Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.04

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 Meg (2018) — 6/10

This is a movie about an underwater research institute that is even more amazing than the one in Sphere. The research they are doing will benefit mankind and the entire movie is a documentary about the multiple ways in which mankind will benefit from the discoveries made by the altruist billionaire’s donations to open-source research.

I kid, of course.

While that may be the background, this movie is most definitely about a gigantic shark, a Megalodon. The Megalodon is a relic of the deep past, a monster up to 20 meters long. Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is a diver nonpareil but he’s retired from the game. Zhang (Winston Chao) is the aforementioned billionaire, while Suyin (Bingbing Li) is his brilliant shark-researching daughter. Jaxx (Ruby Rose) is the genius who built the whole oceanic base and all of the underwater toys.

A mission goes awry when it enters the hunting grounds of the Meg, attracting it with its lights and vibrations. The Meg disables the vehicle, wounding Jonas’s ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee) in the process. Zhang convinces Jonas to help them out. He shows up to save the day, rescuing the stranded divers—all except Toshi (Masi Oka), who sacrifices himself by making a lot of light and noise, to save the others.

They all get back to the underwater base—but the Meg follows them, threatening to break into their lovely base. It leaves giant tooth imprints on the supposedly unbreakable polycarbonate outer walls. The team abandons their research and pools their resources to hunt down and kill this thing.

They cruise out to its hunting grounds—it has just killed a boat full of Japanese fishermen who’d been harvesting shark fins (no big loss)—and drop Suyin in a super-strong shark cage to harpoon it in the eye. Things don’t go as planned because, while the Meg can’t break the cage, it can try to swallow it. It doesn’t succeed; Jonas rescues Suyin and they narrowly avoid being eaten as the Meg finally manages to entangle itself in a line, forcing it to stop swimming…and the lights go out.

Suyin awakes to see the Meg hanging on the back of the boat, dead as a doornail. To absolutely no-one’s surprise, this is not the real Meg. The real Meg leaps out of the water to eat this “tiny” shark, destroying their boat in the process. Various people are in the water, various people save other people, and a couple of them get eaten. No-one important yet, though.

Mac (Cliff Curtis) manages to get to a zodiac and they take off in two of them, heading for mainland, where they can bring Zhang to a hospital (he’d been injured gravely). The Meg chases them for ten miles before a helicopter shows up, loaded for bear. It spikes the Meg’s fin with a transponder. They all make it back to shore, but Zhang dies along the way. The cocky oceanographer Morris (Rainn Wilson) closes the ocean base until they can kill the Meg. The countries of the Pacific Rim band together to give chase.

Morris is at the forefront, dropping dynamite bombs on the Meg. It’s dark, so they blow a giant hole in a whale instead. Morris realizes the mistake, but falls off the back of the boat when his crew takes off. The Meg eats him up. It turns out that Morris hadn’t informed anyone about the Meg. He wanted to kill it before anyone found out about it. The rest of the crew decides to just pick up Morris’s mission where it left off—also without notifying anyone. They eventually try, but everyone thinks they’re pranking them.

OK. So now the Meg’s cruising around a Chinese holiday spot, making trouble but not really taking a lot of victims. Our crew lures it out to their tanker, where they have super-submarines as well as helicopters to hunt the thing. Two of the helicopters fly into each other while Jonas and Suyin zip around trying to kill it. A bunch of people fall in the water with Suyin rescuing them.

Jonas takes on the shark alone, slicing it from stem to stern with the dorsal fin on his ship. The Meg is wounded, but not down for the count. It takes his ship apart but Jonas manages to stab it in the eye, right into the brain. It’s still not quite dead, but then hundreds of sharks appear to finish the job. Suyin rescues Jonas from them as well.

This movie is honestly better than it had any right to be. Maybe I’m just a sucker for Jason Statham’s charisma and swagger. I watched it in German.

American Factory (2019) — 6/10

This is a documentary about a Chinese glass-company Fuyao that buys a factory in America to produce car windows. It’s ostensibly about a culture clash, but it’s really a movie about class conflict. The Chinese company is keenly interested in keeping costs down, so it’s keenly interested in keeping out unions. The Chairman threatens to leave if the American management can’t keep them out.

