Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.09

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 Witcher S03 (2023) — 6/10

In 2020, I gave season 1 a 9/10. In 2022, season 2 was down to an 6/10 and merited a reasonable write-up. At that time, they established the formula for having the Witcher kill one monster per episode, while the rest of the episode is exposition.

Having now read the books up to the part covered by this season, I now know that this is kind-of true to the books. Geralt (Henry Cavill) is still healing in the forests of Brokilon, then sets out with a small group to find Ciri. A fake Ciri is introduced to Emhyr as his bride. Yennefer is weaker in the show than in the book—which is kind of surprising, given that the books were written in the 90s and 2000s by a Polish man, and the movie script seems to have been written by a cadre of very non-sleepy scriptwriters.

Ciri stumbles around the desert, meets a unicorn, fights a monster and gets out of the desert, meeting and joining the Rats, a band of bandits. She takes on the name “Falka”.

Look, that’s all I have the energy to write, as this season wasn’t very good. The effects, in particular, were jarringly CGIed, at times. The backgrounds were so flat, you could practically see the green screen. It was quite distracting, at times.

Sex Education S04 (2023) — 6/10

In 2019, I gave season 1 a 10/10. In 2021, season 3 was down to an 8/10 and merited a reasonable write-up. Season 4 drops a few more ranks and I can barely remember what happened in this season. Ah, yes, they all went to high school and fought with being total assholes to each other all the time, all the while bathing in a positive soup of sex positivity and openness at the private school that their poor selves all had to attend.

Maeve (Emma Mackey) is in America, being treated like crap by her writing teacher (Dan Levy), while Otis (Asa Butterfield) is a whiny jackass, butting heads with equally obnoxious O (Thaddea Graham). Eric Effiong (Ncuti Gatwa) is even more of a self-centered douche than he’d become in season 3. Jean Milburn’s (Gillian Anderson) role was disappointingly humdrum and shitty.

The most appealing and engaging characters are, in no particular order Aimee Gibbs (Aimee Lou Wood), who’s just a hilarious, genuine ray of sunshine, Adam Groff (Connor Swindells), a reformed bisexual bully who’s well rid of boyfriend Eric. He has grown considerably and seems to be able to deal with the world in a way where he no longer considers every person as a potential conquest, either physical or sexual. His father Michael (Alistair Petrie) is also very good. They reconcile somewhat on the horse farm where Adam works.

Isaac Goodwin (George Robinson) is great—well-written and well-acted. Ruby Matthews (Mimi Keene) redeemed herself this season with excellent work (even though the actress is really very noticeably painfully thin, which is her own thing, of course, but stands out for a show that makes everything a message, because it makes you wonder what message they think they’re sending).

There were a few good moments, but they were few and far between. Although Maeve handled her mum’s death pretty poorly—you know, for the character who was supposed to be the most worldly and mature—the funeral episodes were the best ones. The other episodes were just relentlessly SEX-POSITIVE and GENDER-POSITIVE and all of the good things that it must be, until most of the characters succumbed to the collective weight of all of their multifarious identities, expressing nothing of interest but general superficial shittiness. Is this how young people want to be depicted?

Disenchantment S04–05 (2022–2023) — 5/10

In 2018, I gave season 1 a 6/10. In 2021, seasons 2 and 3 were up to an 8/10 and merited a reasonable write-up. The fourth and fifth seasons phoned it in even worse than season 1. The characters have all been established, and there are a lot of plot elements to work with—Steamland, Mermaids, Hell, Oona and her pirate ship, the Trolls, etc.—but they just seem to be used as Deus Ex Machinas rather than as a coherent plot.

I can’t really remember what was in season 4 and what was in season 5. There’s a Bad Bean, there’s Hell, there’s Dagmar, there’s Elfo’s association with the dead-eyed Trolls. Luci is dead, he’s alive, he’s got his wings, he doesn’t, his head’s attached, it’s not. There’s an increased focus on “Stience”, which Bean can apparently channel to send lightning bolts through here hands. Her arch-nemesis ends up being the king of Steam Land.

I dunno. I watch this while I eat dinner, so it’s just some filler content with an occasional few decent jokes. Elfo’s kind of witty.

