Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.6

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.

Rocky (1976) — 8/10

I’d forgotten just how little boxing this movie actually had. It’s really only the last ten minutes of this two-hour film that has any real boxing. And it’s hard to call it “real” boxing as Rocky—despite training for long weeks with a purportedly good trainer—has absolutely no defense. He almost never has his hands up. It’s kind of laughable.

We meet Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) outside of the ring, looking for a contender to fill the place of an opponent who’s injured his hand. The bout was to take place in Philadelphia, so he looks for a local fighter to fight. He eventually finds Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone).

Rocky, meanwhile, spends most of his time getting to know the painfully shy Adrian Pennino (Talia Shire) while working as a loan shark, taking part in small-time fights, and helping out at a gym. He eventually starts training with Mickey (Burgess Meredith) with some help from Adrian’s brother Paulie (Burt Young). Rocky ends up being sponsored by Paulie’s meatpacking company.

The night of the fight arrives. Rocky is as ready as he’s going to be, but his plan was never to win: it was to go the distance, something no fighter has ever done against Apollo. Apollo marches in to fanfare; Rocky to silence. They fight to an absolute standstill, with Rocky premiering his uncanny ability to lead with his face and take countless punches the head. His entire head is a shambles by the end of the fifteenth round, with Apollo not looking much better. They lean on each other, but neither falls.

Apollo wins the fight by split decision, but Rocky’s only concern is finding Adrian and telling her how much he loves her through his shattered mask of a face.

I watched it in German this time.

Rocky II (1979) — 8/10

The film starts with the last several minutes of Rocky, with the Italian Stallion (Sylvester Stallone) against Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) fighting each to a 15-round standstill. Rocky and Apollo are taken to the hospital, where they spend weeks recovering from the respective damage they’d done to one another.

When Rocky gets out, he proposed to Adrian at the zoo and they are soon married. Rocky takes her on a shopping spree, buying a Trans Am, gold watches, furs, and even a nice row house. Rocky’s right eye never recovered and his peripheral vision is terrible. He’s still very fit, but he shouldn’t fight again. He takes on a few acting roles for commercials, but his reading skills aren’t up to snuff. He spends evenings in bed reading to Adrian out loud. They’re adorably in love. Rocky is very, very funny.

Rocky looks for an office job, but he doesn’t have the qualifications. He gets a job with Paulie (Burt Young). Rocky is a down-to-Earth poor guy who wants a good life for his family. He goes to Mick (Burgess Meredith), who turns him down because he’s going to get killed without his right-side peripheral vision. Mick offers him a job at the gym, but the others are disrespectful. Even people throughout town are not impressed with his down-to-Earth approach.

Apollo wants a rematch because his fans keep telling him that he didn’t really win. Mick and Rocky agree to start training again. To protect his eye, Mick trains him as a southpaw. He starts him on chasing a chicken (a scene I also recall from other, later films). Then he trains him old-school, while Apollo trains much more sophisticated (though nowhere near what Ivan Drago would do in Rocky IV).

Adrian is pregnant and working in the pet store again. Rocky is back in training, probably earning nothing. Mick is brutally honest with Rocky, whereas Rocky isn’t enthusiastic enough. His head is somewhere else. Adrian ends up in the hospital with internal bleeding. The child is in danger. Mick offers his condolences, but also tells Rocky he has to fight Apollo with all of his heart. He tells him isn’t just an “Eintagsfliege”, then sits with him in the church, in silence.

Rocky is in the hospital, reading letters he’s written to his comatose wife. The baby had been born and Rocky had never seen him. Finally, she wakes up. I have no idea how long this all was supposed to have taken. They both see the baby for the first time. In the late 70s, I guess you just didn’t visit the baby as a father?

Adrian gives Rocky her blessing to beat Apollo. He finally starts training in earnest. His training regime is absolutely gobsmacking. So many one-armed pushups, so many one-armed pull-ups, jump rope at the speed of light, just amazing.

Rocky is hilarious. When Rocky walks in, he says to Mick, “Ich habe gehofft, der kommt nicht.” When he and Apollo meet in the ring, Apollo says “Ich lege dir flach.” Rocky walks back to Mick and says “er wirkt ziemlich wütend.”

Rocky’s fighting style has always been “no defense”. In this sequel, it’s even worse than in the original. I am not sure what the point of constantly doing that is; to show that Rocky can take any number of blows to the head? It’s like he spent absolutely zero time training. It’s an embarrassment for boxing or any fighting sport. They showed him doing a tremendous amount of strength training, but he can’t box worth a damn. He’s ostensibly in southpaw, but he mostly just stands completely flat to the opponent, presenting as broad a target as possible, with his hands down at his sides. He never dodges or ducks a punch. He boxes like Homer Simpson.

