Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.11

Published by marco on

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.

Neal Brennan: Blocks (2022) — 8/10

He used the word “Cauckies” for “Caucasians”. He did it a lot. It was kind of funny at the time, but it looks weird on paper.

“I’m 48, never been married. People don’t like it. Women would trust me more if I’d been married and I’d murdered my wife. I mean, he’s capable of love, he’s just too passionate. And he’s not not gonna murder two people, is he?”

“I’ve never heard a woman do a sound effect in my entire life.”

“Having kids despite climate change is like … it’s like being at a house party where the roof is on fire, the bsement is flooding, the cops are coming to arrest everyone, you’re squished in between tons of people, and you look at your buddy and say “We should invite Brian.””

“I did Bufo Alvarius—it’s like the nuclear bomb of psychedelics.”

He called it a “traumedy” show, which was a good description. It was mostly a comedy show, but also a bit of performance art. He played with the blocks behind him the whole show, shifting them about and putting them on different shelves. At the end, after his final monologue, hoping he’d get better, a light switched on from the left and the shadows thrown by all the blocks outlined the silhouette of his face. He pushed the glasses block a bit to the right and the silhouette got glasses. A nice trick.

Yves Saint Laurent (2014) — 6/10

This is a very pretty movie. The sets, the music, the clothes. It’s nice to just play as a music video, to be honest. The story’s a bit weird, but that was also not unexpected. YSL works far too much, takes far too many drugs to keep himself going, is mercurial, insecure, and brilliant.

He gets involves in a lot of drug-fueled gay orgies. Lots of languorous kisses with lots of drugs and alcohol and smoking. Then they killed their dog by leaving a bunch of drugs lying around on the floor where their French bulldog could eat them. The dog did not go out easily. It’s literally half an hour of self-indulgent self-destruction on screen. There has to have been a more artistic way to tell this story.

This movie is unfortunately much too long and self-indulgent. He takes a long time to fall.

Watched it in German with French subtitles.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) — 8/10

The first 2/3 is excellent and well-paced. The final third was a bit long and dragged on, unfortunately. This is the fake biography of Weird Al’s (Daniel Radcliffe) rise to fame, following the exact steps you would expect from a standard career arc: raised by unsupportive parents who want him to “stop being everything that defines him.”, then rising to meteoric fame based on his amazing accordion skills, with his best friends, then getting turned to the dark side by Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood), descends into a hellish nightmare of drinking, drugs, and excess before redeeming himself with an original song Eat It (which Michael Jackson then copies from him), and being shot to death as he’s accepting his Emmy.

Weird Al performs all of his own songs, and there are a bunch of good ones from his repertoire. Daniel Radcliffe energetically lip-syncs it all and throws himself wholeheartedly into the role. I don’t know whether it was Radcliffe’s or Yankovic’s idea to have Radcliffe be ripped AF, but it was a stroke of genius. It was also a nice touch that Radcliffe is shorter than nearly everyone else in the film. Evan Rachel Wood was fabulous as Madonna—also just threw herself right into the role.

There were a ton of cameos and supporting roles worth mentioning—it just goes to show how broad Yankovic’s appeal is. I gave it an extra star because it’s Weird Al, man.

The Boys s03 (2022) — 9/10

At the start of this thing, Stormfront (Aya Cash) is still alive a year later, but absolutely fucked up in a hospital bed and not likely to be of any use at all to anyone. Well, she’s still in love with Homelander (Antony Starr), so when he visits, he pops in there for an invalid handie that was probably the most shocking thing I’ve seen in a while. Hughie (Jack Quaid) is working for the BSA (Bureau of Superhero Affairs) and making headway on catching supe criminals, along with Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit)—who’s the head-popper, but Hughie doesn’t know it yet. It turns out that Neuman is the daughter of Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito), Chairman of the Board at Vaught. Hughie’s eyes are wide open after he sees Neuman pop the head of a person from her past. He realizes he’s been working with the enemy all along, and tries to return to The Boys.