Black Mirror S06 (2023) — 9/10

Joan is Awful

This episode is about a different show on a different streaming service about a woman named Joan (Annie Murphy) who is awful. The streaming service she’s subscribed to has started streaming a facscimile of her life in real-time. She is played by Salma Hayek. All of her friends watch it and realize how awful she is. It gets a little crazy with quantum computing and multiple layers of simulated reality—run by Beppe (Michael Cera)—but it was pretty entertaining. It turns out that Joan is completely average and being “awful” is great for engagement. Although Salma Hayek plays her on one level, Cate Blanchett plays Salma Hayek playing Joan on yet another level. It’s probably easier to just watch it.

Loch Henry

A documentary crew in Scotland end up covering an old mystery in the home town of their director, rather than the boring topic they’d planned to cover. The concept is good on this one, but I found a couple of the characters annoying, especially Pia. Some were good, though, like the pub owner, who played the “school friend who still lives in the town where you grew up and with whom you had some great times, but no longer have much contact, something which you regret the minute you see him again” perfectly.

Beyond the Sea

Cliff (Aaron Paul) and David (Josh Hartnett) are astronauts, hibernating their way on a six-year mission. They hibernate so that they don’t go crazy. They alternately wake to perform maintenance. While they’re awake, they can transfer their consciousnesses back to replicas of themselves on Earth. It’s an alternate 1969, don’t ask too many questions, just roll with it.

Invaders from a Charles Manson family-like group—led by “Kappa” (Rory Culkin)—enter David’s home, kill his family, and destroy his replica. David is now left alone on a mission that will continue for four more years. Cliff’s wife, Lana (Kate Mara) suggests that Cliff let David use his replica so that he can see Earth again.

This develops into a whole thing, where David uses the replica once a week, grows infatuated with Lana, puts a move on her, is rejected, and the jig is up. Cliff confronts him on the capsule, they argue, Cliff pops him in the nose. Soon, there is an alert: something must be repaired on the outside of the ship, requiring a spacewalk. Cliff is the EVA guy.

He’s trepidatious but must go out to investigate. There is nothing wrong. When he gets inside, he senses something is very wrong. He jumps into his replica to find it covered with blood, having just murdered his own wife and son. Cliff’s consciousness returns to space. David offers him a seat. They are equals again.

Mazey Day

It’s 2006 and paparazzo Bo (Zazie Beetz) is disgusted with her profession. She has some blackmail pictures for which the victim is willing to pay $500. She takes $600 to publish them instead. He ends up killing himself. Notorious trainwreck actress Mazey Day (Clara Rugaard) quits a film set after a drug-fueled and therefore unreported hit-and-run. The victim was still alive, though. She checks herself into a very private rehab. Bo is drawn back into the game by a huge reward for the first pictures of Mazey.

Stuff happens, but the paparazzi eventually find her and realize that she’s chained to the bed. They take a million pictures. Only Bo is concerned about what might be going on. She suspects some weird sex slavery thing. Wrong. It turns out that Mazey’s hit-and-run victim had been alive, had bitten her, and passed on its lycanthropy. She’s a werewolf. She breaks free and hunts them, catching a few, but eventually hunting the rest to a diner.

Bo manages to shoot Mazey. She turns back into her human form, drenched in blood, but probably not yet mortally wounded. Mazey begs for the gun. Bo hands it to her. She prepares her camera. Bang.

Demon 79

Nida Huq (Anjana Vasan) is a poor girl working at a department store with a bunch of racist assholes, with terrible customers, in a town full of people with terrible secrets. She fantasizes about slaughtering them all. It is the 70s in England. The right-wing National Front is on the rise. Racism against her drives her to eat her lunch in a darkened basement.

She finds a talisman, pricks her finger by accident, and ends up activating it. It released the demon Gaap (Paapa Essiedu), who’s on his first assignment as a demon (or so he says). She must kill three people in three days, else the world will end in destruction, immediately. Gaap helps her find worthy victims, people he tells her are child-molesters, etc.

The first victim is a man by a canal. The second is the lecherous, wife-murdering Keith, and then the third is his brother, who catches her in the house. Plot twist: Keith didn’t count because he was himself a murderer. Gaap doesn’t make the rules.

Nida decides that Michael Smart, leader of the National Front, will be her final victim. Gaap’s not hot on the idea because demons like Smart. She really goes for it, crashing his car and attacking him with a hammer. A police officer who’d been tailing her stops her before the killing blow.

During interrogation, she reveals the whole story to a disbelieving group of officers. As the clock strikes midnight, the officers are called out of the room to watch as armageddon rains down. Nida and Gaap have failed. They are banished to eternal darkness.

Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018) — 5/10

I’d just finished watching Escape Plan and thought to myself, what the hell, why not go for the doubleheader being so generously offered by German TV, so famous for its discerning taste in cinema?

Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is the only one who’s back from the original—no more Arnie in this one—running his security company with a bunch of new people. One of them is Jasper Kimbral (Wes Chatham), who screws up a mission and is fired by Breslin. This is definitely going to come back, ammirite? There’s also Trent DeRosa (Dave Bautista) … and I didn’t recognize anyone else.

Shu (Huang Xiaoming) ends up in a prison called HADES (not kidding) and goes through a lot of terrible shit. There is some decent fight choreography. He teams up with some weirdos called LEGION, a trio of Israeli hackers—can’t make this up—led by Count Zero (Gibson would like a word). Shu meets up with Kimbral in prison, working with him to escape.

PLOT TWIST: Kimbral actually runs the prison and it’s run by his ALGORITHMS and he’s going to use Shu as bait to lure Breslin into the prison and show him who’s the SMARTEST and … do whatever about his daddy complex. I hope you’re not going to be too shocked to learn that it does not work out for him, even though it takes about 45 minutes worth of disabling computer systems, re-enabling them, fighting, blowing things up, and so on before Breslin emerges victorious, with no-one dead but Kimbral (obviously).

The group behind HADES contacts him and he swears revenge—to be shown in painful detail in what Stallone hopes will be a sequel (he was right: Escape Plan: The Extractors, in which he teams up with Bautista again, came out a year later).

I watched it in German.

Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom (2018) — 6/10

I’ve seen this movie before, but somehow failed to make note of it. The dinosaurs look and act great. There is pathos as most of them die by the middle of the movie. The brachiosaur standing on the dock, howling and barely visible through the smoke, as the lava covers it—it’s heart-wrenching.

Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) is pretty good: Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is OK. This time they’re tricked onto the island to help a billionaire collect dinsosaus for science, but no, haha, it’s actually to make weapons out of them.

The second half of the movie takes place in a weapons-mogul’s mansion. There is an auction of dinosaur warriors to the seediest people in the world, all chomping at the bit to enhance their rockets, laser-guided defense systems, and drones with … dinosaurs? Anyway, there’s a plot twist, because they’ve bred one of the craziest, most savage killing machines possible out of a dozen other dinosaurs—didn’t we already do this in a previous movie?—and it is f&$king unstoppable. Or is it?

The velociraptor Blue’s relationship with Pratt features prominently. Pratt manages to use his vast knowledge about dinosaurs to engineer a breakout for himself and Claire. Blue manages to wipe out the nastiest, most brutal dinosaur that the breeders could breed by dropping it through a ceiling onto a couple of giant spikes. You can’t kill Blue now. She’s got the status of a dog, which Hollywood only kills if it’s the main plot-driver (see John Wick).

They let out all of the dinosaurs in the end to save them from dying in their cages because there’s no-one left to take care of them. They disperse into the woods. Blue remains to say goodbye to Pratt before heading out to repopulate Los Angeles with dinosaurs, I guess?

I watched it in German this time.

Old Dads (2023) — 6/10

This film is an interesting expansion on a lot of the themes that Bill Burr has in his standup comedy and his morning-show podcast.

It’s interesting that it doesn’t occur to any of the prominently featured female characters to wonder what they’re bringing to their marriages, whether they’re doing enough to raise their children right. I know that Bill Burr wrote this, but I really wonder how many other people noticed that it was taken as a given that one is to kowtow to the pressures of the snobbiest parts of society, to do “whatever it takes” for a family’s children to get ahead.

Any anger at how fucked-up the world is is to be suppressed, there is no need to try to change any of it. Instead, you make sure that you bubble to the top of the snobbish heap, sucking off the horrible tin-horn dictator of a school principal so that she writes a recommendation for your kid to go to the right school. Madness.

But the person who rebels against this utterly vacuous and immoral mindset hammered home by society is the asshole. Is that the story, though? I wonder if anyone else noticed how basic the wives were? Sure, the guys were pretty basic, too, but at least we got to learn that they started and ran a thriving business for 23 years. We never learned what the three wives even do for a living—except Kimberly, who just wanted to “go to the gym and fuck” Mike.

This is pretty shallow, I think. Do better, Burr. I gave it an extra star for having a few good rants. But I deducted stars for only making the guys cool.

The Terminator (1984) — 8/10

Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) and the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) both arrive in 1984 from the year 2029. They show up naked and in a flash of bright light, posed to cover their naughty bits. They go about getting some clothes and weapons, each in their own way. They have conflicting missions: Kyle is there to protect Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) whereas the Terminator is there to … terminate her.

