Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.02

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.

Feels Good Man (2020) — 6/10

This is a documentary about the artist who created Pepe the Frog, a character in a comic he’s been drawing for years, but which was coopted by the alt-right as their mascot. The first part introduces the innocuous comic-artist, his wife, his roommate, his friends. The guy and his friends are overgrown man-children, having a goof making stoner-humor comics and finding a reasonable amount of success.

The next part documents the growth of the meme, starting on 4chan, which actually seems quite innocent, compared to the sheer psychosis that is young girls jumping on a meme to get attention and to boost their channels on whatever social media they’re on.

I'm Going To Chop Your Head OffThe shot to the right is of a young girl who’d painted her face to look like a frog, mispronounced his name as “pee-pee”, then started a tirade that she hated the frog. It literally doesn’t matter what that girl thinks, but she probably had millions of followers, watching her psychotic antics and cheering her on. The decline and fall of western civilization indeed. The documentary didn’t at all mention how psychotic this all is, it just noted that there was a backlash to the alt-right use of Pepe. It didn’t at all delve into a world where young girls fake outrage about things they don’t understand at all in order to make money on advertising.

The next part of the documentary is about people who took violence into the real world and, in the minds of many, simultaneously made literally everything with which those people had previously associated evil and worthy of elimination, worthy of censorship.

Obviously, there are a bunch of idiots, psychos, and mentally ill people who supported this violence, much as the girl above was threatening to kill because she was so angry. If we agree that she’s probably not going to act on her dementia, then we also have to agree that almost no-one else will act on theirs, not matter how much we despise who they are as people.

Naturally, people will defend their “side’s” threats of violence as innocent, while every single expression of dark humor on the other side as absolutely real and a harbinger of imminent violence. Because people are stupid. Instead of thinking at all about what the root causes are. Because, even after forty years of it, people still don’t get how funny and easy trolling is. Because the Internet has killed irony for so many people.

Instead, you have people who analyze the frog being drawn with his thumb under his chin as “being so smug, like he’s above the discussion that people are trying to have about … kindness.” JFC, you people are so fucking easy to troll, it’s not even right. The frog looks like literally every cheesy author picture ever published. That person spent literally six seconds drawing that frog and you’ve probably spent weeks of your waking life writing articles on Jezebel analyzing it. You can’t even see when you’ve been had.

There’s one dude who’s likening the use of Pepe the Frog with pogroms. Good luck with that, buddy! Hope you look good in makeup when you get your regular spot on CNN. What a shitshow.

And you know what? Those memes were mostly pretty great. I don’t agree with the politics at all, but they are pretty gold. Their meme game was super-strong. It’s also interesting to see how the alt-right and the alt-left/mainstream media worked super-hard to build up this meme, just because it was making lots of anger and money for everyone.

The artist was put on the ADL’s list of slanderous symbols and he was immediately ostracized. His friend told him to sue the Anti-Defamation League for defamation.

It literally doesn’t get any better when they spend the 10 minutes talking about crypto/NFT millionaires (363M in Pepe cash for one stoner). They give long, long minutes of time to young men—all men, of course—explaining how the system works, as if there is any justification for anyone becoming a multimillionaire for buying frog-based electronic trading cards. One idiot shows his most valuable trading card—it has a typo—then gets into a Lamborghini and drives away. The only solace is that these idiots are hopefully all broke now. I wish they’d shown him fishtailing his overpowered vehicle off of a cliff.

After that, they cover Furie’s suing of Infowars and Alex Jones for having appropriated his art and selling it. It was fine, but it was also tediously long, again interesting only for people who just want to watch Alex Jones get his just desserts, which I don’t care about at all.

This was a reasonably well-made documentary, but you have to be a lot more invested in the right/left, Dems vs. Reps, siloed bullshit than I am. You could have made this documentary half as long and lost nothing.

Дом дураков / House of Fools (2002) — 9/10

This film is set in a hospital for the mentally ill in Ingushetia, on the border of Chechnya. Zhanna (Yuliya Vysotskaya) is an inmate, but also seems more capable and is kind of the ad-hoc leader there. She has a lisp and believes that Bryan Adams is her fiancé. I am not kidding when I saw that the actual Bryan Adams is actually in this film, in her dream sequences. He is invariably singing Have You Really Loved a Woman?, which is actually one of his better songs.

The staff of the hospital leaves in order to find help, but they don’t return for a long time. Instead, a group of Chechen soldiers set up camp nearby, taking over the hospital temporarily. Their leader Ahmed is in the basement when she finds he and three of his compatriots, playing her accordion. She asks for it back, then plays it for them. Ahmed says he would marry her on the spot. She believes him.

