Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.12

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.

Tenet (2020) — 7/10

Protagonist (John David Washington) is an agent of unknown provenance, perhaps CIA—it doesn’t matter. He’s part of a failed extraction mission, in which he is captured and beaten. He chomps down on a cyanide pill that is no such thing and learns that he has passed a test for entry into something called the Tenet organization. That “tenet” is a palindrome is not a coincidence. The meaning of the word doesn’t really play into the plot at all.

There is an expository section in which we learn that anything can be imbued with inverted entropy so that it travels against time’s arrow. There are big rotating machines that impart this property onto stuff, like guns, cars, bullets, people. Some people know about this resvolutionary, physics-defying technology and the rest of us are installing ad-blockers against spam ads while waiting for a year for them to fix a single train tunnel in Switzerland. But, hey, that’s one of the tenets of this film: physics isn’t what you think it is, but only spy agencies know about it—no scientists.

I learned the lessons of this movie so quickly that when Protagonist and Neil (Robert Pattinson) penetrated to the center of the Rotas pentagon—awesome logo, by the way—and found bullet holes, and Neil asked, “What the hell happened here?”, I said, in unison with Protagonist, “It hasn’t happened yet.”

The protagonist goes to Mumbai—this movie is really the answer to “what if James Bond were black?”—with his handler Neil (Robert Pattinson), where they reverse bungie-jump up to Priya Singh’s (Dimple Kapadia) penthouse, where she reveals that she, too, is part of the organization.

When the Protagonist is talking to Priya about his and Neil’s experience in the vault, he says that there were “two antagonists. One inverted.” When she asks, “both emerged at the same moment?”, I said with her “they were the same person.”

She gets her entropically inverted goods from Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a ruthless man of Russian origin, who’d dragged himself up from the ruins of Stalsk-12, a Siberian prison city. Shades of Bane with this one, to be honest. He looks more normal than Bane, but he’s just as kooky and his origin story is very, very similar.

Sator is trying to obtain plutonium and he ends up capturing the Protagonist, Neil, and Sator’s estranged wife Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki). There is a whole thing about a forged or not-forged Goya and there is a lot of stuff with inverted bullets and inverted cars and people that looks reasonably cool, but is, honestly, a bit much. Sator and his henchmen are executing what everyone seems to recognize as a “temporal pincer movement”, the mechanics of which remain a bit fuzzy, but I guess it sounds cool.

We eventually find out that some of the mysterious people in motorcycle helmets that appear to be inverted are actually the Protagonist, who would invert himself later in the film to retroactively justify those interactions. We learn more about the Tenet organization: that’s it’s from the future and that it involves people trying to prevent climate change in our time, in order to save themselves from the even deadlier effects in their own.

Or I think it’s something like that. But I’m not sure, because Sator is terminally ill and he’s working for them, and they’re helping him put together a plutonium weapon that will be able to destroy the planet, but that seems like an odd way to “fix” climate change for a better future, but whatever, go with the flow, or reverse-flow, or whatever.

There is a huge operation. I mean, huge. Like, with red and blue teams and lots of people running around in the desert—both forwards and backwards—and lots of explosions—both forwards and backwards—as well as people criss-crossing their own selves during an operation that is yet another inverted pincer movement, though this time by the ostensible good guys.

At the end, Neil does some hero shit, saving the Protagonist, but it’s his inverted self who did so. So, even though their non-inverted selves make it out of the cavern in which the super-bomb was scheduled to go off, Neil knows that he has to go invert again so that he can make the sacrifice that saves them both so that he can invert and sacrifice himself … but at least the Protagonist makes it out, which is good, because, apparently, he is to found Tenet and, in the future, invert and go back to recruit Neil way in the past, so that they work together for a long time and become the best of friends.

Even though the Protagonist in the film remembers none of this—not having lived it yet—Neil remembers a life lived well fondly right before he goes off to die. The non-inverted Protagonist thinks that their relationship is just starting, which it would feel like it would be, in a non-Tenet world, Instead, Neil has known him forever, and is more than willing to make the sacrifice that will retroactively call that whole, long friendship into being. Even though, if he hadn’t, probably another timeline would crop up in which he’d never known the Protagonist and wouldn’t care? I dunno.

