Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.01

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 Mummy II (2001) — 8/10

Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) are back for another rousing, Egyptian-themed adventure. This time, they start off in some desert, investigating a tomb. They have their son Alex (Freddie Boath) in tow. Evelyn feels like she knows this tomb and keeps having visions of what it was like in its heyday. She uses this knowledge to get into a deeper tomb, where they discover the Bracelet of Anubis, formerly owned by the Scorpion King. The Scorpion King was a legend, supposedly a man who’d ruled over lands only because he’d promised his soul to Anubis. Anubis had come to collect.

They disturbed the tomb and tripped a flood trap that almost kills them. They retreat without meeting the other tomb raiders who’d happened upon their camp.

Back in England, the other tomb raiders turn out to have been a group intent on raising Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) once again. They are led by Hafez (Alun Armstrong), Lock-Nah (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and Meela (Patricia Velasquez), who is the reincarnation of Imhotep’s bride. All of these people converge on the O’Connell/Carnahan home to try to get the bracelet. Alex turns out to have put it on, triggering it. Instead of finding Rick, the intruders find Evelyn’s brother Jonathan (John Hannah) and torture him for information. Luckily, Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr) is there to help fight everyone off. The intruders make off with the case (unaware that Alex had taken the bracelet out).

The intruders get away and continue with their resurrection of Imhotep, which succeeds (partially, of course, as in the last film). They discover that they don’t have the bracelet, though. Rick shows up to rescue Evelyn before they can start to convert her into Imhotep’s bride. Rick, Evelyn, and Ardeth improvise and escape with Jonathan and Alex in a double-decker bus with several mummies in hot pursuit. They dispatch the mummies with lots of danger and fighting, and Evelyn gets all…amorous. Thus distracted, someone gets onto the bus and kidnaps Alex.

They put together a rescue mission, engaging the services of a zeppelin pilot to find Alex. Adebisi almost certainly wants to be rescued from the highly (and deliberately) irritating Alex. Meanwhile Imhotep has fed on three underlings and gotten himself back to his full power. Now, there’s a sort of dream sequence where Evelyn and Meela have a boss-girl fight and play-act out the conflict between Nefertiti and Cleopatra. Evelyn is so into the dream sequence that she jumps off of the zeppelin and Rick barely catches her.

Alex keeps building replicas of the temples to which they are going next so that Rick and Evelyn and find him. They get closer, but Imhotep drives them away with an incredible wall of water that drives them into the valley of the Scorpion King, where there is an eternal oasis. There is a terrible battle in the jungle on the way to the temple, with a family reunion amid wholesale slaughter. Even Jonathan steps up and makes himself useful.

They get Alex to the temple in time to get the bracelet off and save him—but then Meela stabs Evelyn to death. Hafez finds the bracelet and uses it to activate the temple. Rick wanders the temple, looking for revenge. He finds Hafez with his arm in the wall. Rick eventually wanders into the main room, where Imhotep—now mortal—is waiting for him. They engage in single combat. Jonathan, amazingly, does the same, but against Meela. He’s singularly powered by his desire for revenge for his sister. Alex, meanwhile, is reading from the book of the dead, trying to resurrect his mother. He succeeds.

However, his spell also awakens the scorpion king, in the form of an uncanny-valley, CGI, Dwayne Johnson torso with a scorpion body. Meanwhile, outside, Ardeth Bay and his army of friends have managed to subdue the initial armies. But more scorpion armies are on the way. No-one is vanquishing anything unless they can kill the Scorpion King. Luckily, they’ve been carrying a spear all along. Jonathan unfolds it and chucks it. Imhotep catches it and re-throws it, but Rick catches it. He stabs the Scorpion King with it and erases all of the armies outside.

Evelyn races into the collapsing room to save Rick, while Meela abandons Imhotep, who lets himself fall into the pit rather than struggling further. They escape the temple and Izzy (Shaun Parkes) shows up with his repaired zeppelin. It is absolutely impossible to imagine how he’d repaired that wreck in the middle of a jungle.

This wasn’t as good as the original, but it’s a fun group of characters and Brendan Frasier and Rachel Weisz are just a top-notch action-film couple, so they get an extra star.

Rick: I thought I’d lost you.
Evie: You did. Would you like to know what heaven looks like?
Rick: Later. *smooch*

Rambo: First Blood Part II — 5/10

Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is in a desert military prison but he’s released by Trautman (Richard Crenna) for a dangerous mission back in Vietnam. He meets his teammates and is not impressed. His new commander Murdock (Charles Napier) is even less impressive. They tell him how he’s to do his mission, give him a ton of equipment, and drop him out of a plane over Vietnam. It doesn’t go great. He gets stuck on the side of the plane, so he misses his drop point. He also has to jettison a ton of his equipment in order to free himself from the outside of the plane. That means he’s just down there with a knife, his bow and arrows, and his ripped T-Shirt. He meets up with his contact Co (Julia Nickson) and they get near the MIA camp. Instead of following orders and just taking pictures, Rambo rescues one of the soldiers from the clutches of those dirty Vietnamese.