In the meantime, some Russians show up with a tank, but they’re only there to return the body of one of the Chechen soldiers. They make a deal, then relax together in the sun. They discover that they fought together in earlier times. When the Russians leave, their commander leaves the money the Chechens had paid for the body with them, saying he owed them that much for having saved his life way back when.

Zhanna and the other inmates make preparations. The next day, she leaves in her wedding dress, with her wedding hat, with her wedding makeup, carrying a small suitcase and her accordion. She enters the bunker and takes her place next to a reluctant Ahmed. The soldiers start to scuffle, but first Zhanna, then another guy takes over to play a song on her accordion, a song that the soldiers know. They stop fighting and start dancing.

Ali shows up to take Zhanna back to the asylum. The soldiers invite him in, offering him a drink and yanking his backpack off to see what’s in it. It’s full of poems. Zhanna says to read them. He begins to recite as he picks the papers off the floor. The leader of the Chechens begins to sing in a low voice. The rest join in. It’s quite beautiful.

Much later that night, Zhanna finds Ahmed and confesses to him that she can’t marry him because it would break Bryan Adams’s heart—that he can’t live without her. Ahmed admits that he’d never intended to marry her, that he was just joking. He asks her forgiveness, which she grants. They talk about the war and how he came to fight. He admits that he’d bald, too. She says many people are bald. “Lenin was bald. And smart. And his wife loved him.” They spend the night platonically in the gazebo on the asylum grounds.

In the morning, a bomb explodes nearby, terrifying everyone. The Chechens are inside again, this time collecting medical supplies. My edition didn’t have subtitles for when the Chechen soldiers spoke to each other, which made Zhanna’s confusion feel more real. Vika is out there, proselytizing her leftist rhetoric. Poor Zhanna tries to fix everything with her accordion, playing it as the bombs fall.

Vika has stolen an AK and taken up arms against “Russian chauvinism and imperialism”. Ali tries to prevent them from stealing supplies; the soldiers beat him into a puddle forming in a crater. Behind Zhanna, a Russian helicopter crashes and explodes on the grounds of the hospital. The Chechens had just driven off, firing into the sky. She doesn’t stop playing her accordion.

Who is really mad here? All are mad. War is madness.

The rain falls; Ali crawls out of the rapidly filling crater. Shades of Tarkovsky.

The inmates wait out the bombs in the basement. The hospital is a shambles. Machine-gun fire in the distance. Helicopters. Glass everywhere. The tough Lithuanian fighter—a woman with a wounded shin—is back in the hospital, sniping from the windows. She tells Zhanna to get in the basement. Zhanna ignores her and stabs Polaroids of Ahmed with a bloody sliver of glass. The Chechen behind her is sniped herself and bleeds all over the night table, the insides of her head spilling into her helmet.

Soldiers burst into the hospital. Zhanna starts spiraling. Cue soft, afternoon light. Cue piano and acoustic guitar version of Have You Really Loved a Woman? and she’s dancing with Bryan Adams as the hospital falls down around her ears. She goes back to an older inmate,

“You didn’t eat your apple? The nurse says that God forgives. Will he forgive everyone?
Who?
God.
Which one?
You know. God.
What do you see?
An apple.
Is that all?
Well, yes, what else? It’s an apple.
I see different nations on that apple. People that love each other and destroy each other, fighting for generations, and dying. They stare up in hope to see my face. And you want me to eat them? I can only forgive them. Just as I forgive you. I’m aware of your existence. (Я знаю что ты есть)”

The doctor returns the next day, with supplies and kind words. He finds Zhanna pining for Ahmed, then wishing him a painful death.

Soldiers return, with tanks and guns, entering the hospital and searching it, top to bottom. The captain starts to have a panic attack, just unlacing his muddy boots. He confides to the doctor. He has lost so many friends and colleagues. He asks for a shot. The doctor says,

“Do you know what the most important thing in war is? It’s not victory. It’s death.”

The solder gets his shot and is back on the hunt for terrorists, reinvigorated. There’s a shootout. It’s with his own company. Who’s mad here? The whole world is a madhouse. Only the inmates act calm and sane and carry on with their daily routine. In the cantina, Zhanna spots Ahmed in line, getting food. Her face reveals a plethora of emotions crashing over each other like waves. He’s pretending to be an inmate. The others have a chance to give him up, but they quickly close ranks. The doctor pretends to buy it.

Zhanna retreats into her Bryan Adams fantasy, starring in a video on a train of Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?

That this was Russia’s entry for the best foreign film Academy Award for 2002 is wonderful. They really, really tried to reconcile with America. Here, they made a film about their war against Chechnya that wasn’t particularly flattering to the Russians. Not only was it published, it was submitted for an award in America.

Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) — 10/10

The story is set during what Americans call the Korean War, in a remote Korean mountain village called Dongmakgol, whose inhabitants have no idea that their country has been divided in half, with the northern communists (“comrades”) fighting the U.S.-backed army in the south (the “puppet” army).

Chief Comrade Lee Su-Hwa (Jae-yeong Jeong) leads his wounded troops on foot into an ambush, losing nearly all of them. A handful survive and begin to make their way to Pyongyang, across the mountains. Likewise 2nd Lt. Pyo Hyun-Chul (Shin Ha-kyun) has lost his entire command and is ready to kill himself when Army Medic Mun Sang-sang (Jae-kyeong Seo) saves him. They grudgingly end up traveling together and also head over the mountain.

The all end up at Dongmakgol, led there a bit by “free spirit” Yeo-il (Kang Hye-jeong), who is a pretty little sprite who does what she wants when she wants. She might be mentally handicapped or might just be completely unrepressed and happy. I suppose it’s a mark of our society that I can’t tell the difference. She tells the Northeners that they should move because there are snakes. They laugh it off because they think she’s a bit off. When a snake lands on Jang Young-hee’s (Ha-ryong Lim) arm, they expend all of their remaining ammunition trying to kill it.

The Southerners meanwhile also find the village and they end up in a standoff with the Northerners. They stand on opposite sides of a platform in the middle of the village. They have also ordered all of the villagers to stand on the platform between them as they stand off against each other—one side with only grenades, the other with empty rifles. After a night and a day of standing there, the villagers have gone back to their lives.

Yeo-il plucks the ring from a grenade for a lark. Northener Seo Taek-ki (Deok-Hwan Ryu) clutches it harder, but eventually falls asleep on his feet, his grip on the grenade slipping until he drops it—sans pin. Lt. Pyo jumps on it while the others jump away. It’s a dud. They continue their standoff. Eventually, Pyo chucks the dud away, it rolls into the grain and corn storage,…and explodes, destroying the village’s food supplies.

The group of five wake up together, in a single hut. Seo has a flower in his hair. The others take time off from squaring off against each other to enjoy a laugh at his expense. They start to work in the fields, grudgingly getting used to each other, and helping the villagers rebuild their stores. Both the soldiers and the villagers begin to regret how quickly the stores are restored, because it means that they will probably have to move on.

Seo starts to falls in love with Yeo-il. Pyo and Lee become friends. Jang and Seo become best friends. Smith helps out as well, though he keeps trying to communicate with home base from his crashed plane. This would be a mistake because Smith’s American comrades would get a fix on his downed plane and will want to come to “rescue” him—annihilating the nest of communists in the village as well. The long interlude of bucolic peace is over.

Avatar: The Way of Water juxtaposed the simple, bucolic, village life with the batshit-insane and murderously violent and creed-less military onslaught of the Americans. This feels exactly like that. Fortunately, most the landing party gets caught up in a storm of butterflies emanating from the festival and only five of them survive. They make their way to the village and rudely break up the party, threatening everyone’s lives and yelling completely nonsensical things about a war no-one knows or cares about.

When they start senselessly hammering on the chief, Lt. Pyo flips it and stabs him in the neck with a stick, leading to a fracas in which all but one of the invaders are killed. They take him prisoner. Poor Yeo-il was fatally wounded in the bedlam.

The villagers are sad to see them go, barely understanding what’s going on, but suspecting that it has something to do with the bad men who had broken up their party, assaulted their chief, and killed Yeo-il.

The six of them visit the prisoner and discover that he and his crew had been searching for Smith and that there is a bombing coming. Smith tells them of a weapons store that he’d found and they decide to use it to distract the bombing attack to save the village. Pyo tells Smith that he can’t accompany them, though; he has to go back to the base to thwart a second attack—because one will come if they thwart the first one. There is no way he can stay with them. He and the remaining soldier head to the base. They’re all dressed up in furs. They set up a Potemkin village and some firing positions and wait.

Mun sang-sang sings his song again as they wait for the approaching bombers to appear. They eventually appear, evil black spots, a dozen of them. They are inexorable, uncaring, unfeeling, remorseless, inscrutable, and completely convinced of their own righteousness. They wield overwhelming firepower, safe in their airborne sanctuaries, merrily and gleefully destroying tiny villages on the side of a snowy mountain as if that were a viable military target.

The men avoid all the bullets—and take out an oncoming plane with a bazooka. The pilots are starting to sweat a bit. They take down another plane. The snowy mountain looks like a moonscape. The remaining planes are implacable and drop the real hardware. It is no longer fun. It no longer feels like victory. Our poor heroes are taking some damage. Lee Su-Hwa is hit by a bullet; Pyo is knocked out by a bomb; Jang is killed by a bomb; Seo is killed in his machine-gun nest, avenging Jang.