The Terminator doesn’t have a great plan, so it goes through the phone book, killing every Sarah Connor it can find. Last one’s the charm, but Kyle rescues her. He fills her in on the unstoppable murder machine intent on killing her, in particular. It’s because of SkyNet, man. It’s because the robots found out that she would give birth to John Connor, who would go on to lead the rebellion against the machines.

The twist here is that Sarah and Kyle get busy at some point, which means that Kyle is his own leader’s father, even though he only discovers this after the fact. How could he have been the guy who was working with John Connor and not know that he was his father? Because he hadn’t traveled back in time to impregnate his wife and leader’s mother yet. Does he not retroactively remember? It’s complicated.

This all happens while they’re constantly on the run, constantly building new weapons—pipe bombs—and barely slipping the grasp of the unremittingly persistent Terminator. It’s finally taking damage, though. After one explosion, it loses its entire exoskeleton, leaving a red-eyed, stop-motion-animated robot. Reese finally dies in an explosion that blows this remaining endoskeleton in half. It crawls across the floor to grab Sarah. She breaks free of its grasp and traps it in a hydraulic press. The lights finally go out in its eyes.

Sarah travels alone in Mexico, pregnant with John, preparing for the coming war with SkyNet.

The original and still the best? The visuals are a tiny bit dated, but still mostly hold up. The chase scenes are decent, if a bit repetitive. There is a stronger focus on story because there wasn’t enough CGI to distract viewers for the entire film.

I saw it in German.

Make My Day S01 (2023) — 6/10

I have no idea whether this is representative of serial anime, but it was kind of stretched out to make ten episodes. The premise is that there’s a prison planet, run by a private corporation, which benefits from the energy crystals that they harvest. Jim (Masaomi Yamahashi) is a guard, but one of the good guys, unsure of his role and place there. Monsters from the deep attack. It is their planet. The energy crystals are their food.

Jim is heavily invested in saving Marnie (Ayahi Takagaki), who is pregnant. Along the way, they team up with a prisoner with a heart of gold Walter (Kazuhiro Yamaji). He’s done bad things, but Jim is willing to treat him as the person he is now. There are long discussions with people with the viewpoint that “once a criminal, always a criminal.” This tension between a humanistic and purely capitalistic world suffuses the show.

There are shuttles to leave the planet, but they’re only for the elites. There is a strong tension between the hyper-capitalistic world as it is, and the socialist world that could be. This is very, very explicitly stated several times. Characters heavily invested in the me-first way of doing things seem to have the upper hand, but then get their brutal comeuppance as the group that sticks together inevitably wins out.

Despite tremendous firepower, the native inhabitants have overwhelming numbers and don’t seem at all deterred by the slaughter of what seems like millions of them. There are millions and millions more. This bucks the socialist trend a bit, in that it seems to be ascribing a mindlessness to the enemy, which is a bit convenient.

The premise is that the enemy is some sort of hive mind, that it doesn’t care about itself or its brethren, that it’s willing to relentlessly suicide its way toward its goal. Well, yes, of course it is. It realizes that if it doesn’t eliminate the human menace, it will steal all of its food. There seems to be no way to communicate, which is convenient. This is the plot of Starship Troopers.

Walter, Jim, and Marnie escape in a lifeboat at the end, as the aliens swarm to retake their planet, eliminating all evidence of human habitation. The end.

The animation’s a bit weak and flat, but you eventually stop paying attention to it. I watched it in Japanese, mostly while cycling indoors.

6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park (2011) — 7/10

This is a documentary about the making of one episode of South Park over the course of a week. The episode is the first in the fifteenth season, HumancentiPad (Wikipedia). You see them developing the jokes, really putting the time in on jokes about how it would work when people are strapped to one another ass-to-mouth (as they are in the movie Human Centipede). We see Trey and Matt doing voice work, which is pretty fascinating. They just … do it. With little preparation, they just shout out the various voices.

You can watch the documentary at here (YouTube). It’s about 42 minutes long. These people work incredibly hard, from before sunup until long after sundown. They talk about how the process developed, from building all episodes beforehand to the process they have today, where they build the episodes the week before they air. This allows them to stay very current, but it’s also very stressful—during the season anyway.

2011 was a banner year for them, as they’d just returned from the opening of Book of Mormon, which would go on to smash all sorts of Broadway and musical records.