The Boys are kind of idling, but Butcher (Karl Urban) is still trying to figure out a way of killing Homelander. He gets onto the scent of a device that might be able to take him out when he learns from Mallory (Laila Robins) that she’d been on a mission in Nicaragua—back when that was where the CIA was focused—when the Russians showed up and took away an incapacitated Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). The legend had always been that Soldier Boy had been killed, which was why Butcher was interested. Soldier Boy was the only hero in history who was as powerful as Homelander. How was he killed? And if he wasn’t killed, how had he been incapacitated?

There are a bunch of strands in this season, with MM (Laz Alonso) struggling to stay “straight” (not involved in supe-hunting activities) but falling off the wagon and returning to The Boys. Frenchie’s (Tomer Capone) past comes back to haunt him in the form of Nina (Katia Winter), who doesn’t seem to have any powers, but is preternaturally powerful anyway—at least in the hold she has over all those around her. Bad things happen, but they end up going to Russia to find the “weapon” that took out Soldier Boy. Instead, they find Soldier Boy himself, releasing him from captivity. He’d been kept on ice with low temperatures are spectacular amounts of vaporized Novichok.

He shakes it off because he really is immensely powerful. In escaping, he knocks Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) around so hard that she loses her powers. This seems to be a side-effect of his new ability to channel rage into an unholy chest-ray that obliterates everything non-supe that it touches. Supe things it seems to neutralize.

Anyway, the Boys come back from Russia, with an incapacitated Kimiko. However, Butcher has started taking an experimental one-day-supe drug called V24 that grants you superpowers for a day, but has a pretty sick hangover, as well. Hughie starts taking it as well. Butchie’s powers are closer to Homelander’s, while Hughie’s give him strength and the ability to teleport (although not with clothes).

Nina is still trying to extract her pound of flesh from Frenchie, but Kimiko saves him, despite no longer having healing powers. She gets pretty heavily damaged in the bargain and ends up in the hospital, where she and Frenchie get … closer.

Homelander, meanwhile, is spiraling out of control. On his supposed birthday, Stormfront kills herself by swallowing his tongue. He melts down and goes on a spectacular rant, declaring himself utterly superior to everyone. This goes down remarkably well and saves his polling numbers. He’s back on top of the world—and no longer hiding who he is.

A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) is dueling with a supe named Blue Hawk (Nick Wechsler), who’s “cleaning up crime” by mostly just killing black people. The Deep (Chace Crawford) is back in the Seven after a struggle, while A-Train isn’t. The Deep gets an octopus involved in his sex life with his wife. His manipulative wife Cassandra (Katy Breier) is less than thrilled, realizing that her grip on him is slipping (no pun intended).

Annie (Erin Moriarty) is granted co-captaincy with Homelander and they’re supposed to act as a couple. This is deeply disturbing to everyone but Homelander, who’s a flat-out psychopath. The terror is palpable.

Man, what else? Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) used to be part of Payback, headed up by Soldier Boy. It was Soldier Boy who’d mutilated and brain-damaged Noir so badly that he only ever appears in costume and never says anything. (This is different that in the comic books where Noir was actually a prior clone of Homelander) Soldier Boy seeks revenge on all of the former members of Payback, who’d hated him and who’d helped incapacitate him for the Russians, who’d experimented cruelly on him (trying to figure out what might damage him by, e.g., pouring gallons of acid down his throat, which, while not doing actual damage, hurt like mad). He picks them off one-by-one. Two of them are hosting that year’s Herogasm, so they did that as well in this season.

Maeve (Dominique McElligott) is secretly helping The Boys because she hates Homelander and is terrified of what he may do to innocent people. But Homelander knows, of course, because he can smell Butcher on her when she returns from having delivered another supply of V24—and stayed for many bottles of booze and also some supe-sex with Butcher, who literally knows no bounds.

Homelander takes over as CEO and COTB of Vaught with Edgar’s departure/arrest. A-Train kills Blue Hawk but ends up having a heart attack, so he gets Blue Hawk’s super-heart implanted while he’s in a coma. Neat. Also, taking V24 will kill you after 3–5 doses, so Hughie might be OK, but Butcher is fucked.