There are so many planes. The force is overwhelming. They don’t care. They never do. They have their orders. They have their hate. They have their machines of violence. They have their orgy of destructions. They have their lack of morals, principle, ethics, sense of history, empathy. They are hollow men. And they always, always win. This time they have been fooled into destroying a snow crag instead of the village they were seeking. The three remaining heroes stand on the hill, smiling at one another as the bombs fall on them.

Smith hurries onward to get to the base. He hears what’s happening and breaks down in tears, but know he must push on, else even worse will happen to Dongmakgol, else his friends’ sacrifice will have been for nought. Because the war machine hungers always for more, always seeking new targets, always finding new enemies. It exists to feed itself.

In flashback, Yeo-il visits the sleeping men and puts a flower in Seo’s hair.

This works very well as an anti-war movie, I think. I loved it and would watch it again. It’s darkly comic; it’s deeply touching. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much of this movie’s plot Avatar: The Way of Water just lifted nearly wholesale. Sneaky, James Cameron, sneaky.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) — 7/10

Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Lui (Eiji Okada) (no names; their names mean “her” and “him” in French) have just spent the night together in Hiroshima, in each other’s arms, discussing the city and the war and the bombing. She talks about the museum. He tells her she’s wrong. That she doesn’t know.

Here I am watching another French Avant-Garde film—and another anti-war film. The pictures and films from the time are absolutely horrifying. He asks her about how she felt when it happened. She says that she can’t believe they had the audacity, but that the world was happy that it ended the war. This is absolutely not why that happened. The war was already over. This is 100% admitted fact, by both the U.S. government (and the always-charming Curtis Lemay, war criminal sans pareil) and almost all historians.

Seeing the destruction, one can’t help but think that the U.S. is one of the most criminal empires to have ever graced the planet. Of course, so were the German and Japanese empires—but the U.S. one killed 200,000 and wounded 90,000 people in nine seconds and fetes itself to this day for its bravery.

They wake in the morning and introduce themselves. She finds out that he’s an architect and had taught himself French to learn about the French Revolution from original texts. She is leaving the next morning—she’s an actress and her shoot is over.

They part ways, with her saying she doesn’t want to meet up again. Creeper shows up on her film set. They go to a parade commemorating the Hiroshima attack. People carry pictures of the dead and fallen. She cries in empathy. He’s still creeping hard on her, “Je crois que je t’aime.” Read the room, buddy. They’re literally standing behind someone in body makeup that looks like a whole-body, bloody burn scar.

They go back to his apartment. She asks where his wife is. “In Unzen; I’m alone.” He says he’s happy with his wife; she responds that she’s happy with her husband. They embrace. Afterward, they lie entwined in bed and talk more about their pasts, about her fling in Nevers during the war. He was not a Frenchman (presumably a German? He’s definitely a soldier.)

They leave the apartment and wander the city. The film of the city itself is lovely. In a tea room, she tells more of the story. The town had ostracized her for having loved a German. They’d shaved her head; her parents had locked her in the basement. They’d waited for her “madness” to pass. In telling her story, she keeps referring to her former German lover in the second person, seeming to be speaking to her new Japanese lover. The story lingers on her way back from her exile for quite a long time.

She recalls have seen her German lover’s death in the street before her home, how they’d come to retrieve him the next morning, how long it had taken him to die. She starts to freak out a bit, shouting in the teahouse. He slaps, then backhands her to bring her to her senses. The whole bar turns around. She continues her story as if nothing had happened. They keep drinking beer, she keeps talking about her former German lover, he keeps loving her. At least she’s back to the third person now.

They part ways again, late at night. She is to depart in the morning. She’s a bit drunk, a bit overtired, and starts regretting that she’d told her story. She decides to stay in Hiroshima, with her new lover. She goes back to the tearoom. He finds her outside. Creepin’.

I wasn’t quite as impressed with the nature of this “tone poem” as others seem to be. The film is in black-and-white, with pretty standard fixed cameras, but the photography is really quite lovely. I found the story to be a bit pedestrian, though—maybe it was more shocking when seen younger, before having seen so many other movies and read so many books.

The philosophy is a bit bland, a bit superficial. He is like a prop—his overwhelming love for her is completely incomprehensible. Perhaps there’s the juxtaposition of how much she feels herself to suffer for her ancient relationship with a German soldier—in a city that suffered more than nearly any other. I mean, that’s nearly shockingly solipsistic, but I’m not sure that’s the takeaway that impresses so many others.

