Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.8

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.

Ozark S04— 7/10

This season whipsaws back and forth and finally settles on an ending of sorts.

Marty and Wendy enter Navarro’s orbit, circling much more closely than before. Marty even goes to Mexico to put the accounting house in order while Navarro is in jail. Wendy, meanwhile, is using whatever pull she has to get Navarro transferred to Mexican jail, where it is presumed it will be child’s play for him to escape.

Navarro’s nephew Javi is an absolute wild card, dangerous, paranoid, and unstable—and liable to do anything. A private detective Mel Sattam is hot on the Byrd’s trail as well. Speaking of unhinged, Darlene gives Javi a run for his money in that department. She marries Wyatt and they move in together. Ruth does not attend the wedding.

Marty is working with the FBI, leaking details of Javi’s shipments, and he’s not happy about that. Javi, paranoid as he is, suspects foul play. He’s right, of course, but, man, what an asshole.

Darlene kills Kansas City mobster Frank Cosgrove Sr. in a fit of rage. This would be her last murder. Javier out-crazies her and takes both her and Wyatt out for competing with his drug business.

With Wyatt’s death, Ruth becomes increasingly unhinged herself, but also masterfully cunning. She hunts Javi down and kills him in cold blood, without hesitation. Marty, Wendy, and Clare are witnesses. Wendy needs Clare’s donations, and Clare needs Wendy’s heroin—until Ruth and Frank Cosgrove Jr. deliver all the heroin her pharma-company needs. Clare drops Wendy like a hot rock.

Then there’s another deus ex called Camila, Navarro’s sister and Javi’s mother. She’s of course ruthlessly going to search for the animal who killed her wonderful son.

Wendy’s dad gets custody of Jonah and Charlotte, which crushes Wendy’s spirit—she thought she was almost out, with her whole family (but then she always thinks that—it’s a through-line of the show that Wendy and Marty have to keep escalating to keep all of the balls in the air).

Meanwhile, Navarro’s main henchman Nelson is hunting for Javi’s killer and is circling in on Ruth. Ruth and her friend Rachel get the drop on him and dispose of the body. More trouble ahead.

Navarro finally gets his prison transfer, but Camila arranged it, so she betrays him and ties up his loose end, deep in the desert. Camila finds out from Clare that Ruth killed Javi. She returns the favor. Thug life, Ruth. Thug life.

Weirdly, it didn’t end there. Instead, the Byrdes return home to find Mel rooting around in their house, having discovered Ben’s ashes (Wendy had allowed the cartel to kill her meddlesome brother) and vowing to bring them to justice. Jonah shoots him point-blank. The family is back together, they have a ton of money, the cartel is out of their way. The end.

A typical tacked-on 21st-century happy ending that explains every last detail for the next generation of dolts who hate open-ended so much that it physically pains them. The show should have ended on Ruth.

Sam Morril: Same Time Tomorrow — 9/10

Very tight set. That’s all I wrote. I didn’t take any other notes, so I must have been just enchanted. I’ll trust my rating. Sam’s smug and self-assured, but he’s funny as hell.

Red Notice — 4/10

Utterly passionless. I don’t know, it feels like it was written by a committee? Or by an AI? I usually enjoy Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds. I’m not a fan of Gal Gadot. I think she’s way too stiff, but whatever. It could have worked. The plot was so derivative, had so many unforeseeable and frankly unnecessary twists that it was too clever for itself by half.

Stuff gets stolen, then it’s stolen by other people. Somehow it’s important who’s the greatest thief in the world. Somehow it’s important to have like six acts.

Somehow, it’s important to have Gal Gadot be invincible in every role she plays.

Even poor Ryan Reynolds—who’s always playing Ryan Reynolds—couldn’t keep up the patter well enough. I love the guy—I’ve been a fan since Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place and Blade: Trinity—but he absolutely peaked with the Deadpool movies. A bunch of this Netflix stuff is just homogenized beyond belief. Whatever pays the bills, I guess. I’m sure a lot of people are pretty happy with it, but I feel like this kind of stuff is just preparing us for AI-produced content with deep fakes that bring up Deadpools 3–103 within weeks of each other.

Jimmy O. Yang: Good Deal — 7/10

He was pretty good. Had some good moments. He talked a lot about growing up Chinese, to no-one’s surprise. Kath loved him! Surprisingly, because she really disliked his character Jian Yang. I mean she appreciated that he’d done a good job of being detestable, and also acknowledged that Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) deserved everything he got, but I still thought she’d be more negatively predisposed, but she wasn’t.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel S04 — 6/10

This season continues the trend of the previous two: Mrs. Maisel is the worst part of the show. Her parents are funny. Joel is more sympathetic and interesting. Mrs. Maisel torpedoes her own career again and again for a principle of some sort. Susie also does terrible things to her own career. Lenny Bruce plays Carnegie Hall. The whole family moves back in to the old apartment. Abe learns to enjoy his low-paying journalist’s job. Rose’s job as a matchmaker endangers the whole family as she crosses the matchmaking mafia. Joel turns out to be a mensch and finally introduces his family to Mae. Imogene is pretty funny, and ends up doing work for Abe.