He manages to escape with Co and the soldier, but they’re recaptured when Murdock calls off all support. The Russians are at that camp as well (I mean, of course) and Podovsky (Steven Berkoff) tortures him. Before he can force Rambo to make an announcement of some sort, Rambo breaks free (with the help of Co, who’s re-infiltrated the camp). They escape together and are almost away scot-free when Co is shot to death.

Rambo swears revenge and takes out nearly everyone at the camp. He steals a helicopter and rescues the remaining soldiers. The Russians give chase, Rambo shoots everyone down and heads home with his helicopter, coming in for a bumpy landing at the base. Rambo goes to settle up with Murdock. He destroys all of his computers, but stops short of killing Murdock, charging him instead with “finding all of the other missing soldiers.”

They did mention, at some point, that there were only MIAs because the U.S. refused to pay the ransom to get its soldiers back. The politics in this movie are otherwise shockingly simplistic. It is, at the very least, pro-soldier rather than pro-military. It is pretty ridiculous. Pretty close to peak 80s movie. The credits music is shockingly bad. It cranks up the jingoism to eleven.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) — 9/10

This is a reasonably good anti-war movie that tries to show the hopelessness, the senselessness of war. The movie follows the plot of the book pretty well. The handling is a bit literal, with a lot of dialogue and emoting.

However, that’s the first two hours, which are decent, but nothing spectacular. They do set up the finale, though.

The final twenty minutes of the film are worth the price of admission. It finally starts to hit home how terrible and senseless the war is—they show it rather than just saying it. Paul is on leave and no longer fits in. He assures his mother that he will come back, when he knows he almost certainly won’t—he doesn’t even want to. He is angry with his father and his schoolteacher for their ludicrous and completely unhinged attitude toward the war. He tries to tell his professor that he’s wrong, but the professor and the students call him a coward.

Once he’s back to the front, he finds his diminished company. They’re only a handful of young men now, with only Tjaden and Kat left over from the early days, four years ago. The new recruits are sixteen years old. They’re eating sawdust.

“Tjaden: The replacements are all like that. Not even old enough to carry a pack. All they know how to do is die.”

“Tjaden: Is it true about the armistice, Paul?
Paul: It doesn’t look that way back there.
Tjaden: You mean they want us to go on fighting?
Paul: That’s what they say.
Tjaden: They’re crazy! Germany’ll be empty pretty soon.”

“Paul: The old men said, “Go on! Push on to Paris!” My father even wanted me to wear my uniform around.
Kat: (laughs)
Paul: You’re all I’ve got left, Kat.
Kat: I’m not much to have left. I’ve missed you, Paul.
Paul: At least we know what it’s all about out here. There’re no lies here.
Kat: Push on to Paris? You oughta see what they’ve got on the other side. They eat white bread over there. They’ve got dozens of airplanes to our one, and tanks that’ll go over anything. What’ve we got left? Guns so worn they drop shells on our own men. No food, no ammunition, no officers. Push on to Paris! So that’s the way they talk back there.”

Every true war story is the same. Everyone dies or is ruined. Kat would die. So would Paul. He dies when a French sniper shoots him as he reaches over a sandbag to touch a butterfly. He had a look on his face that reflected perfectly that he had nothing left to live for. His former life was gone; all of his comrades had died. Kat was gone. The country he’d come from didn’t understand the war. They didn’t care. What was he fighting for? What was he striving for? What did he have to live for? He had more in common with the enemy soldiers than the children he fought alongside or the fools that egged the war on at home.

It’s about a 7/10 for the first ¾ of the film, but it ends so strongly that I had to bump it to a 9/10. I would watch this again. I’m looking forward to comparing it to the 2022 version.

The Priest’s Children / Svecenikova djeca (2013) — 8/10

This is a movie about a small Dalmatian island whose population is dropping drastically, especially among Croatian Catholics. One of the priests Don Fabijan (Krešimir Mikić) decides to take action. He teams up with a local newspaper-stand owner named Petar (Niksa Butijer) to pierce condoms used by the local population.

Petar has been guilted into confessing to having “killed many people” by his wife, who thinks he’s sinning by selling condoms. They all come up with the plan to pierce the tons of condoms they sell at the newsstand but, after three months, there is no noticeable rise in the birth rate.

They regroup and decide to enlist the assistance of Marin (Drazen Kuhn), who is a shocking racist and enthusiastic participant. He only sells pierced condoms to Catholic Croatians because he wants to keep the Serb, Muslim, and Albanian populations down. At the same time, he replaces all of the island’s birth-control pills with placebos because he knows that women are doubling up on protection.

The plan finally bears fruit (no pun intended). Women are becoming pregnant and getting married in a hurry—a huge win for the church. Of course, things go sideways because no-one really wants the children, women get desperate for abortions, and all sorts of other bad things happen. Three men are coerced into a paternity test; the lucky loser becomes an alcoholic and threatens to throw himself from a tower.

Petar and Marin pseudo-adopt one of the children (he can’t adopt because he pretended to be insane to get out of military service in the war of Yugoslavia) but he doesn’t want to keep it and tries to abandon it, but thinks again, at the last moment.

Fabijan is lying and causing havoc with his plan and slipping more and more off the holy pedestal. We actually meet him in the hospital at the beginning of the film, giving his confession to his replacement. Most of the havoc is women who don’t want their children. Fabijan tells one couple they can have one girl’s child, but that they have to help keep her from aborting for the next 20 days, until it’s too late to abort. They kidnap her and lock her in their attic. The girl tries to abort with a coathanger, barely survives, loses the child, and will also never have children again. Fabijan can only look on in horror at what he has wrought.