Despite this juxtaposition, she remains laser-like focused on her own suffering, utterly without perspective. And he doesn’t care. He loves her unconditionally and begs for a handful of days—whatever she’s willing to give of her endless bounty of fascinating stories and personality. Either that, or maybe she’s just a roaring tiger in the sack.

I gave it an extra point for the lovely photography and decent pacing. I watched it in French with English subtitles.

Bad Sisters S01 (2022) — 9/10

This is another one of those shows full of overly trusting people, none of whom are really worthy of respect. There are some who are over-the-top worse than others, which feels like the show’s pushing you to side with people who aren’t really worth siding with either.

The storyline is about the Garvey sisters: there’s single, semi-alcoholic Eva (Sharon Horgan), who works with John Paul Williams (Claes Bang), who’s the worst person on Earth and married to homemaker Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), there’s massage-therapist and “free spirit”/floozie Becka (Eve Hewson), one-eyed Bibi (Sarah Greene), married Ursula (Eva Birthistle), who’s stepping out on her husband, EMT Donal (Jonjo O’Neill).

They hate John Paul and he hates all of them. John Paul is dead at the beginning of the first show. The rest of season is a flashback explaining how that came about. Mostly, it’s pretty clear: John Paul is a vicious, control-freak of a sociopathic monster who manipulates everyone and loves to torment for pleasure. It wasn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when and by whom he would be murdered.

There’s also a real piece of shit in the person of Thomas Claffin (Brian Gleeson) and his half-brother Matthew (Daryl McCormack). They’re insurance agents who own the agency that has to pay out John Paul’s life-insurance policy. They can’t afford to, so they’re acting like police officers to try to find a reason to not pay out—like maybe the sisters murdered the sonofabitch.

Basically, John Paul is almost preternaturally evil and incredibly capable and lucky and also helped by the fact that people who are having affairs and doing other sorts of shady things don’t have a passcode on their phones, which is, honestly, the fucking laziest sort of writing in this year of our Lord 2022.

It’s almost as lazy as the sisters answering literally any question put to them by the Claffin brothers. They have to answer them because they literally just always invite them in or let them in when they barge in uninvited. Is that how single women work the door at their apartments? They’re standing there in their underwear, with shaving cream on their legs and when a complete stranger shows up, you just step aside when they take a run at you? And then you answer all of their questions. I can’t tell if this is even lazier writing than leaving phones unlocked in 2022.

We see how the pressure builds and the sisters’ pots all boil over and they each line up, ready to help kill John Paul.

Bibi’s wife Nora (Yasmine Akram) is a treasure, though. She finally tells the Clafferty brothers what John Paul was really like: “Every time I saw him, I felt like punching him in the face.”

They are quite inventive in finding ways of making him be an unimaginably horrific “Prick”. In E05, he chases his daughter Blanaid’s (Saise Quinn) cat—which she’d received from her aunties and which he hates—into the street with a hose, where it’s promptly hit by a passing car. He leaves its body in the street and goes back to washing his boat. When Grace gets home from a dance class that he hadn’t wanted her to take—she’s too busy caring for his home—and from which she’d fled before it had been five minutes because she felt guilty about being away from her job of caring for the Prick all the time, she runs over the cat’s body. When she discover’s the cat’s body, Blanaid accuses her of always ruining everything. The Prick runs out to console her for killing the cat, and to tell his daughter not to be too harsh on her mother. Wonderfully cynically written.

In E06, Grace is starting to exert some independence—although a very minimal amount—and the Prick starts to lose control when he finds her vibrator (given to her by Eva, of course) and challenges her, telling her that maybe he doesn’t find her attractive is why they’re no longer having relations, but she forces herself past him to go on an overnight sports thingie with Blanaid, after which the other sisters roofie the absolutely ever-lovin’ Christ out of him, but he rallies, leaving the house without pants and driving down to his feckin’ beloved boat because he needs to go out on the water with his boss Gerald, but he’s got no pants and it’s the middle of the night and he can’t swim anyway and the roofie dose is absolutely going to debilitate his motor control at some point and that point is when he’s straddled across the boat and dock, exposing his wedding tackle from behind to the sisters, who are watching the train wreck of their plan come to fruition because perhaps there is a God and the Prick falls in and sinks beneath the surface forever and ever amen.

Except forever isn’t as long as it used to be. Gabriel saves the Prick from drowning, for which JP returns the favor by trying to blackmail him for being gay and then taking a run at him, which Gabriel repays by cracking him in the jaw and sending him flying into a urinal. The prick has made another enemy, kind of. Gabriel is also mad at Eva because he thinks that she told the Prick about his homosexuality, which isn’t the case, but it doesn’t matter.

