Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.5

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.

The French Dispatch (2021) — 9/10

“Self-reflection is a vice best conducted in private, or not at all.”

—Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright)

This is a Wes Anderson movie, so it’s much like many of his other movies, but, perhaps, a bit more so. He continues to make the same movie, refining and experimenting, like a sculptor who makes many, many variations on the same theme. Many actors are on board with his vision, returning again and again: Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Benicio del Toro, Frances McDormand, Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban. This time, they’re joined by Timothée Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, Léa Seydoux and others.

The film unfolds in several chapters, each telling a piece of a revolution unfolding in a remote French town, as covered by The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The editor-in-chief of the magazine has died and the staff busies itself producing the final issue, as per his wishes.

The first chapter “The Cycling Reporter” gives us a tour of the town in which the rest of the chapters will take place. The second chapter “The Concrete Masterpiece” tells the tale of prisoner Benicio del Toro, who paints extremely abstract nude portraits of one of his guards, the delectable Léa Seydoux. His masterpieces, however, are frescoes, and will never leave the prison where he created them. The next chapter “Revisions to a Manifesto” tells the story of revolutionaries who fall in love, a love that is requited but once before one of them dies while making repairs to a pirate-radio station. The fourth chapter “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” concerns warring criminal syndicates and a kidnapping plot, as well as the denouement of the ephemeral revolution. “Obituary” shows the staff back at home, reminiscing and preparing the final edition.

I very much enjoyed watching this movie. There is a meticulous attention to detail in dialogue and scene with an excellent cast.

La casa de papel S05 (2021) — 6/10

The fifth and final season is more of the same, which is both good and bad. There is no small amount of filler material that only super-fans will really love, but there is also enough of the classic formula to pull everything together. There is less and less “cleverness” on the part of the Professor, although the flashbacks with Berlin training his son to be a thief are very good in this regard. Instead, we find that Sierra, despite being nearly ludicrously pregnant, walks to the Professor’s lair and gets the drop on him. He and Marseilles eventually help her deliver her child, which binds her to them.

They dither around about eliminating Gandia, giving him one opportunity after another to generate plot points. Eventually, we finally get rid of Tokyo when she goes out with a bang to defeat him and his men. There is a lot of drama between personalities—I guess that’s what people like?—but one constant is that I did like where Denver’s character ended up. Perhaps it was the actor, who’s very, very good.

Back to the main plot, Berlin’s son has teamed up with Berlin’s widow (I think they’re bangin’?) and they have become even greater criminal masterminds than anyone else—because everything has to be YA these days. They steal the gold from the hidden location where the gang had spirited it via melted pellets in a waterway. The ingots are now buried under a house. Sierra (not the Professor) figures out where it is and they negotiate to get it back.

Tamayo gets his gold back, but it’s just gold-foil-covered brass, so he’s in a bind. He agrees to make it look like the gang had been killed in a shootout, in exchange for the gang never revealing that Spain no longer has its gold reserves. They all get new passports and live happily ever after, having split the entire wealth of a nation amongst themselves.

I suppose they’re heroes? Is that the story? The entire nation of Spain has no reserves left, having been forced to allow ten people to steal them—and that’s a good thing? Or is the lesson that our economy and society is based on fictions and that those fictions are more important than the actual underlying reality?

I’m probably overthinking it. There was a lot of drama, a lot of interpersonal conflict, a decent amount of cleverness and a whole lotta Spanish, which I quite enjoyed listening to.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019) — 6/10

Some of the battle scenes were nice, but the story was not great. It was also incredibly obvious that the whole movie was just a setup for a series of some sort. I honestly can’t remember what it was all about; it was something about warring cyborg factions, with a highly corporate-military faction firmly in charge of society and Alita ostensibly the last great hope of a floundering and vastly underpowered revolutionary faction. I got vibes of Ready Player One but without all of the 80s callbacks.

Anna (2019) — 6/10

The cast is promising, with Helen Mirren and Luke Evans. I’m not a fan of the lead, though: Sasha Luss as Anna is unconvincing. Some of the fight choreography was nice, but it was, at times, an awkward fit for her 45kg self that tended to throw you out of the illusion. She’s not supposed to be super-powered, nor was it posited that she could defy the laws of physics—and yet there she was, purporting to do both. She is, apparently—and in typical 21st-century, everything-is-YA-fiction-now fashion—amazing-looking, an unparalleled genius, a weapons expert, a martial-arts expert, and who knows what else. There is no tension. Apparently, tension is superfluous these days.

Upload S02 (2022) — 7/10

Nora’s character is now quite terrible. She’s horrible to Nathan, taking him to task for not having told her about Ingrid’s uploading—when she’s the one who went off the grid. Also, how did the Ludds make a “hyperworm” when Nora’s the best tech they have? Why did Matteo have to wear a disguise to show up at the edge of the garden for five seconds? This is very bad storytelling. And now Nora’s better than the rest of the IT department and has all of the privileges and rights to alter Lakeview code. A likely story. This lax attitude toward security and authorization is a continuation of the first season, but more pronounced.