It was fine, but Midge got really, really tiring. I get it: she thinks everything’s about her. She’s right. The show is literally named after her. The best parts were the ones without her in it. Even her humor was very narcissistic and, frankly, spiteful, at times. That’s her prerogative, of course, but it felt very much like we were being told to think she’s funny because she’s a groundbreaking female comedian when really she was a rich girl who’s (nearly) never had to work a day in her life (she did, temporarily, until she was “discovered” and able to buy back her palatial upper east-side mansion).

That’s somebody’s idea of a great show, but not mine. Lenny Bruce was funny. Joel was funny. Susie was funny.

Crip Camp — 8/10

This was a documentary about a summer camp for handicapped people of all stripes, run by big-hearted, but completely under-qualified and nearly hopelessly underfunded counselors. The camp ran for decades. There are umpteen interviews with former campers who reminisce about how wonderful it was to just be treated like real people. They were able to play sports for which barely any of them had anything approaching the physical or mental equipment, but they all tried anyway. The counselors pushed and dragged them around and they all loved it.

The camp was called Camp Jened, at the foot of Hunter Mountain, ran from 1951 until 2009. Some of the campers would go on to win major victories for Americans with disabilities, including a month-long occupation of a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare building.

An extra point for the subject matter, but it was a bit of long documentary for the material presented.

The Eternals — 4/10

Jesus Christ. What in the hell was this movie? What a mess. They did such a terrible job of introducing the nigh-dozen characters, each with their own identity: female, deaf, gay, overweight, black, Mexican, Scottish, Asian—and combinations thereof. And then there’s their powers, their origin, the age-old battle with inscrutable beings. And they just talk and talk and talk, but they don’t say anything helpful.

The Eternals fight the Deviants, which are remorseless, mindless killers, monsters unparalleled in evil. Or are they? Are they also just pawns of the same Celestials who use the Eternals to do their dirty work? The Eternals have God-like powers relative to humans, but they too are in thrall to beings whose purpose is unknowable to them. Some of the Eternals think that they’re fighting the good fight, allowing Earth to be destroyed in order to allow many other civilizations to flourish.

At least that might be the gist of it. Who knows? The movie was much more concerned with CGI-ing the absolute hell out of everything. The Celestial that was to come out in the “Emergence” was buried in the planet, but also so big that its head and part of its hand
stuck out over the cloud deck of the planet. Physics was 100% out the window there. What a shit-show.

The Amazing Spider-Man — 4/10

This is not Peter Parker. I don’t know who this is. This is the BMOC, with no sense of humility, no sense of poverty. The Peter Parker of Tobey Maguire is gone. It has been replaced by whatever Andrew Garfield thinks he’s doing. He’s going steady with Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone) and smooching her in front of the whole school. Aunt May is played by Sally Field in this one, for God knows what reason.

The action scenes at the beginning are a mishmash of cuts so fast they would make a TikTokker’s head spin, all filmed with shaky cameras. The shaky cameras are back when Electro (Jamie Foxx) gets his powers—the tank full of electric eels is a shaky mess of cinematography. This whole process of course sends Electro completely around the bend.

Electro seems incredibly powerful, but Spider-Man gets the better of him. He jokes the whole time, which is pretty true to the comic books, but he’s so flip the whole time, even when he’s worrying about Gwen Stacy, which isn’t. And Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) just wanders into danger—a war zone—without a care in the world.

They just talk and talk and describe and describe—exposition all the way. Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan) is back and ill and becomes the Green Goblin in order to save his own life. He is, naturally, insane. He ends up killing Gwen Stacy in the ultimate battle. I feel like Emma Stone’s contract demanded this so that she would absolutely not have to be in a sequel. Andrew Garfield chews the shit out of the scenery mourning her loss.

Five months later, from the insane asylum, Harry gives orders to release a prisoner (Paul Giamatti) to take up the role of “The Rhino”. Instead of a genetically enhanced superman with extraordinarily thick skin and super-strength, he’s a psychotic prisoner in a rhino-style robot suit. Giamatti yells “I. Am. Rhino.” I wonder how much he was paid per word for that travesty.

I have no idea what Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Paul Giamatti, and Sally Field are doing other than just raking in millions of dollars. Only a cash grab can explain their participation in this terrible movie. It’s unclear why the whole Rhino scene was there in the first place.

I was of similar mind when I reviewed this movie for the first time back in 2012.

Nick Kroll — 4/10

Nick Kroll is one of the creators and writers of Big Mouth and was very good with John Mulaney in Oh, Hello On Broadway —but he’s absolutely not a good stand-up comedian. Well, he’s definitely not targeting an adult audience. He spent the first thirty minutes on poop and fart jokes. This is, perhaps, unsurprising for those familiar with Big Mouth but—at least in the first season or two—there was a cleverness there, as well. I think Mr. Kroll has run out of ideas. The start of the fourth season of Big Mouth was also very poop-joke-heavy.

But he’s not a good comedian because he’s really just there for fan service and to be adored. At one point, he tells the audience that he’s “the baby of the family”, then waits a painfully long beat for everyone to clap. That was not a joke. This is not an affirmation of him as a person. This is not therapy. Comedians should get laughs, not applause. Everything is wrong with this picture. He should be funny. He is not.

At another point, he’s doing some “crowd work” and asks if anyone has a much older father. Someone responds that they do, saying that their father is “pushing 60” and they themselves are 21 years old. Kroll says, “So your Dad was in his early 40s? That’s not old.” He’s right about that, but he can’t do simple arithmetic. Jesus.