This thing is picking up pace, I must say. It got a bit rockier at the end, though. There are really no good people in this show at all. Everyone’s looking out for themselves, with no regard for what’s right. The sisters snipe on each other—they’re trying to kill a man. Grace is a pathetic heap of a woman. Thomas Claffin is garbage, motivated only by money. His wife Theresa (Seána Kerslake) is also not interested in what might be right—she’s interested in helping her husband on his jihad, without regard for how many lives get ruined. Thomas and his wife are perfectly willing to cover up the horrendous fraud his father perpetrated on several customers, all the while judging the Garvey sisters for their purported crimes.

Gabriel (Assaad Bouab) is an unassailably nice person. He’s the best one in the show. Perhaps Matt Claffin is also pretty good, mostly, although he’s under the aegis of his horrible brother Thomas.

In the end, my guess turns out to be right and it is Grace who finally snaps and kills the Prick while they’re at their cabin in the woods, on her birthday. He treats her even more like garbage than usual—“you’re a shadow, Mammy; you don’t even exist when I turn out the light”—and she finally realizes that she’s been kidding herself. She sets up his body to look like he’d strangled himself driving home drunk on his snowmobile. Her neighbor, who JP had turned in to the police for being a pedophile, shows up to help her.

Gracie finally admits her crime to the sisters, who breathe a sigh of relief that he’s gone and who help her cover it up. Matt eventually discovers the truth, but ends up burning the evidence—and Grace ends up dropping her claim on his insurance company.

Overall, this was a pretty strong cast and a pretty strong and unique story. I gave it an extra point because it very clearly didn’t position itself for a second season. I would like to see this family again, but I like that they had the stones to just end it, rather than setting up a possibly lucrative continuation that serves only to make money, but not to extend the story.

Spirited (2022) — 6/10

The premise of this movie is that a modern-day manipulator Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds) would be able to easily outwit a Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) who’s been doing the rescuing bad people bit for over 200 years. Also, there are a fuck-ton of musical numbers, many of them featuring Ryan Reynolds or Will Ferrell singing.

Clint runs a very successful image-consultant business with Kimberley (Octavia Spencer). Over the one year of research they did on Clint, GCP fell in love with her. Clint proves a tough nut to crack. First, he sleeps with Ghost of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani), then he starts to turn the tables on GCP, who actually used to be Scrooge. Clint, for his part, supports his brother Owen (Joe Tippett), who adopted his niece (Marlow Barkley) because he wasn’t willing to do it. He advises his niece to ruin her opponent’s career in the sixth-grade-president race at her school.

The plot quickly becomes about GCP retiring and getting back to life, to be with Kimberley. Then he and Clint figure out how to live as a human rather than a ghost. They end up back at Clint’s X-Mas Eve party. Clint hands GCP off to Kimberley and is picked up by Christmas Future (Tracy Morgan)

There are some decent lines and Reynolds is actually a different role than he usually plays—a lot fewer one-liners, which was actually the right call. Ferrell has a couple of good lines,

“Clint: You know I pay for all of this, right?
GCP: You suck.”

But he also has a couple of throwaway lines that are too current (“I think I have moderate to severe Crohn’s disease”) and won’t have legs a couple of years from now. Their chemistry is good overall, but they burst into song much too often.

This type of musical is really not for me. The film is too long by about 45 minutes and it’s crammed with songs that do nothing but let people like Octavia Butler and Will Ferrell try to prove that they can sing in a musical. I don’t like these highly orchestrated singing and dancing things with all of the sad extras, looking very obviously like they’re hoping that someone will notice them in this movie and hire them for other things.

It was also obviously CGId, even in places where there was absolutely no need for it. The sets were antiseptic and felt mostly fake—par for the course for a modern film, I suppose, but this film would have been an opportunity to have it feel warmer and more lived-in than movies generally feel nowadays.

Archer S13 (2022) — 8/10

In this season, the Agency—now without Malory—is a subdivision of IIA (international intelligence agency), run by the Fabian (Kayvan Novak). The plot arc for the season is the crew doing Fabian’s bidding and trying to get their Agency back under their own control.

Cheryl (Judy Greer) is the same, but also a demolitions expert now. Pam (Amber Nash) and Krieger (Lucky Yates) are a bit tamer than in previous episodes, although Pam does fight a couple of times—and we get to see her tattoo. Also, we get to see Krieger’s new van. Cyril (Chris Parnell) is also the same old Cyril, pathetic and needy and terrified, but sometimes useful. Ray starts out as the leader nominated by Fabian, then seems to have switched to IIA, then turns out to have been a double agent, and the team comes around.

Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is perhaps a bit more alcoholic than in prior seasons—if that’s even possible. Lana (Aisha Tyler) is in a custody battle with Robert (Stephen Tobolowsky) for a nearly tween-aged AJ (Kimberly Woods), who’s quite capable in her own right.

They eventually get their Agency back under their own control—despite Fabian’s and also Slater’s (Christian Slater) best efforts. Slater reprises his role as the Agency’s CIA liaison.

This is a solid entry in the series, not one of the best, but solid. I’m just happy that they’re still making these, honestly. They’re a lot of fun and the characters are well-worn, but wonderfully familiar at this point.

Inside Job S01–S02 (2021–2022) — 9/10

This is a cartoon about a company called Cognito, which is in charge of running the deep state in the Unites States. Basically, every conspiracy theory you can think of is true—and was either promulgated or perpetrated by Cognito employees. The company was founded by now disgraced Randy Ridley (Christian Slater) and J.R. Scheimpough (Andy Daly). Randy is no longer at the company, but his genius daughter Reagan (Lizzy Caplan) works there, in a very high-ranking position.

She’s a genius with amazing engineering abilities (á la Rick Sanchez), unbelievably and cartoonishly good, in fact, but that’s just fine in a cartoon. We’re not supposed to think about how quickly she’s able to single-handedly engineer incredibly intricate devices that do things that defy all of the laws of physics that we know. She builds not just slightly more advanced technology, but actually impossible technology. Season two ends with a multi-episode arc about a machine that Rand invented that allows him to jump people into different time continua.

She leads a team comprising social-media expert Gigi (Tisha Campbell), chemist/druggist/druggie Andre (Bobby Lee), dolphin-hybrid Glenn Dolphman (John DiMaggio), giant mushroom from the planet’s core Magic Myc (Brett Gelman), the genocidal Robotus, Alpha-Beta (Chris Diamantopoulos) (created and held hostage by Reagan), and endless optimist, nice guy, and doofus Brett Hand (Clark Duke).

They have a bunch of wacky adventures, saving the company and their own jobs several times. They go to the moon, They meet, befriend, and fight with Bear-O. They meet the Illuminati. They are ordered about by the mysterious Robes. Sasquatch has a cameo.

Reagan is pretty hilarious and refreshingly well-written. Her character arc is quite fun, going from beleaguered employee to CEO to partner with the Robes in a long arc over two seasons. In season two, Ron Staedtler of the Illuminati shows up as a heavy love interest and it’s really well-done. The final episode is touching.

Several of the other characters are very good as well, but she stands out. This show’s a lot better than I expected it to be when I half-heartedly clicked on it. It’s clever and subtly subversive and a lot of fun for a Netflix cartoon. It’s not shockingly subversive, but there are enough asides that surprised me in their relative audacity.

Furthermore, as noted above, it doesn’t mix with modern-day politics at all (or not yet, anyway). It takes for granted that there’s an overarching surveillance state—the cartoon is literally about that organization. It doesn’t connect the dots to the NSA because it’s a comedy not a documentary.

Letterkenny S01–S03 (2022) — 8/10

This is the story of a rural community in Ontario called Letterkenny.. There’s Wayne (Jared Keeso), his sister Katy (Michelle Mylett), his best friend Daryl (Nathan Dales), and Dan (K. Trevor Wilson), who work on a farm together. There’s a local hockey team, where Reilly (Dylan Playfair) and Jonesy (Andrew Herr) play. There’s a group of on-again/off-again meth-heads, led by Stewart (Tyler Johnston). There are a handful of other bit players.

The story is basically that Wayne is a straight-shooter and the toughest guy in town. He spends part of season 1 proving it. He has a distinctive style, both in his mannerisms and his diction. It’s quite funny. He likes to farm, smoke, and drink straight from the bottle. There are a lot of mini-skits with highly ritualized exchanges between the characters, usually, Daryl, Katy, Wayne, and Dan.

There are a few other characters who show up now and again:

Bonnie McMurray (Kamilla Kowal)

She’s sweet on Wayne (like most of the other girls, exceptin’ Katy) and very pretty

McMurray (Dan Petronijevic)

He’s Bonnie’s dad and very structured and not so bright. He’s president of the Ag.

Mrs. McMurray (Melanie Scrofano)

Horny as hell for her husband and loves the hell out of cursing and G&Ts

Tanis (Kaniehtiio Horn)

Head of the gang on the reservation; kind of has a thing going with Wayne, maybe?

Joint Boy (Joel Gagne)

A beefy scrapper who’s always smoking a joint; shows up as part of Wayne’s gang

Coach (Mark Forward)

Coaches the local hockey team; hilariously angry all the time, “It’s. Fucking. Embarrassing.”