It’s a class conflict because the Chinese workers in the plant in China are treated quite poorly. They get about two days off per month and work much longer shifts than eight hours (it goes unstated just how long). People tell how they see their children only once per year. The management in America is only too interested to keep the plant open at all costs—and they very quickly agree to all demands for cost-cutting. The employees in America become restless and agitate for a union.

The American plant also has Chinese workers, who have been shipped in to work for two years. They, too, work long hours, and are away from their families for that time. The attitude is, of course, that people don’t need to do anything but work. This should be the only thing they need in life. This is, of course, patently untrue, and wholly unnecessary.

If the people who can’t figure out what do in the forty hours of work assigned to them were to actually pay more for their goods, factories wouldn’t try to race to the bottom and press wages as low as possible. These highly skilled workers are making only about $100 per day. That’s $2,000 per month, pre-tax, or about $24,000 per year. That is not a lot of money in most places in America.

The workers become increasingly dissatisfied and the management eventually seems to relent, offering everyone a $2-per-hour raise. But they seem to tie it to working longer hours. It’s unclear. The Chinese workers seem to think of their American colleagues are unskilled and lazy, but we have to tread very carefully here. The group of workers is self-selected to the group that would be willing to leave their families for two years and bring a factory up to speed. That means that they are very good at what they do and very dedicated to their company and to their work. That is, if you ask them, of course you’re going to hear that work is the most important thing to do every day. That’s literally the life-choice that they made. To deny it would be to throw a shadow on everything they’re doing. It would mean that they’d left their families—passed up the opportunity to watch their children grow—for nothing. Of course they’re not going to lament the lost time that they would have otherwise spent on hanging out with friends or reading books.

This film is longer than it needs to be and it unfortunately fails to make the point that it’s not China versus the U.S.: it’s capitalists vs. labor. They kind of hint at this sometimes, but it’s too diffuse to make out over the much lower-hanging fruit of pitting cultures against one another.

Oeconomia (2020) — 10/10

This is a fantastic one-woman film that sets out to answer the questions: how does the macro-economy work? Where does money come from? Where do profits come from?

Wie entsteht Geld? − Macht. Herrschaft. Geld. Über Staatsverschuldung, EZB & riesige Privatvermögen by MrMarxismo (YouTube)

Just using the nearly clueless interviewee from BMW as an example that serves to show how the economy works—and how unaware the parasites are that they are parasites—here’s a snippet of dialogue.

At 00:48:07,

“BMW representative: Sie können ungefähr rechnen, dass jedes zweite Fahrzeug, das wir weltweit vermarkten, über BMW-Finanzdienstleistungen refinanziert wird vom Kunden.

“Charlotte: Und inwieweit könnte man sagen, dass Sie durch die Autokredite, Autofinanzierung, das Geld für Ihre Gewinne damit auch selbst produzieren?

“BMW representative: Also, die Finanzierungssparte ist auch profitabel…

“Charlotte: Ich meinte gesamtwirtschaftlich gesehen, Sie vergeben mit demAutokredit einen neuen Kredit und tragen so selbst zu einerGeldmengenerweiterung bei. Das steigert ja die Gewinnerwartung.

“BMW representative: Das wirkt sich deswegen positiv auf die Gewinnerwartung aus, weil wir einen gewissen Teil unsererFahrzeuge eben aufgrund der Kreditvergabe… verkaufen, und wird aber…Wir sind ja Teil des… Finanzierungsbankensystems und unterliegenentsprechend auch den ganzen Regeln, denen Geschäftsbankenauch unterliegen.

“Charlotte: Mhm.”

At 00:50:54,

“Charlotte: Wenn die Möglichkeit, dass Firmen Gewinne machen können, unweigerlich in paradoxe Schleifen führt, wieso müssen Firmen überhaupt Gewinne machen?

“Finance Guy: Man sieht, dass Leute wie Sie…Die verstehen nicht mal die mindesten Zusammenhänge der Betriebswirtschaft und der Wirtschaft. Diese Frage ist so, als wenn mich jetzt jemand fragt: “Wieso fällt ein Stein von oben nach unten und nicht umgekehrt?”

“Charlotte: Die längste Zeit der Menschheitsgeschichte fiel also der Stein von unten nach oben. Da gab es keine gewinnorientierte Wirtschaft.

“Finance Guy: Moment. Ich erkläre Ihnen, warum diese Frage eine Beleidigung ist.