Noir is watching his past in the form of cartoon versions of Payback playing out the final scene before Soldier Boy was taken. Homelander is on the fence about trying to kill Soldier Boy because he finds out that he’d his dad. That is, Homeland is Soldier Boy’s son. Neat. Annie is off the leash, enraging Homelander with bad press. Noir tries to get Homelander to help him kill the dangerous Soldier Boy, but that’s no longer happening because Homelander wants to team up with his dad. Noir insists and Homelander rips his insides to the outside.

Frenchie helps Kimiko get V so that her powers are restored. They all gather for the big clash between Homelander and Soldier Boy. Maeve and Homelander fight it out, with Homelander blinding her in one eye, but Maeve having done some damage as well. Homelander’s son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) is there as well, trying to figure shit out and trying to help with his powers. Maeve tackles an exploding Soldier Boy out of the building and apparently sacrifices them both. Obviously Soldier Boy is not dead. Neither is Maeve, who is now de-powered, but alive, if blind in one eye. She’s back with her old girlfriend Elena (Nicola Correia-Damude).

Annie and the Boys are getting their feet back under them. Neumann is back and now campaigning as Vice President—Butcher declares that they will have to stop that bitch. Homelander is learning that he hasn’t lost any support among his faithful. Instead, he gains more support when he kills a protester who threw something at Ryan, whom he now takes to his personal appearances.

Con Air (1997) — 8/10

Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) is a veteran who’d gone to jail for manslaughter for killing a man in a fight outside a bar. He’s about to get out on parole, but is being flown on a Con Air with a whole crew of colorful villains, like Cyrus the Virus (John Malkovich), Diamond Dog (Ving Rhames), Pinball (Dave Chappelle), Garland Greene (Steve Buscemi), Johnny-23 (Danny Trejo), Swamp Thing (M.C. Gainey), and others. They hijack the plane and are pursued by Agent Larkin (John Cusack) and Agent Malloy (Colm Meaney).

This is peak Cage, the source of many Cage-like memes. It is a damned exciting movie, with a lot of interesting characters. It’s worth the price of entry just to watch Cage and Malkovich chew the scenery. Steve Buscemi is his understated and creepy self.

The plane takes off, there is subterfuge, the plane lands, the plane takes off again, the plane “lands” in Las Vegas in a spectacular final scene. Poe’s little girl gets her bunny-rabbit stuffed animal while Malkovich’s Cyrus the Virus gets his head pounded in, literally. The only other survivor are, of course, the good guards, but also Buscemi’s Garland Greene, who’s now at the craps table, winning big.

Unleashed (2005) — 7/10

Danny (Jet Li) is kept enslaved by Bart (Bob Hoskins), a shylock for the mob. Bart keeps Danny on a collar, releasing him only to convince recalcitrant debtors to reconsider their parsimony. We see Bart on a collection run, unleashing Danny time after time, yelling at him while Danny saves his ass again and again.

On one job, Danny meets Sam (Morgan Freeman) and learns a bit about playing the piano. On one job, Danny catches the eye of a rich man named Wyeth (Michael Jenn), who approaches Bart about Danny taking part in an underground to-the-death fighting ring. Danny is off to a good start, but Bart doesn’t see anything but money. Danny wants a piano. Jet Li plays the role quite well.

Before things can get going, though, one of Bart’s customers catches up with him, ramming his car and machine-gunning him and his crew. Danny is the sole survivor, escaping back to Sam.

Sam and the girl who lives with him Victoria (Kerry Condon) adopt him, teaching him about how the world works—mostly stuff related to eating. At the same time, Victoria continues her studies, while Danny learns how to play the piano.

Victoria has a piano recital coming up, after which she and Sam will return to New York. They have invited Danny to come with them. Predictably, Danny runs into someone from his old world and convinces him to come back to Bart, who “accepts” him back, slaps the collar back on him, and takes him right back to the fighting ring.

I have no idea why Danny decided to go with the henchman, but he did. And there he stands in the illegal fighting arena, arguing with Bart, all while wearing a shirt thatreminded me a bit of Bruce Lee’s yellow jumpsuit from Game of Death. Danny doesn’t wnt to hurt anyone anymore, so his first fight looks a lot more like Jackie Chan than Jet Li. The movie has a ways to go and it’s a Jet Li movie, so more fighting and less piano-playing was inevitable.