The bishop arrives because Fabijan’s maid (also Marin) has turned him in because she thinks he’s actually using the condoms. He says he’s not, that the condom she found isn’t even used. She says that’s even worse! That means he’s doing it without a condom! The bishop says the same thing, because he just can’t conceive that the minister isn’t doing anything untoward. The bishop only needs to be convinced that Fabijan isn’t diddling little kids. Otherwise, he’d have to shuffle him about. The bishop leaves satisfied, even impressed with the condom-piercing plan, with dreams of trying it out nationwide.

Another girl is found floating face-down in the harbor. Fabijan rescues her. She’s only a young, young girl, but she’s killed herself because she was pregnant as well. Fabijan is forced to take his prior’s confession—he was the one fucking the underaged girl. This sends Fabijan around the bend.

At the same time, we hear news repots on various televisions, telling of a Croatian delegation of children that are visiting Ratzinger, who was well-known for covering up child-abuse scandals in Germany when he was a bishop. The film simply does not stop piling on the bad news and cynicism.

Fabijan completes his confession to his successor. He is relieved of the burden of the story, but his successor now cannot tell anyone else because the horrific story was confessed under the sacrament. Fabijan can die happy now. He has a brain tumor. We see the ghost of the young, pregnant girl appear, take his hand, and lead him away. His successor runs across town to the church, where he leaps into a confession booth and begins to unburden himself.

A dark, cynical film, well-done.

I watched it in Croatian with English subtitles.

Adam’s Apples (2005) — 10/10

Ivan is a minister at a church in a small Danish town. He takes in former prisoners. He’s already got Gunnar (Nicolas Bro), an alcoholic kleptomaniac, and Khalid (Ali Kazim), an armed robber and actual maniac, living with him when Adam, a neo-Nazi, shows up. Ivan is nearly irrepressibly optimistic, upbeat, and positive. He always sees the best side of things. He doesn’t really see that Gunnar and Khalid haven’t gotten any better. He completely ignores Adam’s hostility.

We find out that Ivan had lost his wife to suicide when their child was born with cerebral palsy. That doesn’t stop him from advising a distraught woman Sarah (Paprika Steen) from having her own child, even though the doctors told her that it had a 60% chance of being born severely handicapped. He tells her “those are just statistics.” We also find out that Ivan and his sister had been buggered every day by their father to within an inch of their lives when they were children, until the old man died. Their mother had died giving birth to Ivan.

Adam pummels the living daylights out of Ivan, but he acts as if nothing had happened. He just says he has to go to town to the clinic and asks if anyone needs anything while he’s there. His face is absolutely mangled, but Gunnar doesn’t blink an eye and asks Ivan to get him some “medicine”, holding up a booze bottle. Absolutely no problem.

The eponymous apple tree in the yard is pivotal to the metaphor of Adam’s soul. It is growing well, with plenty of apples, but dozens of crows descend on it. Adam is supposed to make an apple cake at the end of August. Adam procures a gun for the purpose of scaring Ivan into admitting that he’s full of shit, but Ivan doesn’t blink an eye and says that shooting the birds would be a good idea. Before Adam can do anything, Khalid laughs, saying “Why didn’t you say we could use guns?” and starts blowing them all away with his own gun. He takes out Gunnar’s cat, which drops from the tree. Ivan convinces Gunnar that the cat was just old and had dropped dead. There is a giant red gunshot wound on the white cat.

There are dead birds everywhere.

Ivan visits Adam in his room, which he’s decorated to his own tastes.

“Ivan: [looking at a portrait hanging on the wall] Oh, oh, oh … what a handsome man. Your father?
Adam: That’s Hitler.
Ivan: No, Hitler had a beard.
Ivan: [Looking closer] Ah, you’re right. I’m thinking of that Russian guy.”

These people are mad.

Even the doctor keeps asking Adam how his hand is—the one he injured beating the absolute living Christ out of Ivan. The doctor just laughs that Ivan won’t “ever have to waste money on perfume because he’ll never smell anything again.” Adam just looks on perplexed. Ivan is decked out in his customary shorts and sandals. Both probably rode there on their bicycles.

They are there to visit Poul (Gyrd Løfquist), a survivor of a concentration camp. At least that’s how Ivan described him to Adam at first. He later revealed that Poul worked at the camp. He’s now lying on his deathbed. Ivan and Adam visit—with Ivan telling Poul that he has to buck up, that all is forgiven. Poul can’t forget what he’d done to all of those poor people. Ivan tells him that all is forgiven. “God forgives all.” Poul slips away.

Ivan lives in a fantasy world. Adam questions him about his wife. Ivan has an answer for everything. He even pretends that his son doesn’t have cerebral palsy. Anytime someone tried to penetrate Ivan’s protective veil of lies, he accuses them of “being just plain rude.”

He takes his son Christopher with him to the church the next day. The boy is completely paralyzed. Adam puts on the pressure, trying to get Ivan to admit how horrible his life was and is.