“Charlotte: Ich bin gespannt.

“Finance Guy: Was die meisten Menschen nicht kapieren, ist Folgendes: Tilgungen von Krediten erscheinen in keiner Gewinn- und Verlustrechnung. Wenn Sie sagen, auf Ihrer Gewinn- und Verlustrechnung steht: “0 Euro Gewinn”, haben Sie kein überschüssiges Geld für Ihre Kredite.

“Charlotte: Unternehmen müssen Gewinne machen, um ihre Schulden zurückzuzahlen?

“Finance Guy: Ganz genau.

“Charlotte: Wenn man das nun gesamtwirtschaftlich betrachtet: Können alle gleichzeitig Gewinn machen?

“Finance Guy: Ja. Warum denn nicht?

“Charlotte: Dann muss die Geldmenge wachsen.

“Finance Guy: Nee.

“Charlotte: Wenn alle auf ihr eingesetztes Kapital mehr erwirtschaften?

“Finance Guy: Was wollen Sie denn da mit der Geldmenge?

“Charlotte: Sie können keine Geldmenge X reingeben, aber eine Geldmenge X plus 0,03 rausziehen wollen.

“Finance Guy: Da sind Sie jetzt bei mir komplett falsch. Das interessiert mich auch gar nicht. Weil Sie die Geldmengensteuerung der anderen Länder… Ach. Und wenn Sie drüber promovieren, da ändert sich nichts.

“Charlotte: Ah ja, verstehe.”

At 00:55:28,

“Für steigende Gewinn und Wirtschaftswachstum ist eine ständige Ausweitung der Verschuldung nötig. Das ist der berühmte Elephant-in-the-Room, über den niemand spricht. Der zentrale Akteur im Kapitalismus ist der Schuldner, er ermöglicht die Profite und den Vermögenszuwachs der anderen.”

At 00:57:58,

“Der Profit der Privaten wird zum Teil also über Staatsverschuldung finanziert. Und so gesehen ist für meine Begriffe, der Staat eben eine Profitquelle.”

At 01:01:08, there’s another great sequence that I’m not going to quote in full because it’s too long, but it’s about how the state continues to pump more money in, as private entities swallow it up as profit.

At 01:10:28,

“Charlotte: Es entstehen Vermögen, die nicht einfach da sind, sondern die auch Einfluss haben. Also ist es nicht ein Rechentrick zu sagen: Prozentual gesehen wachsen die Reichenvermögen geringer, aber es ändert sich für mich langfristig, auch, wenn ich das über 50 Jahre hinweg rechne, nichts daran, dass die Reichen deutlich reicher bleiben und reicher werden?

“Finance Guy: Das ist so. Ja.

“Charlotte: Kleine Wachstumsraten bei großen Vermögen… bringen erheblichen Zuwachs, mehr als große Wachstumsraten bei kleinen Vermögen.”

At 01:12:49,

“Charlotte: Einerseits wachsen private Vermögen, weil sich Staaten verschulden. Andererseits drehen die Kapitalgeber den Staaten den Geldhahn ab, wenn sie zu viele Schulden machen. Wie kann ich das verstehen?

“Finance Guy: Das kommt daher, dass sich die Idee durchgesetzt hat, dass sich Staaten auf dem Kapitalmarkt verschulden sollen. Damit hängen Staaten vom Willen und der Bewertung privater Kapitalgeber ab und sind dazu genötigt, Wachstum zu fördern, um ihre Steuereinnahmen zu erhöhen, oder Staatseigentum zu privatisieren, wenn ihre Schulden zu hoch sind. Das hat zur Situation heute geführt: Ganz viele Projekte sind nicht mehr finanzierbar, weil sie nicht mit den Renditeerwartungen privater Kapitalgeber übereinstimmen. Das könnte die Bekämpfung hoher Arbeitslosenzahlen betreffen, oder ausreichend Geld für Bildung, Pflege oder Infrastruktur. Oder die Transformation in Richtung einer ökologisch tragfähigen Wirtschaft. Leider nicht finanzierbar, weil unrentabel. Regierungen können nicht mehr frei entscheiden, was sie finanzieren. Sie können nur in ihren Haushaltsentwürfen vorschlagen, was sie finanzieren möchten. Dann müssen private Kapitalgeber dem zustimmen. Und deswegen ist das eine hochbrisante, politische Frage.