Danny is getting his ass kicked until … he doesn’t. He vanquishes four opponents, but kills no-one. Bob Hoskins is so over-the-top that it’s nearly impossible to imagine how Danny even considered going back to him—other than he’s incredibly mentally damaged. I understand that the plot called for it, but the docility that he shows toward his handlers is hard to believe. Perhaps it’s a dearth of imagination (or experience) on my part.

What is perhaps more impossible to believe is that Bart shows absolutely no fear of the killing machine that he abuses. He has no worries whatsoever that his abuse will ever backfire on him, that the chickens will ever come home to roost.

On their way to the next fight, Bart is babbling on about something and says, “families are meant to be together,” a sentiment with which Danny agrees. He grabs the wheel and crashes it, killing everyone in the car but himself. He’s pretty much fine, and returns to Sam and Victoria.

Danny learns more about his mother, in particular that his “uncle” Bart had shot and killed her. Now he know that Bart will never stop hunting him. He’s correct. Bart is on his way with dozens of disposable henchmen, all of whom Danny will more-or-less easily dispatch in a The Raid-style hallway and stairwell fight that will, of course, culminate in a boss fight against a mysterious bald, flowing-white-robe-clad, sword-wielding, eyebrow-less fighter from the arena, who has accompanied Bart.

Danny starts fighting that dude and, of course, has to lose before he can win because we don’t have any other plots. The close-quarters fighting is nicely choreographed, though, as is the rest of the fight once they square off against each other. Danny even tries to save the guy’s life, but his uniform rips and the guy drops several floors to his death, on top of Bart’s car.

Bart is now Danny’s final boss. Again, unclear why Danny doesn’t just take him out. Is he still reluctant to harm his former “family”? They’re all such utterly and irredeemably horrible people; it’s honestly very hard to believe that he would still hew to his “training” and spiral into his Stockholm Syndrome.

Bart counts on it, though, to the very end. Jet Li is quite an expressive actor; he’s one of the few who tried to make meaningful action movies (perhaps Jean Luc Van Damme was another, at least sometimes). Bob Hoskins seems to enjoy the role so much; his “Bart” is so invested in keeping Danny a “dog” that he’d give up his life if only he could continue to ruin Danny’s. That is a level of insanity that is quite hard to believe.

The epilogue is at Victoria’s piano recital.

Commando (1985) — 5/10

This is the story of all-around military bad-ass John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who has retired to the Californian hills with his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano). They are interrupted in their daddy-daughter bliss his former commander Major General Franklin Kirby (James Olson), who posts several of his best soldiers to protect them from an old enemy Arius (Dan Hedaya). Arius sends his henchmen to attack the house. They fail to kill Matrix, but they manage to kidnap Jenny. The very strangely attired (he looks like a leather-bound, net-shirted sex-club frequenter) Bennett (Vernon) has partnered with Arius to get back at his former compatriot Matrix.

After killing every last man other than those who manage to escape with his daughter, Matrix is caught and bundled onto a plane to be delivered to Arius. Instead, he escapes, killing his bodyguard and getting right onto the trail of Sully (David Patrick Kelly), who he sees hitting on Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong). Matrix follows Cindy and gets her to help him follow Sully. They end up shooting up a mall, then follow with another high-speed chase, more killing, and, finally, end up knocking over a weapons-supply shop that has a secret back room with a ton of military-grade hardware.

The cops show up and arrest Matrix, but Cindy gets away. She follows the paddy wagon and takes it out with a rocket launcher. They continue together to a pier where they figure out that Jenny is on an island. Luckily Cindy knows how to fly, so they take a seaplane to the island. Matrix storms it, kicking all kinds of ass. Bennett heads down to kill Jenny, but she’s escaped. Matrix kills Arius (as well about a hundred other people, all of whom run into his bullets heedlessly), then squares off with Bennett in the sewers below, as Jenny looks on. I’m not spoiling too much by telling you that Matrix wins the duel. He delivers a mot juste or three, then flies away with Cindy and Jenny. The end.

This movie didn’t hold up nearly as well as the original Predator.