The Ludds are being made to seem like merciless revolutionaries, while Nora sees the humanity in all people. The working class with whom she works in IT treats her better than the revolutionaries. Is that supposed to be the message?

Ingrid didn’t end up uploading herself, having fooled/guilted Nathan into prolonging their relationship longer than he likely would have had he not been convinced that she’d been so self-sacrificing. Nathan is also a super-hacker who’s able to steal and donate bandwidth to those in the 2GB world, who need it the most. He’s Robin Hood.

The plot moves forward in that Nathan learns that it was he—not his partner—who was the less altruistic partner and who’d agreed to sell his shares in his ground-breaking Upload-for-everyone company to Ingrid’s father and to billionaire David Choak. At the same time, they learn that uploads will lose what few rights they had when “Mind Frisk” goes online, a technology that allows those running the virtual world to investigate any thought that the uploads have.

Choak, meanwhile, continues his plan to open upload centers for the “people”, but only in swing states—he is most likely granting the poor a chance at eternity in exchange for them voting correctly in the next election.

Ingrid, never having uploaded, has instead grown a copy of Nathan’s body in order to allow him to download. The download succeeds and Nora and Nathan escape with a couple of other luddites. Ingrid is left with nothing, but a single hair of Nathan’s head, which allows her to continue her plans on reuniting with him. Since Nathan is now missing in the upload world, another employee of the tech-support staff—who’s also infatuated with the handsome Nathan—restores him from backup.

This season was entertaining enough on its own, but seemed very much designed to set up a third season.

Brooklyn Nine-nine (2013–2021) — 9/10

This is the story of a police precinct in Brooklyn, initially focused on Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg), but finally ending up being about the small crew there. His partner Charles (Joey Lo Troglio) is an absolutely unapologetic fan of Jake.

Rosa (Stephanie Beatriz) is a bad-ass with a deeply buried heart. She dallies briefly with Adrian Pimento (Jason Mantsoukas), who is not a permanent member of the crew. Her partner Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) is a lover-of-all-things-organizational ladder-climber who ends up marrying Jake Peralta.

Sergeant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews) is the dad of the unit, a pumped-up pussycat. Captain Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher) is an amazing character, a robot of a man who slowly opens up over the arc of the show, but not all of the way. His husband Kevin Cozner (Marc Evan Jackson) is similarly staid, a professor at NYU.

Scully (Joel McKinnon Miller) and Hitchcock (Dirk Blocker) are lazy, but occasionally brilliant cops. Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti) is the precinct’s secretary (ostensibly Raymond Holt’s), but she doesn’t do very much other than talk about how amazing she is.

Side-roles of note are Madeline Wuntch (Kyra Sedgwick), who is Raymond Holt’s nemesis, Doug Judy (Craig Robinson), a car thief who fools Jake many times, each time charming him into thinking that the power of their friendship is strongly than Judy’s desire to steal things, and Keith “The Vulture” Pembroke (Dean Winters), who provokes and steals cases from the 99.

From s03e02,

“Raymond Holt:Your vocabulary is an indictment of the public education system.”

From S03e03,

“Rosa: Step one: put a pie in the fridge and cover it with poison.
Terry That’s step one? What’s step two?
Rosa: Tell their widows they were thieves.”

From S04E01,

In the exchange below, Greg is Raymond Holt and Larry is Jake Peralta.

“Greg: Ms. Karfton, you don’t know us, but-
Jordan: Uh, yeah, I do. I got you on video looking like a couple of dumbasses. [Jordan leans against the door frame and chuckles.]
Larry: I like to think I handled it with some amount of grace.
Jordan: Nope, you looked dumber than my kid Jaden, and his eyes are perma-crossed. You want to see? Hey, Jaden! [Jordan turns and shouts into her house.]
Greg: No, that’s not necessary. Have you posted that video to the Internet?
Jordan: Not yet. Ran out of data on my phone because of all the porn I watched.
Larry: We don’t know each other. You could’ve just said you were out of data.
Jordan: I’m uploading the video tomorrow at my cousin’s wedding. Dog track has free Wi-Fi.”

In S06E09, talking about Amy agreeing to help her insufferable brother, but for spiteful reasons,

“Jake: I don’t love how we got here, but we’re going where I want.”

In S06E10, talking about Nikolaj’s real father Gintars,

“Jake: Judging by the head-to-toe denim, he’s either not American or deeply American. I’m thinking either Ukraine or Kentucky.”