“Charlotte: Sollten wir als Gesellschaft nicht selbst entscheiden, welche Ausgaben wir sinnvoll finden, und dann erzeugt der Staat das Geld für diese Ausgaben? Wieso sollten wir als Staaten nicht das gleiche Privileg haben, wie gewinnorientierte private Banken?”

At 01:15:58,

“Das Dilemma für mich ist, dass diese Idee: “Profit ist eine zwingende Triebkraft für wirtschaftliche Aktivität”, sich so verfestigt hat, dass wir das für normal erachten.”

At 01:18:18,

“Und jetzt kommt das grundsätzliche Problem: Investiert und reinvestiert wird nur in profitorientierte Unternehmungen. Sie wollen ein Stück Wald kaufen. Wenn Sie ihn in Ruhe lassen wollen, bekommen Sie dafür keine Finanzierung. Der Kauf wird nur dann finanziert, wenn Sie den Wald bewirtschaften, also ihn zumindest teilweise abholzen und das Holz zu Geld machen.”

At 01:20:34,

“Ist das nicht ein Zirkelschluss? Kann es Wirtschaftswachstum überhaupt ohne Neuverschuldung geben? Sind die Profite von heute nicht die Schulden von morgen?”

At 01:22:12

“Wir wollen eine ökologische Wirtschaft, das heißt, eigentlich sollte tendenziell der Konsum sinken. Ein Sinken von Nachfrage würde im heutigen System zur Krise führen.

“Wir haben einfach ein instabiles System, wo der Staat reingehen muss, damit das ganze Ding nicht kippt.

“Wenn man weiß dass das System instabil ist, dann ist das eine Art Beatmung des eigentlich schon toten Patienten.

“Wie lange kann das noch gehen? Vor allem zum Preis der steigenden Ungleichverteilung?”

I watched it in the original German, but with hard-coded English subtitles that I covered with German subtitles.

Kevin Can F**k Himself S01/S02 (2021) — 9/10

Part of this show is a sitcom centered around Kevin (Eric Petersen), a Bostonian blowhard, casual misogynist, and all-around moron whose horribleness you don’t even notice because of the sitcom-style lighting, coloring, and the laugh track. His father Pete (Brian Howe) and best friend Neil (Alex Bonifer) round out his gang. The show is actually about his beleaguered wife Allison (Annie Murphy) and also about Neil’s sister and Kevin and Annie’s neighbor Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden). When the story focuses on them, the lighting changes to a much-more dramatic, cinematic quality, and the laugh track disappears.

Allison has spent a miserable decade married to Kevin. Hers is the story of the sitcom wife. She works a dead-end job at the “packing store”, which sells liquor and wine. The first season sees her establish a desperate plan to kill her husband. He is quite manipulative, so she can’t just leave. In this, the relationship is darker than sitcom reality often lets on.

Before establishing her plan, Allison unravels and goes on a bender. She triggers a sequence of events that result in Patty’s supply of Oxy being cut off. She’s been dealing to little old ladies who visit her salon—she’d had no idea that they were selling her drugs on into the neighborhood and that Patty was supplying a good part of her district. Without drugs, she’s in trouble. Allison is forced to help her out, and Patty is forced to befriend Allison, whom she’d considered to be a wall decoration for the last decade.

Their friendship deepens as they try to get their feet back under them. Patty starts a relationship with police officer Tammy Ridgeway (Candice Coke) to throw her off the scent—but ends up liking her more than a bit. Allison takes up with an old flame Sam (Raymond Lee) who’s just moved back to town and opened a café. She also starts working from him after spectacularly quitting the liquor store.

The season ends with Patty dating Tammy, a controlling, lesbian police officer, who’s been looking for the local drug dealer (who used to be Patty). The first season is definitely better than the second. We finish the first season with Neil being dragged into the darker world when he confronts Allison about having tried to kill Kevin. He ends up choking her, and Patty brains him with a frying pan.

In the second season, they lock him up in the basement, then spend a couple of episodes scheming on how to keep him quiet about what he’s learned. They eventually do figure out something—they threaten him that, with his past, it’s more likely that the police will believe that he tried to kill Kevin instead. He becomes sullen and distant, taking even more to drinking. He takes up with Allison’s aunt Diane (Jamie Denbo), for whom she used to work at her liquor store.