“Your son’s a spastic. Your wife killed herself. Your mother died giving birth to you. Your father raped you.”

Ivan’s starts bleeding out of an ear. Ivan says nothing. Adam is triumphant. Just super self-satisfied with his evil piercing of Ivan’s veil, at having forced the three idiots to admit that they’re living in a fantasy world together. He smiles and exhorts Ivan to “give up.”

Ivan does not. He turns the other cheek when Adam slaps his barely healing face. He doesn’t flinch when Adam head-butts him into unconsciousness.

Cut to a shot of an apple on the tree with worms coursing in and out of it.

Adam drags rag-doll Ivan to the car and takes him to the doctor. The doctor reveals to him that Ivan has a volleyball-sized tumor in his brain. Ivan blocks it all out because he thinks he’s in a struggle with the devil.

Back at the house, Christopher is still there—with Sarah, who’s freaking out. She gets nihilistic and starts playing quarters with Gunnar, who’s a pro and makes her drink all the time. Adam wanders through in black bikini briefs and yells at her that she’s pregnant and can’t be drinking. “It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it?”

Adam’s portrait of Hitler keeps falling off the wall. The bible on his cabinet keeps falling on the floor, flapping open to the Book of Job.

After the beating and the subsequent head-butt, Ivan’s nose is bent nearly out of recognition. He pays it no mind, carrying this burden like all the others. Adam asks him “what if it’s not the devil who’s testing you?” He proposes to Ivan that it’s God who’s tormenting him. Adam presses him to believe that it’s God, that he’s a modern-day Job. Ivan asks him why he’s doing it? “Because I’m evil. And you can’t change that.”

What if, though, it’s actually the Devil who’s tormenting Ivan and Adam is just another weapon he’s using? What if it’s the Devil who kept making the Bible fall open to the Book of Job? What if Adam is just the Devil’s pawn?

A bolt of lightning splits the apple tree asunder and burns it down.

However, even though it’s summer, Adam has begun wearing long-sleeved sweaters, covering up his swastika tattoo. He takes Ivan to the hospital. He drives him home, briefly turning on Ivan’s easy-listening music (“How Deep is Your Love?”).

Ivan follows Adam’s advice from before. He gives up. He tells the troops. They all blame Adam for having ruined everything.

Adam’s skinhead friends appear and catch him trying to find some good apples with Khalid. They’re going to try to make Ivan a cake. The skinheads roll up and threaten Khalid. He calmly shoots the big one in the knee. The leader moves in on Khalid and threatens that he’s going to kill him, “You nigger, you’re dead. [mimes gun to head]”. Khalid shoots him point-blank in the chest, “you stupid? I have gun.”. Then he shoots him in the back as they’re retreating. Adam takes the gun away, but does nothing else. Khalid claims that he’s unbalanced because he doesn’t like seeing Ivan like he is now.

Gunnar is hammered and wandering the halls with a bottle of oil, an eggplant and a tennis racket. He used to be a tennis star before he became a fat alcoholic. He tells Adam that he doesn’t know where Sarah is, but she’s passed out and tied up in his bedroom. Adam frees her. Gunnar and Khalid are off the rails. Khalid is testing guns in the parking lot. Adam volunteers himself and Gunnar to ride along on Khalid’s next gas-station robbery. Adam goes in first to try to protect the employees. He manages it and steals a toaster oven to replace the oven that keeps shorting out in the church.

They get back to find that Sarah and Christopher have eaten all of the apples. Also, Adam’s neo-Nazi friends are back, with reinforcements. They start to beat on Adam. Ivan comes out to help him. Ivan starts to confiscate weapons that “make noise […] so he can die in peace” and gets shot right in the eye. The inside of his head is on the outside. He’s not dead. The doctor calls his condition a “half-Kennedy” and says that Ivan won’t survive the night.

Khalid leaves, taking the church car. Gunnar returns an apple to Adam that he’d swiped earlier. Adam makes a tiny one-apple tart for Ivan, using the oven he’d stolen from the gas station. He hurries to the hospital to bring it to Ivan. Ivan is not in his bed. The doctor is packing his things, muttering that he’s “going somewhere where the sick die” because Ivan has gotten up and is sitting in the garden, eating a cheeseburger. The neo-Nazi shot his tumor away and healed him. Adam takes the tart to him. Ivan won. They eat the cake together, Ivan’s head bandaged up with only one eye showing.

Ivan officiates Sarah and Gunnar’s wedding. His nose and temple are a mess. One eye is almost certainly fake. Adam’s hair has grown in. Sarah’s child has Down’s syndrome. They’re moving to Indonesia. Ivan asks if they’re going because of the tigers. Gunnar says that it’s so the child’s eyes won’t be as noticed (JFC what a dark, dark joke) and because the tennis courts are good there. Ivan says that tigers are fascinating. He’s back.

Ivan and Adam pick up two ex-cons who are going to stay with them. They’re driving across the idyllic countryside, listing to “How Deep is Your Love”. Ivan sings along. Adam finally joins in, mouthing a few words.

I watched it in Danish with English subtitles.

Im Westen Nichts Neues (2022) — 5/10

The film starts in a battle. Heinrich is charging out of a trench, watching everyone die around him. We see his body plucked from a pile and thrown on the ground. He is stripped, his clothes bundled with others to be washed, holes sewn up, and prepared for the next wave of child soldiers.