This movie isn’t too multi-timeline friendly, seemingly quite happy to imagine that any arrow-of-time-defying maneuvers all occur in the same observable, physical universe, with no or little effect on the memories stored by consciousnesses that are, presumably, also just quantum patterns, but seem, even in their complexity, to be only very coarsely affected by inversion, so yeah, the whole theory isn’t thought out down to the nuts and bolts, but I think the time-looping stuff kind of matches up ok.

And then, despite knowing about the fate of the world and climate change and billions of current and future lives hanging in the balance and, despite knowing that he himself founds an organization with the express goal of putting as much of this right for as many people as possible, the Protagonist kills Priya—who, remember, worked for a future version of himself—in order to prevent her from cleaning up after the operation by killing Kat, who obviously knew too much and would, also obviously, sacrifice the entire planet’s future for her son, whose future would also be gruesomely sacrificed at the same time, because if humanity’s gone, then so’s her son and his future.

But mom’d are gonna mom, ammirite? At this juncture, I’m going to go ahead and note that this is yet another movie that has no problem making a woman look shockingly stupid and shallow because she’s a mother. This is, honest to God, a line from the movie.

“Neil: Everyone and everything that’s ever lived, destroyed. Instantly.
Kat: Including my son.”

JFC.

And it also has no qualms making the Protagonist throw away everything he and many others had sacrificed—including his very best friend-to-be Neil—for a tall, skinny piece of tail who he’s never going to see again (Kat) and whom he’d never bedded or even been in a relationship with in the first place.

Look, I may have missed some bits and I may have misinterpreted some stuff and I’m sure that there are tons of fans who would say that it all becomes wicked clear on the dozenth viewing and after you’ve watched a good gross of explainer videos by Director Christopher Nolan and others, but I’m kind of good.

It was fine. A bit long, with a bit too much focus on the whole reverse-movie thing, but I’m glad everyone seems to have had a lot of fun making what is, actually, a pretty unique movie, if not the most original of plot lines, in the end. I know, I know, no other plot has this temporal inversion stuff, but most of the movie is about shadowy agents from shadowy organizations shooting at each other and blowing up cars and buildings and stuff. There’s a mad Russian who wants to blow up the world. There’s an unconsummated—and seemingly lust-less, as is the trend these days—relationship where everything is sacrificed for love. That sounds like a ton of other movies, no? Despite the core tenet of temporal inversion, most of the rest of the movie is kind of bog-standard.

Goodbye Berlin (2016) — 9/10

Maik Klingenberg (Tristan Göbel) is in school, mooning over Tatjana Cosic (Aniya Wendel). She doesn’t acknowledge his existence. He meets Tschicke (Anand Batbileg Chuluunbaatar) in school. He’s smart, of east-asian/russian descent, and is a force of nature. His relationship with Maik reminds me a bit of that between Val Kilmer and Gabriel Jarret in Real Genius.

In the summer, Maik’s mom (Anja Schneider) goes to a clinic to dry out while his dad (Uwe Bohm) jets off for two weeks with his barely-of-age secretary. Maik has the house to himself. Tschicke steals a super-shitty Lada and they go on a road trip—out of Berlin.

Tschicke is full of wisdom while driving.

“Warum blinken? Die Leute sehen doch wo in hinfahre.”

“Landkarten sind für Muschis. Wir fahren einfach Richtung Süden.”

They throw in a Richard Claydermann cassette that they found in their stolen Lada. Ballade für Adeline starts playing. “Voll geil” says Maik. Tschicke: “Bist du sicher, dass du nicht schwul bist?”

The road’s ending, so Tschick say, “Ich fahre doch sicher nicht zurück.” and veers into a cornfield, turning on the wipers, and rolling up his window when the flapping corn starts to annoy him.

They start to draw something for Google Earth: “Ohne Sinn”.