Allison, desperate for a way to leave, ends up hatching a plan to fake her own death. This is the focus of the second season—and she does it! It works! By the time she has to go, she’s realized how much deeper her friendship with Patty has gotten, but she’s forced to put her plan into action because Patty herself is threatened. Allison fakes her death and flees to Keene, New Hampshire, where she starts up a life as Gertrude Fronch. She has a steady job and nice place to live.

Several months later, Kevin has grown a beard and has a new girlfriend. Kevin met her at Allison’s wake at the bowling alley. Neil is back in his circle, as is his father. But they’re not happy, not really.

Tammy tracks down Allison, but has no intention of bringing her in—she just wants some answers, she wants to know why Patty is so obsessed with figuring out where Allison’s gone. Patty doesn’t believe she’s dead (she knows Allison was planning it), so she also refuses to leave Worcester because Allison might come back. Patty ends up splitting with Tammy; Allison ends up coming back; Kevin ends up burning himself down in his own house, after he drunkenly lights a hobo fire in a trash can in his living room.

I give it an extra star for the concept and for the all-around great acting.

Blue Collar (1978) — 8/10

Zeke (Richard Pryor) is a working-class man just trying to make ends meet. He declares some extra kids on his taxes because his wages are shit compared to what he needs to survive. His boss (Cliff De Young) is a hard-ass, his union rep Dogshit Miller (Borah Silver) is a racist, and his co-workers are a mixed bag. They meet up for a beer after work pretty much every day. They work themselves to exhaustion.

Zeke is married, as is Jerry (Harvey Keitel), while Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) is single and gives them their only opportunity for fun when he throws a party with cocaine and working girls. Everything else in their lives grows increasingly disappointing. The union doesn’t do shit for them. Zeke comes up with the idea to rob the union’s offices. The gang of three manage it, but only abscond with $600 rather than the expected haul.

The union, on the other hand, claims that at least $10,000 was stolen. The guys know that’s not true, but neither can they officially say anything. They instead decide to blackmail the union with the contents of one of the notebooks they found in the safe: it details a number of sketchy loans from sketchy loan sharks from the neighborhood. In response to the $10,000 extortion, the union now claims that it lost $20,000.

Some other guy squeals on the trio and the union starts to turn the screws. They almost manage to get Jerry, but Smokey’s waiting there with a baseball bat. In retaliation, the union arranges to trap Smokey in a car-spraying chamber, killing him with poisonous fumes. Zeke and Jerry know that the union murdered Smokey, but they also offer Zeke the position of shop foreman. He takes it. Instead of taking revenge for Smokey with Jerry, he says he wants to change the system from within. With Zeke squarely under its thumb, the union continues to gun for Jerry. They chase him to the Canadian border, where he ends up wrecking his car before he can flee. He signs a deal with the Feds to try to crack the crooked union.

When Jerry returns to the plant with the Feds in tow, Zeke confronts him as a traitor. The final scene is reminiscent a bit of the ending of Animal Farm, where you can’t tell the pigs from the men.

“They pit the lifers against the new boys, the young against the old, the black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.”

—Smokey

The ending is dark: it concedes that, though the people in charge change—and might even be black!—the system does not. Instead of people changing the system, the system changes them. For a lot more information about the real fight, see the podcast Episode 282: Fighting Times by TrueAnon (Patreon), an interview with Jonathan Melrod. I can’t find the quote, but he talks about the difference between directly being able to hassle the shop steward for ventilation when it’s hot rather than having a corporate union, where you put in a request for fans and then, two years later, get a response that there’s no money in the budget for fans.

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) — 7/10

The first half, where they set up all of the characters, is better than the second half, where they blow shit up. See my previous review, from 2021.

The Matrix (1999) — 10/10

The original and still the best.

I’ve watched this several times over the years and it holds up so well. The first time I saw it was in a large theater in New York City with my good friend Adeel. We played hooky from work to see a matinee. We got individual lazy-boy-style chairs right up front. The movie began and took our breaths away. Trinity was like nothing we’d ever seen before. We didn’t draw breath again until Neo woke up in his capsule.

That doesn’t say anything about the plot of the movie, though. It’s awesome. Trust me.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets — 6/10

Watched this again in German this time. I didn’t pay 100% attention, but my review from 2017 stands. It’s a lovely, luscious-looking, absolute Jean-Luc Besson-style movie with a God-awful script and some of the most wooden acting you’ll ever see.