We meet Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) and his friends at school. They hear the rousing speech, they sign up for war. They arrive 25 miles from the front and are stopped. Their trucks are commandeered by doctors. There are too many wounded to transport. The boys are forced to march to the front. They have to do a gas-mask drill. They have to bail a flooded trench. They meet Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch), who is wise in the ways of war.

Though it’s in German and should thus feel more authentic, it veers far away from the plot of the book. The 1930 version stuck pretty much to the plan. This one is making war look pretty, which is not a great start. It continues to be a very pretty movie, and it continues to have nearly nothing to do with the book. There are a few lines that are familiar, but it also focuses very much on the high-level generals actually running the war, explaining the war, explaining the reasoning. There is no reason to explain. There is no reason. The other film didn’t explain the war. It was senseless.

The film focuses a bit too much on the tension between the officers and the soldiers. It feels a bit more like Full Metal Jacket—in the truck, chiding the young soldier for not taking care of his gun, or in the barracks, rousting the men from their beds—than the book or even the 1930 movie. They also rely a bit too much on the soundtrack—that feels almost swiped from Dark—to create tension.

There is a long scene where Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) asks the French for a ceasefire. They grant it, but only 72 hours from now. Many more will die. The weird thing is that Paul was in the war for four years and it feels like he only just got to the front and the war’s already ending.

They’re in the trenches, but it glorifies the fighting. Kat looks like he’s playing Counterstrike, just head-shotting people in close quarters. There isn’t enough confusion, the director lends too much coherency to the battles. The soldiers can see who’s shooting, can see where the bullets are coming from. The book and original movie gave no such comfort.

Now they’re in a gorgeously lit courtyard, eating soup with bits and pieces in it, with potatoes. They have clean silverware. There’s no sawdust in the food. The food is something other than sawdust. Tjaden commits suicide with his fork. This is nothing like the book. Now Kat and Paul are talking about what they’ll do after the war. They’re stealing a chicken again. They walked across an untrammeled field to get there. It’s snowing lightly. It’s quite beautiful. Most of this movie is too clean.

And now Paul’s being chased around a barn by a French farm-family. I don’t remember any of this from the book. OK, I’m annoyed now. The farmer’s son found Kat in the woods and shot Kat. This is just a completely different story. It doesn’t show the senselessness of war. The man was shot for stealing duck eggs. And now Kat is feeling sorry for himself. That is absolutely not what he did in the book. He accepted his fate because he had nothing to live for anyway. In this movie, they’re hopeful that the war is ending with them alive.

And Paul never went home, never learned how war-hungry those at home were (that was one of the more sobering passages in the book and the original film). Just gone.

And now the completely made-up German general is making them all go into a battle even though they all know that the armistice starts at 11:00. Fifteen minutes before the official end of the war. Was having Paul just be killed on a “clear day” not exciting enough? Did they have to have a fucking countdown? I hate this movie.

Oh God, now we’re being introduced to French soldiers, so we see both sides. This is really stupid. I mean, I guess it’s senseless, but Paul didn’t really get to the point where he just gave up. He’s still trying to save himself.

I gave it a lower score so that you save yourself some time and watch the 1930 version instead. That versions’s got some hokeyness, but at least it doesn’t feel like someone made a Marvel movie out of it. I thought the American accents were out of place. I thought it would be better with the original German language. It’s not. It really, really isn’t.

Paul’s berserker-raging in the fields and the trenches now, taking out people. Now a Frenchman is on top of him and he’s drowning in mud. Would that it would have ended with Paul’s death, but it doesn’t. Paul finds a rock and knocks out his attacker. Then, he and another guy see a gun lying between them and fight over it. This is filmed like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels—it is glorifying the violence rather than driving home how senseless it is. They kind of get at it with the armistice, that Paul was killed just seconds before 11:00, stabbed from behind as he hesitated to kill a French soldier that looked like him.

He then has a long death scene, where he seems to be walking into the light. He seems to be communing with a benevolent God, for whom this war might mean something, or who might forgive Paul his transgressions in it, or who might be able to explain what the fuck is going on. This scene is too pretty, too long, and too explicatory. It really goes to show that you have to try a lot harder to make an anti-war film because you almost always end up honoring the sacrifice, which is not what you should do. Those who were in the shit know that the sacrifices are meaningless. That’s why the most anti-war people are people who’ve actually seen war and those most pro-war are those who will never feel the downsides, but will only feel the upsides, as their fortunes are built or buoyed by the spoils of war.

In the 1930 film, Paul doesn’t care whether he lives or dies because he only knows war, all of his friends are gone, and he can’t go home anymore. That’s why he reached for the butterfly, because touching something beautiful was more important than anything else, even survival. He doesn’t walk into the light. The camera doesn’t linger on him. In fact, the last thing we see is his quivering hand as he is shot. End scene. No honor, no God, nothing.

I give this version a big nope.