Hulk (2003) — 7/10

This is the original Marvel movie, directed by Ang Lee, years before anyone knew anything about a continuous story arc or the MCU. Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) has inherited genetic mutations from his father, David (Nick Nolte), who’d experimented on himself. His boss Thaddeus Ross (Todd Tesen, later Sam Elliot) vehemently forbade him from doing so. Years later, and Banner is working in a lab with Ross’s daughter Betty (Jennifer Connelly).

There’s a small cameo by Lou Ferrigno as a security guard, who walks out of a building with Stan Lee.

During an experiment with gamma rays, Bruce is trapped in the lab. Bruce’s genetic mutation protected him from it—not only that, it made him stronger. Banner hulks out for the first time and learns that he’s not normal—and hasn’t been since his father experimented on him.

General Ross threatens him (getting angry) and then Talbot (Josh Lucas) comes over to his house to not only threaten him, but start pounding on him (very angry). So, he hulks out again. He’s mostly aware, though, so he remembers that his father has sicced souped-up gamma-dogs on Betty and intervenes in time. He’s bitten pretty badly as the Hulk and has injuries as Banner. Betty is nursing him when the military shows up and takes him prisoner.

A truly awesome Ang Le montage of military hardware and three-D maps and left- and right-wipes ensues to show us just how many people and vehicles and technology is involved in keeping Banner’s giant mecha-coffin underground. Ross wants to keep the incredibly dangerous weapon named Hulk away from everyone. Betty convinces him
let her try to cure Bruce. It kind of works. He can control himself reasonably well.

Until, that is, Talbot takes over the program from Ross and resolves to slice a piece off of the Hulk in order to build a super-weapon. Banner refuses, but Talbot takes him hostage and traps him in a tank and provokes him into turning into the Hulk. He obviously escapes and Talbot kills himself trying to get the probe.

Betty and David have a chat, during which David reveals how he’d killed his wife with a knife, but he totally didn’t mean it, but he was raging out? Trying to kill Bruce because he was dangerous? I have to admit that I wasn’t watching very carefully at that point.

What I found kind of fascinating is that I’d never heard of the Hulk’s backstory, in which his father was doing research with starfish and other creatures that can regrow limbs and heal themselves. A few times, we see the Hulk injured and then quickly heal completely, in seconds. We see his skin ripple as it absorbs and rejects bullets. He doesn’t kill indiscriminately, though. He generally incapacitates soldiers rather than utterly annihilating them, as he easily could.

Betty calms him down again from his latest rage-journey, where he’d ended up in San Fransisco, tossing about cars and trolleys. The Hulk sees her and lets Bruce reappear.

Bruce Banner is once again under the military’s control. David Banner is being transferred and brought to his son. Once he’s there, they do a bunch of family shit, but mostly both listen to Nick Nolte chew up the scenery in a truly spectacular fashion, walking the boards as if he were on Broadway. Eric Bana screams primally. Nolte mocks him. Everything he does seeks to provoke the Hulk. Since Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Nolte has looked the exact same.

David sticks a power cable in his mouth and absorbs its power; Bruce starts to hulk out. Bizarre shit happens in the clouds above the location. Bruce and David both escape far away, and then do battle, with David as some sort of rock creature, his powers absorbed from whatever he touches. David wants to absorb Bruce’s power—all of it. But there is no end to Bruce’s power—and David can’t handle it.

Ross give up and gamma-nukes the entire spot. Bruce survives; David does not. We discover Bruce practicing field medicine in an unspecified South American jungle. Bandits rob his camp, taking medicine, and we see Banner’s eyes flash green, the camera lifts over the canopy, and the scenes fades to black over the Hulk’s roar.

I watched it in German this time.

TraumaZone Series (2022) — 7/10

The videos are available on YouTube,

I watched the first couple of segments without taking notes.

In part 3, we are shown Boris Yeltsin at a spa with someone who is the spitting image of Tormund Giantsbane swimming right next to him.

In part 4, at about 4:00 or so, a young lady sits behind a pile of dead pigs and opines about the lifting of the price controls (“Shock Therapy” strongly suggested by U.S. American advisors),

“Price liberalisation? I think that once prices are freed, life will become unbearable for a common worker. And it will take a lot of effort to earn a living. We’ll have to use any means, honest and dishonest, just to survive.”

