inducing) and eventually almost puts himself into a coma. Vincent’s wife meets her “son” but finds Titane poking holes into her own very pregnant belly and watching oil leak out. Vincent eventually sees enough that his own delusion is shattered, but he doesn’t care. He now loves his new “son”.

Titane ends up dancing in the fire station, busting out her car-show moves while clothed in her baggy firefighter’s uniform and with her bald head, broken nose, and increasingly pregnant belly. Everybody’s pretty confused, to be honest. Vincent is disappointed but no-one dares say a word. Titane fucks one of the fire trucks to try to get the baby out, but it doesn’t work. I guess science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The birth eventually comes, killing Titane in the process. Vincent ends up holding her titanium-laced baby, cooing to it.

This movie wasn’t at all what I expected it to be. I realized it quite early, but when Titane’s father was setting his own chest on fire while Titane was fucking a fire-truck in order to try to force the birth of a baby she had had implanted by a muscle car, I realized it wasn’t quite for me. It’s well-made and well-filmed. It’s a tight story (there are almost no people in it, other than the couple of main characters). But, man, that plot. I don’t mind crazy plots, but this one was just so random and involved such long sequences of self-harming that were pretty tough to watch and then recover from to focus on other parts of the film. I couldn’t possible recommend this one to anyone I know, to be honest. It’s definitely a filmmaker’s film.

Die Käserei in Goldingen (2008) — 7/10

This is a sweet movie about a cheese dairy in a Swiss town named Goldingen. The dairy is struggling to compete with the other, larger local dairies. He gets a refugee to work with him. When the farmer is going to lose a local cheese competition because he can no longer produce the goat cheese for which he is famous, he is able to promote the amazing cheese made by his refugee protegé/apprentice. It wins an honorable mention and a large prize.

The Revenant (2015) — 9/10

Hugh Glass (Leonardo diCaprio) is a fur-trapper in the Dakotas in the 1820s. He is a trapper nonpareil and is leading a group of men back to their camp. They are attacked by the Arikara, who kill most of the group. The Arikara war party is looking for Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk’o), the Arikara chief’s daughter, who’s been kidnapped. Glass escapes with a much smaller group. They stash their furs, despite Fitzgerald’s (Tom Hardy) misgivings. They need to move more quickly.

Glass is attacked by a bear while he’s scouting game. The attack is horrific. The bear tear his back open; his hands are torn up; he survives. The rest of the group—including his son—finds him and they sew him up. He lies on his back on a pannier, eyes bright with nigh-inconceivable pain. Fitzgerald, of course, argues for a mercy-killing, but they are unable to do it. Instead, the leader of the group Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) offers money to anyone willing to stay with Glass and bury him after he’s … suffered to death? How is that better? Anyway, Glass’s son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and Fitzgerald take the offer, two of them out of concern for Glass, and one of them for the money.

Fitzgerald immediately tries to kill Glass, but is caught by Hawk. Fitzgerald kills Hawk in front of Glass. Fitzgerald then lies to Bridger about the Arikara getting closer. They half-bury Glass half-alive and call it a day. Bridger leaves his canteen with Glass, but he’s terrified for his life—both of Fitzgerald and the Arikara. When they get back to the fort, they both lie to Henry about what happened.

Glass survives the cold night.

His fury drives him to crawl out of the grave, to cauterize his wounds. He somehow makes it down to the river (this is not shown and is nigh-unimaginable, but for the story’s sake, we’ll let it go). He escapes the Arikara by jumping into the freezing water. He is underway alone for many days before he meets Pawnee Hikuc (Arthur RedCloud), with whom Glass can communicate because his wife was Pawnee. She fell victim to the Arikara when they attacked and burned his ranch. He escaped with Hawk and took up his trapper/nomad/scout lifestyle.

Hikuc builds Glass a sweat lodge in which to heal his festering wounds. He emerges days later to find that he’s feeling much better, but that French trappers have killed Hikuc and the leader of the French party is raping Powaqa. Glass frees her, kills several French trappers, and takes back Hikuc’s horse. He escapes with Powaqa, only to be hunted down the next morning by the Arikara. They take back Powaqa and drive Glass off a cliff on his horse. He falls through pine trees, slamming off of branches before landing on the snowy ground. The horse plummets even harder through the trees and dies immediately. Glass crawls over to it, eviscerates it and survives the freezing night in its carcass.