They meet young Friedrich and his country family, breaking bread and playing quiz games for desserts. Maik and Tschicke get the smallest, shittiest desserts because they don’t know anything—and the home-schooled kids know everything.

They meet Isa (Mercedes Müller). They spend some time together. They eventually send her on her way to Prague.

They get to a wooden bridge, after taking a logging road to get off a road with po-po.

Maik: Ich weiss ich nicht.
Tschicke: Ich fahre jetzt sicher nicht zurück.

They get stuck, then jump in the water to fix the bridge.

Tschicke gets a spike through his foot when he steps on it at the bottom of the swamp.

He can’t drive. Maik has to drive. Maik says he won’t, because he’s boring. Tschicke says he’s not boring. Maik asks why Tatjana wouldn’t invite him to her party. Who the fuck cares? Isa’s way hotter, says Tschicke, and she has good taste? How does he know? Tschicke admits he’s gay. He’s never told anyone.

Maik drives out of the swamp, slowly learning how to drive stick. They’re on the highway. A truck passes them, nearly driving them off the road. Maik tries to pass him in the breakdown lane. The truck flips over, spilling pigs everywhere.

Maik and Tschicke are by the side of the road, injured but alive. Tschicke takes off, limping, to avoid being placed in a home. Maik gives him his voll geil jacket to stay warm.

Maik’s in the hospital. A cop is telling him that he actually is old enough to be prosecuted.

Maik’s parents are arranging to blame it all on Tschicke.

Maik does not cooperate. He takes the blame, as he should.

Maik’s dad super-hero-punches him to the ground.

Maik’s dad is moving out now, leaving with his hot girlfriend.

Maik’s mom is plastered again, chucking stuff in the pool. Maik helps her.

She’s just pounding straight from the bottle. They go for a swim.

School begins again. The cops pick Maik up on the way, ask him about Tschicke.

Apparently, a Lada’s been stolen, hot-wired, and returned destroyed in the morning.

Maik smiles. Tschicke is telling him he’s back.

The cops drop him off at school. He doesn’t get his bike out. He’s a bad-ass now.

Tatjana deems him “würdig”. He doesn’t care anymore.

The credits are great, depicting an animation of how Tschicke got fixed up, stole a screwdriver, then a Lada, peeled out the words “Ohne Sinn” in a parking lot, and finally crashed the car.

Tank Girl (1995) — 7/10

We meet Tank Girl (Lori Petty) in what looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, ruled by the W&P (Water&Power). She and her clan all live in a large, ramshackle house that serves as their commune. They grow food in a greenhouse, they do crafts in workshops—there’s a little girl hammering something together with the wrong end of what is actually a finishing hammer—and generally try to get by in a Godforsaken world.

There are inconsistencies galore, but they’re kind of endearing because the movie is so damned earnest.

• The W&P and their leader Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell) are trying to get 3M liters of water. That’s just over one Olympic-sized swimming pool. I wonder if the writers realized that that isn’t really a lot of water?
• Kesslee has devices that converts all of the water in a person’s blood into pure water. When he jams this water-extraction device into a person, we see that it has no top, but he flips it over to hold it up. How did he avoid spilling all of the water?
• When they’re trying to bluff their way into the W&P base, Jet Girl (Naomi Watts) notifies the base that her “bird has no electrical”…over the radio. While obviously hovering and flying.
• Who is firing the tank’s main cannon while Tank Girl is up on the paraglider? You know, the paraglider that still flies when the tank isn’t moving forward? Oh, her tank drives itself. Of course it does. It’s sentient. I think that might even have been from the original comic.

This is not the kind of film that’s going to clear up questions like that.

The movie seems instead to be a love letter to the comics on which it’s based and seems to be entirely a vehicle for Lori Petty, who was, apparently, such a magnetic personality that she got a whole movie mad for herself, despite not being otherwise very well-known at all.

Ice-T plays a human/kangaroo mutant named T-Saint. In the final battle, the attack song is by Ice-T. I am not kidding. He is not the only human/kangaroo mutant. His gang of “rippers” also has Booga (Jeff Kober), Donner (Scott Coffey), and leader Deetee (Reg E. Cathey). Completely unrelated, but Iggy Pop plays a pedophile named Rat Face.