Free Guy — 8/10

Guy (Ryan Reynolds) lives in Free City.

Antwan (Taika Waititi) owns and runs the game company Soonami that runs Free City. Keys (Joe Keery) works there, in support. He used to have an up-and-coming game company that he’d started with Millie (Jodie Comer). He wrote the code; she designed the AI. Antwan bought them out and incorporated their code into Free City without telling anyone, without giving them attribution, and without licensing it.

Their AI has evolved—especially in the form of “blue-shirt guy”, who is Guy. Guy falls in love with Millie and tracks her down. He’s in love with her because she’d programmed him to recognize her—as his creator. But he’s evolved, grown, and he now has real feelings—he’s a real, grown-up AI. She doesn’t know this yet, so she tells him that he has to start leveling up to be with her. He does, but instead of doing evil, he does good. He gains a reputation as a hero in a game filled with villains.

Meanwhile, Millie and Keys reconcile because he’s discovered that their code is in Free City and that none of it is Free City 2. When the sequel launches in two days, the old game will be wiped—taking Guy with it. Millie tells Guy this, after which he has an existential crisis. He consults with Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), who deals with hearing that his life doesn’t matter much better than Guy did. He doesn’t have an existential crisis, he has an existential epiphany.

In an attempt to save Free City, Guy and Buddy go to Revenjamin Buttons’s (Channing Tatum) home base, where he catches them. But he’s a total fanboy for blue-shirt guy and he gives them the video Millie was looking for. It shows that Revenjamin had managed to get to a location in the game unlike any other—a location that comes from Millie and Keys’s original game. It’s proof that Antwon is using their code unlicensed. Guy claims that he knows the place.

Meanwhile, Guy’s good-guy antics are infectious among the other players, who have a newfound respect for NPCs. Antwon is unhappy because presales of Free City 2 are way down. He has Keys’s friend Mouser (Utkarsh Ambudkar) reboot all of the Free City servers. As expected, it resets Guy’s construct back to its original programming. Millie loses her video, but she still hopes that Guy can recover his memories and get her back to their original game.

Keys tells Millie that it wasn’t a fluke that Guy had woken up before. It turns out that he’d programmed Guy to long for love and to be awakened when he met Millie in-game. This is exactly what happens much more quickly when she awakens him with a kiss. He remembers everything.

He takes to his apartment, where he’d been flipping the blinds every morning. It looked like odd NPC behavior the first few times we’d seen him doing it, but he was taking a look at the reflection of their world in his blinds, where the programmers (Antwon) had forgotten to erase it.

Guy leads a revolution of NPCs. They’re all on strike. No-one is working anymore. When Antwon wants to kill Guy and boot Millie, he can’t do anything because none of the NPCs are there to escalate. Instead, Antwon has Mouser turn off respawn and manipulate the game world itself to assault Millie and Guy on their way to find the world. Keys is also in the world, manipulating it to help Guy and Millie escape. They reach the shoreline, hoping that Keys will be able to make a bridge for them. He’s in a “meeting” with Antwon, where Keys tells Antwon what to do with himself, building the bridge across Antwon’s blockage of the original “build”. Keys is fired, but not off the network yet.

Millie gets booted, along with every other player in the world, leaving Guy on his own. Antwon drops in Dude (Ryan Reynolds) from Free City 2, a half-finished, but immensely powerful character. Guy’s getting his ass handed to him, with the world watching. Buddy shows up, but can’t help much. Guy rescues himself with Captain America’s shield, then hammers Dude with a Hulk fist. He pulls out a light saber next (it’s a video game; the mods are going to be clichéd). Guy slaps the glasses on Dude to defeat him by awakening the few tiny brain cells he has.

Antwon is going to kill the server farm directly. He starts taking out servers with an axe, slaughtering NPCs and most of the level. It’s adorable how impossible that would be to do, as regional redundancy and backups would kick in. Guy lands in Millie and Keys’s level, which is suddenly visible to the remaining NPCs. Millie confronts Antwon in the server room—unclear how she got there. She strong-arms Antwon into giving up his ownership of their game, leaving it to Keys and Millie and Mouser, who guide it to success. And and Millie finally realizes that Guy loves her in the game because keys loves her in real life. Duh. Also, Buddy reappears and Guy has his best friend in paradise. The end.