In the end, Rocky is able to stand up before the 10-count, whereas Apollo does not. Both of their faces are ruined shambles. The makeup is very well-done.

Russian Doll S02 — 7/10

It started off a bit shaky, but ended reasonably well. This season sees Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) flitting through history and time-loops again. This time, she’s sometimes her mother and sometimes her grandmother and sometimes in Hungary, learning about why her mother and her grandmother lived the lives that they did. She learns about her good friend Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), a friend of her mother’s. She ends up kidnapping herself, seeking her time-traveling friend’s help, doing some bizarre stuff in bizarre places, and finally ends up making the right decision and resolves a lot of her personal shit and goes to Ruth’s wake at her quirky friend Maxine’s (Greta Lee) place. There’s a bit of rumination on topics philosophical and ethical, as well as a bunch of holocaust stuff, if you’re into rehashing how bad the Nazis were again.

Nate Bargatze: The Greatest Average American — 8/10

Bargatze is a clean and funny comic with a very understated style. I can no longer remember any of his jokes, but he’s not really a one-line kind of guy anyway. He mostly tells medium-length stories about himself and his family. His daughter and wife feature heavily.

Star Wars: Episode II − Attack of the Clones (2002) — 4/10

This movie looks absolutely terrible. It’s worse than even TV shows of that era. I’d completely forgotten in the intervening twenty years since I’d seen this that Jango Fett’s sidekick is his son, who’s nearly as annoying as Anakin Skywalker in the first “episode” (Phantom Menace).

Hayden Christensen’s acting is so mind-numbingly wooden, it’s not even saved by being synchronized into German.

The Fugitive (1993) — 8/10

This movie is much more police-state-happy than I remember. Tommy Lee Jones and crew break into a man’s home without a warrant and blow him away, then tell his wife to shut the fuck up. “I never negotiate with criminals.” Jesus.

Harrison Ford is great as a brilliant doctor how uses his powers to saving himself rather than others, although he can’t help saving others while he’s doing it.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) — 9/10

This movie about a lawyer Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) sentenced to prison is, hands down, the best adaptation of a Stephen King story that ever graced the silver screen. It is not a horror story, nor are there fantastical elements to it. Perhaps it is because of this that it works so well. Perhaps it is because of the staggering acting talent of Robbins and Morgan Freeman, who plays Red.

Everybody in this movie is great. Andy eventually escapes prison in an absolutely spectacular fashion—Eastwood’s Alcatraz is almost as good, but not quite.

I watched it in German this time.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) — 7/10

Johnny Depp’s performance in the eponymous role is riveting: bizarre and unique. He had very big shoes to fill, with Gene Wilder having played the role in the first movie. But Depp brings his own unique wackiness to the role. The boat scene in the original was much better.

See my review from 2011. I watched it in German this time.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) — 9/10

I still love this movie as much as I did the first time I saw it. Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo are fantastic in their roles as the eponymous billionaire Crown and the sultry insurance-fraud detective pursuing him. Their circling of each other is captivating. The finale—with an absolutely epic needle-drop of Sinner Man by Nina Simone—is a joy to behold.

I watched it in French this time. It lost nothing in the translation.

Hidden Figures (2016) — 8/10

This is a movie about three women making their way up the ranks of NASA during the moon shot. One of them—Katherine (Taraji P. Henson)—is particularly talented and rises high. Mary is an engineer, taken onto the capsule-design team. There is a bit of a John Henry plot to it, as a whole roomful of “computers” (the women) will soon be replaced with an IBM. Luckily, Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) is able teach herself how to program the machine better than the technicians sent with it. They are all black, making their participation in engineering disciplines in 1960s America all the more challenging.

This treatment was pretty heavy-handed at times, but the acting was great and the story was interesting. The U.S. in the sixties was an appalling wasteland of injustice. One of the more galling parts is where Katherine is forced to walk half a mile to the colored women’s bathroom—and not one of her co-workers has any idea this is going on.

The ladies save the day for John Glenn and all ends well. It’s a true story. Katherine would go on to calculate the trajectories for the Apollo mission as well as several space-shuttle missions. Mary went on to become NASA’s first female, black engineer, while Dorothy became NASA’s first female, black manager. Incredible that we never learned any of this in school.