Glass’s canteen makes its way back to the fort in the hands of a terrified French trapper, proving the Glass is still alive and making his way back. Henry organizes a search party and they find an exhausted Glass in the nearby forest. Fitzgerald does not partake in the search party, instead emptying the fort’s safe and heading for the hills. Glass protects Bridger from punishment.

After a day, Henry and Glass set out in pursuit of Fitzgerald. This quickly goes awry, as Fitzgerald captures and kills Henry. Glass uses Henry’s corpse on a horse to get the drop on Fitzgerald, but only succeeds in shooting him in the arm. Glass tracks his wounded ass down to the river, where the two fight brutally and amazingly well, considering Glass was grievously wounded and hasn’t eaten in days and Fitzgerald is bleeding massively from a gunshot wound. These injuries phase neither one of them. Glass lets the river carry Fitzgerald’s wounded ass to the Arikara war party on the other riverbank. They scalp Fitzgerald and spare Glass (for having saved Powaqa).

Glass retreats back into the hills and the forest, hallucinating about his wife. It’s unclear whether he finally capitulates to his wounds and joins her and his son in death, having taking his revenge—or whether he drives onward, stubbornly clinging to life.

DiCaprio puts in a tremendous performance and Alejandro G. Iñárritu as director does a tremendous job as well. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki is also worth noting. This is, in a sense, a superhero movie, but with a more down-to-Earth superhero.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) — 9/10

This is the story of the rise and fall of Wall Street con man Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio). He starts off under the tutelage of coke-addled sociopath Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). Hanna’s brokerage implodes after Black Monday, on October 19th, 1987 and everyone loses their job. Belfort is forced to take a job at a penny-stock boiler room, where his bombastic lies and charisma quickly make him incredibly rich on commissions earned by duping people out of their retirement savings.

Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) approaches him in a diner and asks him for a job, based solely on the fact that Belfort has a fancy car. Belfort and Azoff start their own company named Stratton Oakmont, based on a pump-and-dump tactics that go after bigger fish than Midwestern retirees. Jordan recruits a bunch of his friends, Brad (Jon Bernthal), Manny (Jon Favreau), Nicky (P.J. Byrne), Chester (Kenneth Choi), Alden (Henry Zebrowski), and Robbie (Brian Sacca). They would all become incredibly rich and would all become hardcore drug addicts and would all remain fiercely loyal to Jordan.

Their firm is profiled as the dirtiest company on Wall Street, making tremendous profits while riding the fine line of illegality. They are overrun by applicants (of course). Jordan becomes a hardcore drug addict. He also dumps his wife Teresa (Christin Miloti) for Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie). He manages to keep a lot of balls in the air, but the SEC and the FBI—in the form of Agent Denham (Kyle Chandler)—are closing in.

Stratton Oakmont shepherds Steve Madden’s IPO, with Belfort personally making $22M, which he promptly hides in a Swiss bank account, through banker Jean Jacques Saurel (Jean Dujardin). They use Naomi’s British aunt Emma (Joanna Lumley) as well as some of Brad’s relatives to slowly smuggle the money back to Switzerland. This was obviously back in the days when it was much more difficult to wire money through dozens of accounts in seconds to cover one’s trail.

Although Jordan’s friends remained fiercely loyal to him, he gives them up as soon as the noose tightens around him. Saurel is turned by the FBI, so Jordan turns on his friends. Jordan spares Donnie, though, and the FBI is furious at him. He only gets 36 months of minimum security prison, serves 22 months, and goes on to a lucrative career as a motivational speaker.

DiCaprio is spectacular in this movie. The scenes of drug-fueled nigh-pornography, the debauchery, the money, the heedless spending, the rapacious theft—it’s all depicted in music-video-style montages by director Martin Scorcese. Jonah Hill is tremendous as well, even more debauched and mentally damaged than Belfort, at times. A tremendous movie about the worst people in the world.