At 20:30, there’s a straight-up amateur-porn scene with a pretty healthy Russian couple trying to make ends meet by making a porno. I guess YouTube’s censors aren’t so strict?

At 29:30, we see people everywhere in the street, trying to sell their meager possessions in order to survive. Their society had completely collapsed—or, more accurately, been imploded for them. They were selling their vouchers in factories that they’d been “given” as their “shares” of the former communist government. These were quickly and cheaply funneled to a handful of oligarchs, who “bought” the entire country for a pittance. They still rule today.

At about 42:00, they show more of the closed factories, the suffering people, the consolidation of power under the oligarchs, who close everything down, don’t pay anyone, and move their money offshore. The same thing was to happen in the U.S. a decade later, under America’s Yeltsin Bill Clinton, with his NAFTA bill that would have similar consequences for the unwashed masses and the self-elected elites.

Everyone else dropped back to a barter economy in Russia. It didn’t go that far in the U.S. Instead, they’d learned how to fleece everyone without destroying the country utterly. In Russia, no-one cared to avoid that chaos—after all, the principles who benefitted didn’t even live there.

Why do I always feel worse for animals than people? They show monkeys trapped in an abandoned zoo, they show a goat being stuffed into the trunk of a car, a tiger having her kittens taken away, a camel in a harness being rudely transported somewhere—and it tugs on my heartstrings in a way that seeing the entire population of Russia suffer doesn’t. There’s a lesson here, one we don’t want to learn, I think.

We talk these days of the bleakness of Ukraine, entering winter without power or resources. This has already happened to them once before, to all of the former Soviet Union, in fact. At 20:00 in volume 5, they show blasted neighborhoods with “an economy in free-fall, [where] millions of people could not afford food or heating [and] trees disappeared in the parks as people chopped them down for firewood.”

At 27:00, they return to the abortion clinic, where they still provide free abortions. It’s the only reliable form of birth control. The condoms are defective, people are wildly uneducated about sex, and the pill was never imported or produced. The employees at the clinic tell of “record-holders” who have had 16 abortions, some of them 2-3 per year. To be fair, there are those who use the service once. There was a poor lady who was still living in an apartment with her husband and parents, who had been waiting on their own apartment for eight years and counting. The nurse there tried to shame her because she said that wonderful people like the poor lady should be having kids instead of the animals who actually were. Those situations are such a shit-show.

At 34:00, we learn that,

“Viktor Chernomyrdin ran Gazprom. It owned a third of the world’s supply of gas. Yeltsin made him prime minister to force the privatization program through. Chernomyrdin sold Gazprom to himself and his friends at a thousandth of its real value. He then looted it and smuggled the money out of the country.

“The minister of finance said it was ‘the biggest robbery of the century, perhaps of human history.’”

In part six, at about 05:00, we visit an apartment of a family that is so cold that they can see their breath inside. I wonder how this resonates with the people of England and Germany this winter, as some will be thrown into the same situation. What goes around, comes around.

At 13:00, we see scenes from the Russian bombardment of Chechnya, just awful scenes of people fleeing their homes, across fields, with nothing at all, just the clothes on their backs—not even warm clothes. They are frustrated and desperate, driven mad by the relentless Russian bombing campaign. The Russians claiming to be bombing to preempt terrorism—a likely story, and one the great powers love to tell.

This is contrasted with footage from a Russian disco at the same time, where young people are dancing and enjoying themselves, half-naked women dancing in cages over their heads.

Next, we see Chechnyans in the hills, practicing for combat, their weapons laid out on blankets. The sun never seems to shine in this documentary. The BBC carried their dreary weather with them. The scenes of Russia attacking Grozny are bleak and awful. War is idiocy. It is brutality. It is evil. It always goes the same. That is, never as movies depict. it.

Still in episode 6, at 28:00, we hear about the continued dismantling and robbing of the Russian state.

“Despite privatization, the government still controlled several key industries that were vital to society. The oligarchs wanted to get hold of these industries, as well. They came up with a plan. They offered to lend their looted wealth back to the government. But, in return, they would get shares in the remaining industries. They knew the loans would never be repaid. So, they would get control of the industries for a fraction of their value. […] [s]even men were about to get hold of the great mineral wealth of Russia ,,, for almost nothing.”