The leads are quite good. I’m a fan of Joe Keery, who played Steve in Stranger Things. I also quite liked Jodie Comer.

Excalibur (1981) — 8/10

Over the course of its 140 minutes, this film grew on me. Just the sheer bloody-mindedness of having an entire cast in full knight’s armor for the entire film is impressive. Sure, there are some cheesy moments—a lot of them, not the least being the “Lady in the Lake” scenes, like when she catches the sword at the end—but it’s just kind of impressive all the same, like an opera.

This story follows the legend of Arthur, which starts with Merlin (Nicol Williamson) helping Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne) to lie with his reluctant ally Cornwall’s (Corin Redgrave) wife Igrayne (Katrine Boorman). Nine months later, Arthur (Nigel Terry) is born, sister to a young Morgana. As promised, Merlin takes the boy away for himself. Uther is incensed and flees the palace. He is soon cornered by Cornwall’s men, who seek revenge. He plants Excalibur in a stone before he dies.

Years later, there is a camp near the stone, with a tradition of knights competing for the right to try pulling the sword from the stone. One day, Arthur foster father has taken him with this step-brother to the tournament. We watch as Leondegrance (Patrick Stewart) gets his chance, but utterly fails to free the sword. Arthur flees toward the rock at one point and pulls the sword free. His brother and father find him with the sword in his hand.

The crowd soon follows. They make him put the sword back. Another knight tries to free it, but fails. Arthur easily pulls the sword from the stone. Many immediately pledge fealty to him, although there are a few who refuse.

While performing knightly feats, Arthur meets the lovely Guinevere (Cherie Lunghi). They are immediately smitten with one another. Guinevere smits pretty easily, though, because, later, when Lancelot (Nicholas Clay) shows up, she’s smitten with him as well. Lancelot beats Arthur pretty badly until Arthur cheats to win with his magic sword, which he breaks, but which is immediately returned to him, unbroken, by the Lady of the Lake, who is magically in the stream that they were fighting in. 🤷🏼‍♂️

The Round Table is formed. The land is peaceful for years. Morgana (Helen Mirren) has grown, though, into a sexy sorceress bent on bringing down Arthur and usurping the throne. She influences knight Gawain to accuse Lancelot of making goo-goo eyes at Guinevere (and vice versa). He’s 100% right, of course, but they’d not acted on it yet. When Lancelot returns to defend Guinevere’s honor—jumping in for squire Perceval (Paul Geoffrey), who was the only one who’d been willing to try before—she is so impressed that she flees to the forest that night to find and mount him on the mossy forest floor.

Arthur finds them the next morning, dead asleep, and plants Excalibur in the ground near them, then leaves. Merlin is somehow struck by this blow, weakening him enough that Morgana steals the Charm of Making from him, then using it to disguise herself as Guinevere, then sleep with Arthur, letting him plant a baby in her. This would become Mordred (Robert Addie).

Mordred’s semi-incestuous origin (Morgana and Arthur had the same mother) somehow poisons the land and also causes lighting to strike and nearly incapacitate Arthur. In his addled state, he becomes obsessed with the holy grail. He send his entire Round Table out on a quest. Pretty much all of them die, either of more-or-less natural causes or because Morgana traps, seduces, or kills them.

Years later, Mordred is grown and comes for what he considers to be his birthright. Perceval is the only knight who manages to resist Morgana’s sorcery and actually retrieves the Grail for his king. The Grail heals Arthur and he rallies a defense against Mordred, with Merlin coming back out of retirement to trick Morgana into casting a spell on herself, weakening her to a degree that she can no longer maintain her youthful appearance. Mordred is disgusted by his ancient mother and slaughters her. Lancelot also appears out of his self-enforced retirement, just a literal wildman wreaking havoc.

In an amazingly filmed final battle—it really did look like an opera on a stage—Mordred and Arthur fatally wound each other. Arthur lives long enough to instruct Perceval to return Excalibur to the Lady in the Lake. He travels to the lake, but cannot do it, returning to Arthur with the sword. Somewhat hilariously, Arthur exhorts him to try again, which he does, successfully this time. The Lady in the Lake catches the sword in complete defiance of all laws of physics and Arthur’s body is sailed off to Avalon. The end.