I watched it in German with German subtitles.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) — 8/10

James Cameron hates people and capitalism and plundering and piracy and globalism and hypernationalism and he probably hates the U.S. of A. more than a bit but, most of all, he hates colonialism. He fucking hates colonialism. He hates it so much that he’s made two giant blockbuster movies about it and he’s going to make three more just to drill the point home that there is nothing respectable about colonialism, that there is no justification for it, that it is always morally wrong, that it is always extractive, that it is about taking what you don’t think you have to pay for, about denigrating entire species and races and animals as fodder for your egocentric machine.

He is not subtle, but he is good at what he does. The ships of the sky-people returning to the planet were incredibly powerful and incredibly destructive. Whereas spaceships usually land lightly and easily, these ships tore into the planet, burning dozens of square kilometers of forest with their rocket backwash. They landed and opened their maws, regurgitating mechs and giant bulldozers that finished the job the rockets started. Animals fled and burned.

The colonialists are interested only in resources and gain. They see no life, nothing worth protecting or respecting. They don’t care. They don’t even seem to have the capacity to care. They are as empathic with Pandora as many of us would be with a rock, perhaps less so. The soldiers that accompany them learn nothing from any of their experiences. They stay exactly the same. They show up in tattoos and Oakley sunglasses and camo-pants. They don’t learn anything, even after going native, after communing psychically with animals.

Which don’t get me started on the amount of stuff they had to make conveniently work in order to make the battle at all even. The first movie had the battle between the decidedly non-technological forest creatures and the hyper-technological sky-people. The sky-people stuck to their own shit and they did their thing well. They were eventually defeated, but not because they didn’t have powerful weaponry.

In this one, they also have the same powerful weaponry, but they also are just as good at using the power of the planet, which annoyed me a bit. Jake Sully and his clan should have absolutely handed those jarhead idiots their asses inside of three minutes instead of having several pitched battles, some of which came to a standstill. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) got his own sky-steed about 40 times faster than Jake. Why? Why was he so good at riding the thing, like, immediately? How is an asshole like Quaritch able to commune with a beast so quickly? Explain, please.

Ok, so the basic plot is that Jake and his family have had kids and stuff and they’re happy and ruling their own clan on Pandora—when Jake (Sam Worthington) sees a new star in the sky. He knows that his kinsmen—the Sky-people—are coming back. Their landing is incredibly powerful, as described above. They begin to mine the planet again—and also the oceans. Jake and his clan lead the resistance for a year, but the noose tightens. Jake realizes that his presence is now endangering the tribes, but he also couches it in terms that he just cares about protecting his family.

They pack up and head for the islands, where they are reluctantly taken in by an ocean-dwelling clan of Navi. They teach them their ways—this goes on for a long time and is quite beautifully rendered, to be honest—and then the plot picks up again. One of Jake’s sons goes outside of the reef with his new friends, but they abandon him there. He is chased by a savage shark-like beast that goes unnamed, but he’s saved by a Tulkan named Payakan. Payakan had been ostracized from his tribe because he’d allowed other Tulkan to die (somehow). Tulkan are supposedly more intelligent than humans, but their philosophy is pretty primitive and stunted—but then so is the one employed by humanity, for the most part, so maybe that’s representative of something.

Quaritch and his crew finally show up, there’s a truly depressing and impactful/compelling chase of a Tulkan that is Cameron hammering the point home of man’s cruelty to literally everything else on whatever planet they happen to be on. They show the team take out a mother because she’s going to be slower to protect her calves. They slaughter the mother and extract about a kilogram of magic juice that prevents aging in humans. Cameron is not subtle, but boy is he effective.

Quaritch is now closer to his prey and closes in. He is brutal, burning villages, torturing villagers, and slaughtering their animals. Cameron is not subtle, but he’s effective. This is Vietnam. This is Iraq. This is everyone where a conquering army enters. Many will think of Russians instead of Americans because they’re brainwashed, but I guarantee you that Cameron was thinking of America’s many crimes of invasion when he made these scenes. They’re unmistakable. He all but reproduced the Collateral Murder video from Wikileaks.

There is an epic battle wherein Payakan kicks a tremendous amount of ass, taking out most of the humans, with Jake and his family and his new clan picking off the rest. Cameron manages to stick about thirty minutes of Titanic into this film as the awesome hovercraft pitches over and sinks. Lo’ak saved Jake, Kiri saves Tuk and Neytiri, and Spider saves Quarritch (they need him for the next movie, duh).

The visuals are so convincing that I completely forgot that none of it was real. Literally nothing ruined the simulation. With enough money and time, we can literally make anything feel real now. It was an amazing action movie. It was very long, but I honestly don’t know what I would have cut from it. Maybe made two 100-minute movies out of it, I guess?

I saw it in 2D and English with German/French subtitles.

Decision to Leave (2022) — 8/10

This is a Korean police procedural that focuses on the wife Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) of a man who’d fallen off a mountain while climbing. She is a Chinese national who’d come to Korea and had been given asylum a long time ago, marrying a much-older man (the one who died on the mountain). Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is the officer in charge of the case. He is an insomniac and has a lot of open cold-cases that he won’t let go of.

He is pretty much immediately enthralled with Song, even though his relationship with this wife Jeong-ahn (Lee Jung-hyun) seems to be OK, although perhaps a bit long in the tooth. He is an attentive husband who helps out around the house, etc. He has his own apartment in the district where he works, so he’s not with Jeong-ahn as often as she’d like.