At 46:20, they ask a babushka (ба́бушка) picking burdocks in a field (probably for tea?) who she’s going to vote for.

“I don’t care [this was mistranslated; she actually said ‘я не знаю’, which means ‘I don’t know’] − I guess. It doesn’t matter. Even if we vote, they’ll appoint who they’ve already chosen.”

The Russians of the 90s have more and more in common with Americans in the 2020s.

The following screenshot from about 30:15 is labeled with “Ulyanovsk: Lenin’s birthplace near the Volga River”. The snowy, snowy road flowing over the hills, with a car on the right and a horse-drawn carriage on the left, reminds me very much of Central New York, where the Amish with their horse-drawn carriages are very common on the country roads. I saw this scene several times while cycling this summer. That everything is covered in very cold-looking snow reminds me of growing up there (or more-recent visits, when I was still going in the winter).

Horse-drawn carriage and car on a road near Ulyanovsk (Lenin's birthplace near the Volga River)

Just after that, we see a scene from 1500m below Norilsk, drilling for nickel in a mine. It’s interesting to think, from the comfort of my office, how, all around the world, these activities proceed. Nickel is mined, oil is mined, machines are built to extract oil, to extract nickel. Machines are built to build the tools to build the machines that mine nickel. Food, water, logistics for the miners. Safety standards to make sure a mine 1500m below the surface even works efficiently. Incredible how much human activity happens every second of every day.

It’s followed immediately by a dinner full of suited and utterly useless financiers and economists and politicians having a fancy dinner, utterly unaware of how much the rest of humanity is working to make sure that their fancy food shows up on their fancy plates while they earn dozens of times as much as the people down in the nickel mine.

At 45:30, the captions read,

“Those who had believed that Russia could be turned into a Western-style democracy realized that idea had now failed.”

This is a wildly unfair characterization. The prior 6h45m of the documentary had shown how Russia had been eviscerated by pirates. The idea hadn’t failed. It had been killed. Actively suppressed and destroyed. The horse lost the race not because it wasn’t fast—it’s that you chopped its legs off, shot it ten times, and tied it to a 10-car train. It’s like blaming Max instead of the Grinch when Max can’t pull the sled. Fuck everything about that mindset.

Doctor Sleep (2019) — 9/10

Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor), from The Shining, is all grown up and he is an absolutely alcoholic mess. We wake with him from an absolute humdinger of a bender. He is not alone. A lithe, naked woman lies next to him, curled up around a pool of her own green vomit. He’s not doing much better. He throws up into the toilet, then examines a wicked shiner in the mirror. We revisit his previous evening with him in flashbacks. He provoked fights; she loved it; they both got hammered and coked up. As he dresses, he finds an empty wallet. Desperate, he robs the young lady who’d robbed him to buy cocaine the night before. She has a few dollars, but mostly food stamps. Her 2-year-old toddler wanders into the room. Torrance is horrified. He thinks he’s hit bottom. This might very well be it.

He takes the money anyway and heads north—far north. We see bits and pieces of his past coming together, how he learned to put away bad spirits into mental boxes, how he drinks to keep these ghosts at bay. In a parallel story, we see the “True Knot” gather its newest disciple Snakebite Andi (Emily Alyn Lind). Led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), they gain strength and power from gifted young children. Other members of note are Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon) and Grampa Flick (Carel Struycken, who played The Fireman in Twin Peaks). They suck “steam” from victims in a “steamy” world. They can inhale it directly, but they can also store it in canisters. They are soul vampires.

In another strand, we meet young Abra (Dakota Hickman), a very gifted child, perhaps even as gifted as Danny himself.

Danny is taken in up north by a gentle stranger named Billy Freeman (Cliff Curtis), who spots him his first two months rent, takes him to an AA meeting, and helps him get a job in a local hospice. It is here that gets the moniker Doctor Sleep. He’s teamed up with the cat who also knows when a person’s time has come.

Eight years later, he’s still clean.