This is Where I Leave You (2014) — 7/10

This one is kind of a 6, but I bumped to a 7 because it made me laugh a few times. The cast was great, but poorly used. It was a family-gathering movie with Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Kathryn Hahn, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard, and Ben Schwartz. Jane Fonda was the matriarch who’d just recently lost her husband. Her house was full of kids who’d returned home for the funeral with their respective wives and girlfriends. No-one was happy with their lives, some in more amusing ways than others. I watched it in German.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) — 9/10

Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) return for this fourth, and almost certainly last, installment in the Matrix tetralogy. I quite enjoyed this go-round, even though they tried a little too hard to replace characters like Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) or Smith (Jonathan Groff). Additions like Bugs (Jessica Henwick) were OK, but not groundbreaking. I was happy to see Christina Ricci as Gwyn de Vere.

In this film, Thomas Anderson is a video-game designer, responsible for having designed one of the most popular video games of all time: The Matrix. He meets Trinity (Tiffany) and thinks he has a connection with her, but he can’t remember why. She thinks so, too, but also doesn’t know why. She has a husband and two kids.

He keeps trying to figure out whether what he is experiencing is real. Is the Matrix as he vaguely remembers it the real simulacrum within the nightmare world of human-energy harvesting where the machines have taken over? Or is he in a reality where that whole story is just the plot of a video game? Or is he really in the Matrix again, convinced that his memories of having found out the truth of reality are just his inability to determine that the game he himself created is just a fantasy? Did he create the game because he remembered the Matrix or does he think he remembers the Matrix because he’d created the game? Or are his memories of having created the game implanted to fool him into thinking that the Matrix doesn’t exist?

There are, as usual, several meta-levels to this movie, if you’re willing to look for them. There are several scenes whether the characters seem to be talking about the producers of the Matrix movies, who seem to have forced the Wachowskis back into the world of their creation, decades ago.

It turns out that that first three films had happened and that Zion was destroyed, but that the remnant of humanity was able to relocate to Io, aided by machines who see a detente and rapprochement as the best way forward. It is, however, 60 years later, so the real-world counterparts to most of Neo’s friends are now dead. Only he has survived because he was able to download into a completely new body.

It turns out that Neo’s therapist is an entity called The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris), who wrested control of the Matrix from The Architect to rebuild it into a place of emotional manipulation, very much akin to the media and social landscape of the Internet as we know it. In a completely unsurprising twist, it is now Trinity who has complete control over the Matrix. We see her and Neo beating the Analyst’s ass for him, telling him how they’re going to be running the Matrix for the benefit of humanity.

Interstellar (2014) — 8/10

I watched it in German the second time around. I stand by my review from when I saw it in the theater in English.

The Leftovers S02 (2015) — 8/10

This season finds Matt (Christopher Eccleston) and Mary (Janel Moloney) in Jarden, Texas. The town has been renamed to Miracle because no-one from the town disappeared. Kevin (Justin Theroux), his daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley), and Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) also move to Miracle, with Nora spending $3M on a ramshackle house to ensure their being able to stay. The town feels like a giant scam, but that’s the point of the show—humanity doesn’t handle anything very well, least of all the disappearance of 2% of the human population.

The three new residents meet their somewhat-odd neighbors, Erika (Regina King), her husband John (Kevin Carroll), who seems to be beating up folks with whom he disagrees, and their two children Michael (Jovan Adepo) and Evelyn (Tiffani Barbour). After their initial picnic, Evelyn takes off with friends. After an earthquake (not infrequent there, apparently), the girls appear to have disappeared. I say “appear to have” because it is later revealed that they had instead joined the GR (Guilty Remnant) and were actually spearheading Meg’s (Liv Tyler) plan to take the town of Miracle down a notch.

Kevin has trouble with sleepwalking. He had ended up at the same bend in the river from which the girls purportedly disappeared—except he was there with a block of cement tied around his ankle, an apparent attempted suicide. This turns out to have been exactly what happened. He was trying to kill himself in order to extricate Patti (Ann Dowd) from his mind, who lives on as the monkey on his back.

Patti is absolutely amazing. Just a mind-bogglingly good actress making the most of well-written lines and story. Kevin is also tremendous, truly letting us feel what it would be like to have someone living in your head, driving you mad, making you want to just die to make it go away. Kevin tries a couple of times, finally succeeding after having gone through an elaborate fantasy as a secret agent in a parallel world, where he has to kill the president—who turns out to be Patti. It’s all very complicated, but clearer while you’re watching it.

Meg is an out-and-out psycho now, with a power to sway people to her mad purpose that seems at-once hard-to-believe and also all-too-believable. She rapes Tom (Chris Zylka) then tries to recruit him to the GR. Tom and Laurie were working on helping GR members turn back to a normal life. It gets pretty complicated, but the GR ends up driving a camper-van purportedly full of explosives onto the bridge going into Jarden. It turns out not to be full of explosives, but filled with the three girls who’d run away from home at the beginning of the season.

Everyone is varying levels of devastated, disappointed, or saved from their experiences.