In Korean movies, everyone gets really, really tired from running across half the city. Both the criminal and the police officer have to stop to take a breath before they continue their showdown. Instead of a gun, the detective has a chain-mail glove that he uses to counter the knife that the criminal has. Like, he actually has it on him.

There are other nice, cultural differences. When the chief of police visits Jang, everyone else in the office gets up from their desks and issues a slight bow, even though he doesn’t even see it. When Jang gets his drunken partner Soo-wan (Go Kyung-Pyo) from Song’s apartment, they’re all in stocking feet.

Jang vacuums and cleans up Song’s apartment, cleaning up his partner’s mess. She knows that he’s surveilling her—and likes it. They develop a platonic relationship, but they do end up at his apartment and cooking together, which seems quite intimate. He’s still keeping his eyes open because he’s a good cop. Song’s job is to care for the elderly. When she can’t make it to her “Monday Grandma”, Jang offers to help.

He begins to suspect that Song has actually killed her husband when he notices that Grandma’s phone has stairs climbed on it—even though she hasn’t left her single-floor flat in ten years. Jang climbs the mountain and learns how Song did it, how she’d killed her husband. He is waiting in her apartment when she returns. He asks why she didn’t go to the police if he was beating her so badly? Her husband had threatened to return her to China. But none of that is true. She set it all up—making it look like her husband had been beating her, making it look like Soo-wan had torn her apartment apart. She claims that the time they spent together was not false, though.

He tells her he’s broken, tells her to get rid of the phone, lets her off the hook, then leaves the apartment. She has to look up the word that he used for “Broken” because her Korean, while very good, has gaps. That, too, is a nice touch.

The filming style is interesting: when Jang is investigating, he will often be right in the scene that he’s envisioning to have happened. At first, it’s a bit confusing and jarring because you’re wondering whether someone’s going to see him, but then you realize that he’s just a thought-ghost. It’s a nice device.

Song and her new “husband” meet Jang and his wife at the market in his wife’s home town. It is super-awkward. Like, world-record-setting awkward. Days later, her second husband is dead. He was killed by people to whom he owed money. She cleaned up the crime scene, though. She’s so suspect, honestly, it’s hard to tell what’s going on with her. Jang accompanies Song to a mountain to help her finally put her ancestors to rest. Jang’s wife leaves him—like, in the middle of the night—because she suspects/knows that he is having an affair with Song.

Although she didn’t murder her second husband, she did slip fentanyl pills to the mother of the Chinese henchman who was after her husband. That gentleman had promised to kill her husband as soon as his mother died. So Song kinda sorta killed her husband? Anyway, she goes to a beach and kills herself in a pretty gruesome manner. She digs a deep hole in the sand and lies in it, waiting of the tide to fill it with water and sand. Jang finally locates where she’d gone, but can’t find her, twirling in the surf at sunset in anguish.

This was a lovely film with a very unorthodox plot. I feel like it could have been a bit shorter, but have to admit that I didn’t follow everything as well as I could have. I blame the sub-par subtitles. I really liked the code-switching between Chinese and Korean though—I’m fascinated by films that show how multilingual so many cultures are.

Le Petit Soldat (1963) — 7/10

This is a film by famed Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard about a young man and a young woman who fall in love, but are on opposite sides of the Algerian War. Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) drives around Geneva, taking pictures and doing deals and generally being a sort-of spy. He meets Veronica Dreyer (Anna Karina), who is lovely and he falls in love with her immediately (on the first day, he loses a CHF50 bet to his friend that he would not do so).

Bruno gets an invitation to Veronica’s apartment to take pictures of her. As he’s snapping pictures, he thinks to himself, “she was less beautiful than the day before.” She says that she’s Russian, but was born in Copenhagen, and is now living in Geneva, speaking French. “A foreigner speaking French is very attractive.” She is quite beautiful, looking a bit like Milla Jovovich.

They talk some philosophy, music, and art. As with The Forbidden Planet, we are confronted with a deeply ingrained chauvinism. he corrects her on the time of day when one is supposed to listen to Mozart (20:00), Bach (08:00), Beethoven (00:00), and Haydn (good for late morning). What bizarre rules. “She’s convinced Gauguin was better than Van Goh, which obviously isn’t true.”

They fight because she’s changing her mind about whether she likes him or not. “You shouldn’t give your arm to men you’re not interested in.” He’s angry that she’s made him interested, but now he can’t act. He blames her. A story as old as time. I honestly don’t know whether Godard believed this or whether he was pointing out the scandal that others believe this.

They sleep together. We know because they wake up together. He’s smoking. “God, she’s beautiful.” The police arrive and take him in for questioning, for desertion. This is just a threat from his colleagues, punishing him for not having killed a rival. He tries to kill the man, but is foiled by circumstance and his own cowardice/hesitancy. He bungles it again, angering not only the French, but now also the Arabs. He tells Veronica that he’s flying out of Zürich to Brazil.

He is kidnapped by the Arabs before he can escape the country, though. They torture him into giving up his colleagues for terrorism. “Torture in monotonous and sad. It’s hard to talk about.” After a while, he manages to escape the apartment by jumping out the first-floor window. He calls Veronica, who agrees to help him and to escape to Brazil with him.