The practical-effect masks are pretty good, though! The movable ears are really good. The spinning blades on Kesslee’s cyborg arm are pretty cool. This was really the heyday of practical effects, before the allure of doing it all a lot more poorly, but more cheaply, with CGI changed what this kind of stuff looks like, probably forever.

Tank Girl is such a psycho and the scenes are so wild that you just know the director was remaking the comics panel-by-panel. The animated interludes are really well-done, too. This was definitely a labor of love. An extra star for more-or-less sticking the landing.

Private Life (2018) — 8/10

If I can give superhero movies eight out of ten points, then I can definitely do it for Paul Giamatti, who is a genius in nearly everything he does. I’ve loved him since Sideways.

Giamatti plays Richard Grimes, married to Rachel Biegler (Kathryn Hahn). He is a playwright and director. She is an author. They live in the Village in Manhattan. They are childless, but not for lack of trying. As the film begins, they have given up on artificial insemination and are trying their first in-vitro fertilization. Richard’s sperm can’t get into his semen, though, so he needs a procedure to fix that. They’re doing ok, but not that great, so they have to borrow the $10,000 from his brother Charlie (John Carroll Lynch) and his wife Cynthia (Molly Shannon). Charlie’s a good guy, but Cynthia is … not. She’s not a nice person, not a generous or empathetic person. She is the main character in her world.

At the same time as the in-vitro procedure, Richard and Rachel are dipping their toes into the adoption pool, introducing us to a corner of the Internet where teenage girls hawk their fecundity as well as the pending fruit of their loins. Their first experience here shatters them for a bit, as the girl was just in it for the attention and never had any intention of letting them adopt her child. Richard and Rachel fight, but they’re basically together, no matter what. Rachel is less reasonable, more strong-willed, more likely to fly of the handle—and also the partner taking the majority of the hormone-inducing medications.

Charlie and Cynthia’s 25-year-old chronically underachieving creative-writing major daughter Sadie (Kayli Carter) leaves the Bard College campus to finish her degree remotely, moving in with Richard and Rachel. She loves them and their lifestyle and looks up to them as her “art parents”. She’s seemingly more in-tune with them than she is with her own parents. This seems like too fortuitous a confluence as their doctor has recently floated the idea of using a donor egg—rather than one of Rachel’s older, dustier ones—to match up with Richard’s newly motile sperm. Sadie quickly agrees, wanting both to help them and to give her otherwise unmoored life a little meaning.

Cynthia ruins her own Thanksgiving dinner when Sadie, in a fit of bonhomie brought on by her thankfulness to Rachel and Richard, reveals the plan to the rest of the family, with the aforementioned predictable consequences. They proceed with the implantation, even after Sadie makes herself ill by upping her dose on her own, after their doctor had quasi-chastised her for not producing eggs quickly enough. The fails anyway. Richard is somewhat relieved, as they can just stop trying now. Rachel is devastated and furious at Richard for announcing that he’s given up so soon after getting the news. They reconcile, of course, because they’re in it for life. They’ll always have each other.

Sadie gets into a writer’s colony—it’s left deliberately unclear how much Richard and Rachel helped; they say they didn’t—and they part ways. We also part ways with Richard and Rachel at a roadside diner several months later. A woman had called them to find out if they were interested in adopting her child. They wait, together. Richard rises and sits next to Rachel, in an eloquent, sweet, and unspoken expression of love, compassion, solidarity, and durability. Well done.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) — 9/10

This movie starts with a suicide mission. The company’s amphibious vehicle approaches the beach at, presumably, Normandy and drops the front door open. The German machine-gun nest immediately starts to feast on the soldiers, chowing down on the first six or seven rows before they start to drop over the sides instead. The machine-gun continues chewing through them underwater. Some drown instead. Those that make it back up to air have dropped nearly all of their supplies.