Tyson (Jay Bertin)

Local MMA guy; got his ass handed to him by Wayne; in his gang sometimes

Gail (Lisa Codrington)

Incredibly horny former bartender; always looking for love with Wayne

Glen (Jacob Tierney)

Local preacher and flamboyantly out gay man with several odd jobs

Jim Dickens (Alex McCooeye)

Also known as “Dickskin”; local auctioneer

There are a few story arcs: the hockey boys move up to the real league, becoming schmelts, but then taking over when they’re the only ones scoring goals and the other, more senior players, are head over heels for Angie, who’s become a “puck bunny”.

In season three, it’s winter, so it’s snowmobile and ice-fishing season. There are also a lot more fart and shit jokes, which is a turn-off. They also lean way too hard on the ritual where each of the relatively unamusing senior hockey players say something snarky and then hand off to their teammate. Those parts got old really fast. I’m honestly kind of curious how they got to eleven seasons with this thing. The first two were pretty solid, though. Something different—and it’s about rural Canada, so that’s nice.

The Assistant (2019) — 8/10

This is conceptually a great movie. It falls down a bit in the execution because they communicate misery through muddy sound and dim lighting. They succeed in their intent, though: the office where Jane works looks awful. We are assured that it’s a high-powered talent agency, run by a well-connected and powerful Lothario. It looks like trash, though, with awful lighting, cramped cubicles, and food and refuse everywhere.

Jane has so many jobs. She does them all. She’s only been there for five weeks and she already knows so much. It’s utterly unclear who in that office could even have trained her. She looks tired and nearly incapable of smiling or enjoying anything. I only know her name from IMDb because no-one ever recognized her by name; no-one else in the movie has a name.

Jane’s life is misery. She’s at the office at 06:00. She leaves around 21:00. When she went to HR to complain about her boss’s suspected sexual proclivities, she said she’d been there for two months, but HR reminded her that it had only been five weeks. It just felt like two months. At about 40 minutes into the movie, it had felt like I’d been watching for much longer already. In that sense, the movie absolutely succeeded in communicating what it was like to be Jane. This is not knocking the movie—that was its intent.

The HR scene is well-made: she goes in but is told to sit and wait for someone to see her. As she’s sitting there in this harshly lit and unfriendly space, another man shows up and is told by the same secretary to walk right in. After he leaves again, she’s told that she can go in as well, presumably because it had now become too obvious that the man she was to see isn’t busy at all, but just doesn’t want to be bothered. She goes in, where he puts on a show of being busy, just to let her know who’s important and who’s in charge—just what you want in HR, of course. As she tells her story, he becomes increasingly hostile, finally telling her that she should be grateful that she has a job. Basically, stay in your lane, Jane. Oh, and be happy that “you’re not his type.”

Here’s another example from toward the end of the movie:

Just before she’s allowed to leave, she’s listlessly dragging a fork through a microwaved plastic dish of something or other. Her boss calls her to tell her to go home, but it’s kind of cut off. He can’t even be bothered. She dumps her meal in the trash and walks out. On the street, she makes her way to a close-by deli, where she buys a muffin. It’s wrapped in plastic wrap. It’s not fresh. She peels off part of the plastic wrap, enough to take a bite. Two large chunks of the muffin top fall off and land on the counter. She nibbles the bit she’s managed to get in her mouth. She wipes up the two lost pieces. She doesn’t even seem to care—she wasn’t going to enjoy it anyway.

She calls her father to apologize for having missed his birthday (she’d worked the weekend). Her father tells her how proud her parents are of having gotten that job—that she’s going to go far. They want to hear all about it, but not now. On the weekend. Now, her father has to go walk the dog. Good night, sweetie.

She wraps her uneaten muffin in its sad plastic wrap and shuffles out, shuffling up the street, presumably to a subway, getting smaller as the city swallows her, to make her long and slow way home with the N or W train, to Astoria. She has to be back in a car service at 05:00 the next morning, for another day of work.

The whole movie feels like this. It does a great job of making you aware of the misery of this kind of job and of the misery of working for people like that. It makes it clear that these places are everywhere.

Her co-workers are remote, although not completely without sympathy. Her two asshole, shirking co-workers (are they also assistants?) help her write her apology letters when her monster of a boss dresses her down for a perceived infraction. One of these infractions being that he heard nearly immediately that she’d been to HR about him—because the head of HR called him immediately, as, of course, HR would do, right?

But those two bros also kinda/sorta ask her if she wants to come out with them, although they probably only asked because they knew that she would say no, because she’s not allowed to leave the office as early as they are. She has to wait for permission to leave, like a dog waiting for its owner to allow it to eat the biscuit perched on its snout.