They talk some more. He’s a common, typical racist, hating things he’s neither seen nor experienced. He’s so young, but he has such fixed ideas about how different peoples are. He is utterly convinced of his own intellectualism. I wonder whether Godard viewed this man as a hero (I think not) or rather as a caricature of the faux-intellectuals that litter the landscape. After his tirade about politics, he thinks “Women should never get older than 25. Men become more handsome as they grow older, but women don’t age well.” Ah, he seems to be an expert on everything.

Bruno calls his colleagues, who keep him on the line long enough to record his voice. He leaves her apartment just as they’re arriving. They fool her into letting them in by playing the recorder. They pick her up as an FLN informer, torturing her horribly to get her to give up the new FLN headquarters. They promise him that he’ll get Veronica and their passports back if he kills his target. He finally does. He learns that Veronica is already dead. He looks forward to a long life, anyway—because he’s pretty shockingly shallow, despite his veneer of intellectualism.

The film is shot primarily in Geneva. Like Bergman, Godard manages to elicit the most beautiful portraits and close-ups. The combination of philosophical musings in voice-over and closeups imbues the film with import.

Breathless (1960) — 8/10

Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a small-time car thief. While cruising la campagne after a theft, his car breaks down just as the police are searching for him. He had found a gun in the glove compartment and impulsively uses it to kill the gendarme. He returns to Paris to lay low and look for a way to escape to Italy. He reconnects with an old flame, American student Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg). They flirt back and forth, with him pushing hard for them to end up in the sack together, her resisting, but eventually giving in. You have to hand it to him: he’s really in tremendous shape for someone in 1960.

She’s pregnant. He tells her “you should have been more careful.” That’s pretty much all you need to know about his character. As in Le Petit Soldat, the lead actor smokes all the time, has an unjustified confidence in his own intelligence and rectitude, and treats women like a prize to be gained, despite their inferiority and need for a man to make their lives meaningful. He’s basically a dumb pig, surrounded by a cloud of smoke. As with the previous film, I honestly can’t tell whether we’re supposed to identify with him as a cool guy or whether we’re supposed to see through his veneer and feel sorry for Patricia, who can’t seem to help but be mixed up with him.

As in Le Petit Soldat, the camera is nearly always on the move, following cars, people—I think this dynamism is what Godard brought to cinema. That, and his extreme, roving close-ups and long discussions between male and female characters. I notice that both of the girls that Michel visits have pictures of themselves on their own apartment walls. It’s like the only job a pretty girl could have is being a model.

The film is so of its time: it’s perfectly normal to sit around in a convertible, smoking and reading a newspaper. You literally blended into the background. No cop noticed you.

Patricia attends a press conference at Orly airport with a famous French actor Van Doude. He hits on Patricia, which makes her smile. He answers two of her questions. “Deviner immortel et puis mourir.”

Meanwhile, Michel is trying to scare up money for his escape to Italy. A man who owes him money is persistently unavailable. He tries to sell his car, but the man withholds payment for a week—he knows that Michel is a wanted man. The police catch up with Patricia at the Herald Tribune where they reveal to her that he’s killed a police officer. She stays cool, says she’s seen him but that she doesn’t know where he is. The cop threatens her with “passport problems” if she doesn’t help them.

Patricia expertly drops her tail and meets up with Michel. She finds out from the newspaper that he was married. She still loves him. She knows he killed a policeman. She still loves him. They’re on the run, in a car with the top down, which makes it a bit more difficult for him to hide, but cabrio baby. The first girlfriend he hit up for money, Minouche (Liliane Robin) spots him driving by. Her name is a joke because Minouche means “dollface” or “poppet”, or even “pussy”, a slang for vagina. Nice.

After a night of bouncing from place to place, Patricia calls the French inspector and turns Michel in. They’re in a friend’s photo studio, listening to music. He’s planning their escape to Italy when she tells him that she’s turned him in. He doesn’t seem worried. They continue to discuss love as she wanders around the central pillar of the apartment. Now, he walks around the apartment, saying that he prefers prison to running. He realizes that his friend Berruti (Henri-Jacques Huet) is showing up with money and heads him off to keep him from being caught by the police.

Michel says he won’t go with Berruti, he won’t run, he’s tired. He won’t take Berruti’s gun. Berruti throws it to him anyway as the police show up. Michel picks it up. The police shoot him and he staggers down the road, finally collapsing at the end of the road. Patricia is close behind. He’s still smoking as he lies on the ground, surrounded by a grieving Patricia and the police officers. He make a few faces/grimaces (as they did together in the apartment, long ago), then closes his own eyes and says, just before expiring,

MICHEL: C’est vraiment dégueulasse.
PATRICIA: Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit?
VITAL: Il a dit que vous êtes vraiment “une dégueulasse”.
PATRICIA: Qu’est-ce que c’est “dégueulasse”?

Which is translated to,

MICHEL: Makes me want to puke.
PATRICIA: What did he say?
VITAL: He said you make him want to puke.
PATRICIA: What’s that mean, “puke”?

It is unclear why Vital mistranslated Michel’s final words. Perhaps he was trying to protect her by making her hate Michel for condemning her in his final words.

I saw it in French with English subtitles. The French was quite clear for my ear (but I’ve also been practicing quite a bit).