The True Knot takes another victim, a small boy, a little-league player. Abra (Kyliegh Curran) wakes and screams. She communicates with Danny through the chalkboard he has in his bedroom. She writes “redrum” and he writes that he hopes that she’s OK. She is older now, and has learned how to use her powers, at least a little. She tracks down the little boy, to find out where he came from and where he’s gone, and who got rid of him. She launches herself astrally into Rose the Hat. Their first encounter is a shock for both of them. The encounter has repercussions for Danny, who falls unconscious as a result of the psychic, astral shock wave.

Abra swats Rose to the side like she was nothing. Rose is intrigued, not afraid. Crow Daddy wonders whether to kill her or turn her. Rose will hear none of it. She doesn’t want someone so much more powerful than anyone else in the Knot. Abra wouldn’t turn anyway. No, Rose wants to milk her, to keep her as livestock.

Abra seeks out and find Danny, pinging him telepathically. She asks for his help, but Danny tells her to keep her head down instead. Back at work, Danny finds that Dick has come to visit him, showing up somewhat spookily in an empty room. He’s just a spirit, of course. At 01:30:00, while they’re talking, McGregor looks the spitting image (and sound) of Jack Nicholson. I wonder how accidental that was?

Danny: Why are you here?
Dick: I’m here because it all comes ‘round. Ka’s a wheel, Doc.

This is peak Stephen King.

He’s there one last time to tell Danny that his job is to help Abra. Meanwhile, Rose the Hat travels astrally to pay Abra a little visit. This is rendered really nicely. Abra drops the hammer on her, terrifying Rose with her power. Only with great difficulty and no small amount of damage does Rose escape. Abra got into Rose’s head and stole information—Rose doesn’t know what. She and her band are scared, but they’re desperate—they haven’t been feeding well. Grampa Flick “cycles” and departs the earthly plane, leaving only his steam for the others. They greedily inhale it.

Abra, Danny, and Billy find the little leaguer’s body and get his baseball glove. Abra uses it to find the True Knot on the road, heading toward them. The trio are ready for the Knot. Abra fools them into thinking they’d captured her (they’d captured her teddy bear instead). They’re all out in the open and Danny and Billy start picking them off. They get everyone cleanly but Snakebite Andi, who manages to order Billy to kill himself before she dies. He does.

Crow Daddy, meanwhile, has sneakily found Abra at home, drugs her, kills her father, and kidnaps her. They’re on the road when Danny jumps into Abra and tells her to crash the van—Crow Daddy’s not wearing a seatbelt. Rose appears in astral form, but Abra smirks and passes through her. Rose, enraged (and more than a little distraught that her entire family is dead) inhales two entire canisters of steam and vows revenge.

Danny and Abra are on the way to Colorado, to the Overlook Hotel. Danny thinks they’re going to need the malignant force of the hotel to defeat Rose, who he know will never stop coming. They wind their way up the mountain, to the brooding, slumped ruins. Abra waits outside while Danny goes inside to “wake it up”. He does a posterity tour of the the greatest hits from The Shining.

Rose shows up and grandstands around a bit. Danny and Abra almost catch her in a box in the labyrinth, but she pops out in time, realizing that Danny is also gifted. They square off. She gets the better of Danny and starts to draw off his steam, as she tortures him in the grand study of the hotel. Abra has fled, as instructed. Rose discovers the boxes in his head and wants to know what’s in the boxes. He shows her. “They’re hungry.”

After they’ve eaten Rose, they turn on Danny. Abra is upstairs. Danny reprises his father’s role, possessed entirely by the hotel now, having sacrificed himself to rid the world of Rose. Abra ducks into room 237. Danny/Overlook finds her. She stands against the hotel, making the hotel abandon the body, at least temporarily. He tells her she has to leave alone, that he can’t hold off the Overlook much longer. The Overlook is terrified because, while it ate Rose, it is now afraid of the exploding boilers that will torch it.

At the end, amid the fires, Danny is released and sees clearly. Abra stands outside, “I could hear it dying”, she tells Dan, who’s only in her mind now, or on the astral plane, … or something. “We go on, after.”

I watched the three-hour director’s cut. Ewan McGregor is excellent, as are Kyleigh Kurran and Cliff Curtis (who has the most uneven eyes I’ve seen in a while). For the acting and the patient pacing, I give it an extra star.