After Life S03 (2022) — 6/10

Tony (Ricky Gervais) is back for his final season of moping about his dead wife. He seems to have found purpose in helping people and spends some time trying to fix up Kath (Diane Morgan) with someone to make her happy. His best friend and closest coworker Lenny (Tony Way) is doing just fine without his help. His own relationship with his father’s former nurse (Ashley Jensen) goes nowhere, but he helps fix her up with someone nice. Tony finally accepts the money from his dead wife Lisa’s life-insurance policy and distributes it around town, for good deeds.

Brian (David Earl) gets a lot more screen time and it’s not great. He goes on and on like a mentally ill man about his cuckolding wife in lurid and stomach-churning detail.

The first season was fantastic and the subsequent seasons have seems ever more schmaltzy and earnest—and less funny. It’s fine, I guess. Gervais actually makes pretty high-quality schmaltz, but it was quite uneven and two who seasons of unfunny and earnest moping isn’t what I’m looking for. At the end, Tony walks off into a field with his dog Brandy. Tony’s wife Lisa appears briefly, then fades. Then Brandy fades. Then Tony fades. The end.

The Brothers Grimsby (2016) — 4/10

I only saw some of this movie, but I wanted to note that I saw the part where Sebastian (Mark Strong) and Nobby (Sacha Baron Cohen) crawl into an elephant’s vagina in order to escape detection. They think they’ve made their escape, but a bull elephant takes a fancy to their elephant. A giant elephant penis slides into the scene, smashing repeatedly into Strong’s face. Cohen says they have to help it ejaculate to make it go away. It does. Copiously. This is laughably bad and sophomoric. Then another bull elephant comes along. It’s bumping up against Cohen’s ass. His pants are inexplicably down. I just wanted to note how horrible this all is so that I don’t watch this movie by accident at some point. This is almost worse than Brüno in its mindlessness and terrible humor. It’s not very funny. It’s kind of painful to watch. I don’t even want to know what kind of bet Strong lost that made him have to star in this.

The Great Gatsby (2013) — 7/10

The plot follows the book quite assiduously. Many years after they’d happened, WWI veteran Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) tells the story of a summer spent with Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). Carraway moves in to a small groundskeeper’s cottage next to Gatsby’s mansion in West Egg. His cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) lives across the bay in East Egg, with her husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). Tom is the latest generation of an old-money family—he is scum. Daisy tries to fix up Nick with Jordan (Elizabeth Debicki), a local golf pro.

Gatsby is in love with Daisy and chose the house across the bay so that he could keep an eye on the flashing green light at the end of her dock. He throws incredibly lavish parties in the hopes that Daisy will show up at one of them. He has made a tremendous amount of money with his shady business partner Meyer Wolfsheim (Amitabh Bachchan).

Tom is cheating on Daisy with Myrtle (Isla Fisher), the wife of a small garage in the no-man’s land between the Eggs and Manhattan. Daisy learns of this and decides to leave Tom for Gatsby. They all end up partying at the Plaza Hotel and the conversation goes tits-up.

Myrtle’s husband George (Jason Clarke) suspects her and decides to leave the area with her. She doesn’t want to go and tries to jump into Tom’s car as it flits by. However, it’s Gatsby driving the car and throwing yourself at a car isn’t a great idea in any case, so Myrtle dies. Tom drives through in Gatsby’s car a few minutes later and tells her distraught husband that he suspects it was Gatsby she was sleeping with and that it was Gatsby who’d killed her. It was, in fact, Daisy who’d been driving. Mad with rage, George strikes out for Gatsby’s mansion and finds and kills him in his own swimming pool.

Gatsby’s name is dragged through the mud, used as a scapegoat to cover up the infidelities and vehicular manslaughters of the old rich families. Daisy let Gatsby—a man who’d devoted his entire life to loving her and building a fortune to entice her—take the fall to protect herself. She is left with her marriage to the brutalizing Tom Buchanan, who comes out of this shining and more powerful than ever.

There are absolutely lush visuals for a good part of the film—the parties in particular are over-the-top spectacular. Baz Luhrmann as director does a tremendous job, having practiced in movies like Moulin Rouge!. It’s kind of slog once it gets down to the business of wrapping up the story, though.