The machine gun continues to pick them off—how can it not? They’re just walking into the bullets. There’s no cover. Who thought this was a good plan? The tide rolls in over their backs, knocking them down. They reach the shore; the water is like tomato soup. The few survivors cower beneath the X-ed girders dotting the beach. Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is shaken out of his initial stupor by his remaining men, demanding orders. Just bullets, bodies, and bombs everywhere.

Impossibly, some of the men are getting closer to the machine-gun nest. What looks like 90% of the rest of them litter the beach as corpses. The medics are in the middle of the maelstrom, trying to fix one of the bloody bodies. None of the armor made it ashore. The survivors gather weapons and ammo from those who’ve not survived—or who won’t.

They manage to blow something up that causes the Germans to retreat, at least a little. They get eyes on the Germans, but they’re below them. And the Americans have single-shot, bolt-actions versus German machine guns. They find a defilade and send Jackson (Barry Pepper)—their sniper—into it. He clears out the front of the nest. Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore) leads the rest of the company over the ridge. They throw some grenades in, then pick off the dazed survivors. Attrition continues on the way up, though.

People are praying everywhere. There’s a chaplain lying among the near-corpses, administering last rites.

It’s not eye-to-eye trench warfare, meters away from the enemy.. The Americans have overwhelming numbers, despite the incredible percentage of attrition. The Germans give themselves up. Some are not allowed to surrender. At least the film is honest.

Private Caparzo (Vin Diesel) tosses Mellish (Adam Goldberg) a Hitler Youth knife, plundered from a corpse. It is Chekhov’s knife.

Horvath packs dirt from the beach into a tin marked “France”, but I don’t understand why he would also have tins for “Italy” and “Africa” with him. Is this a ham-handed way of indicating he’s been in the war forever? Didn’t the Americans only arrive in France? Even if he’d already fought in Italiy and Africa, why would he have brought the other tins with him?

The camera zooms in one corpse’s back on the beach. It says “S. Ryan” on his backpack.

Switch to the War Department, where a one-armed officer (Bryan Cranston) gets the news that three out of four brothers have died and that the fourth—the eponymous Private James Ryan—is lost in Normandy. The bigwigs decide to send a rescue mission.

Captain Miller shows up with what remains of his company at a post run by Lieutenant Anderson (Dennis Farina). Miller reports. Anderson gives him his new mission. Miller picks up a new translator—Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies)—and has his company trimmed down to a platoon They’re on the move toward Neuville. Private Reiben (Edward Burns) leads the way, including a medic, Wade (Giovanni Ribisi).

They reach Neuville and disappoint the unit there that they’re not their relief. Sergeant Hill (Paul Giamatti) offers to help find Ryan. They start to move through the town. Caparzo tries to help a family, taking the little girl they’re trying to get to safety. He’s clipped by a sniper, laying in a puddle of rain, watching a rivulet of blood slowly swell to a freshet. Jackson takes up the challenge. The rest hunker down. Caparzo is bleeding ever-more-heavily into his puddle. The German sniper (Leo Stransky) is in a tower, sighting on Caparzo, waiting for someone to approach the squealing lamb. He finds Jackson. Jackson shoots right through his scope. Everybody stands down. Everybody except Caparzo. Caparzo has expired.

It’s raining incessantly.

Sergeant Hill stops to fix his boot, knocking a fallen transom over into a weakened brick wall, comically exposing a room full of Germans. There’s a Mexican standoff, ended by two U.S. soldiers with machine guns on a balcony above our platoon. They’re led by Captain Hamill (Ted Danson), who seems to know where Ryan is. They find Ryan, but it’s the wrong Ryan. It’s Minnesota Ryan (Nathan Fillion).

They overnight in a church, chatting and sleeping and fleshing out their characters.

They walk through a night filled with explosions, crossing fields. We rejoin them as they wake in a camp full of the wounded. Lieutenant Dewindt (Leland Orser) says he can help them find Ryan, but he’s just kind of babbling, obviously wracked with survivor’s guilt. The powers-that-be had plated his plane with armor because he was transporting a general. The plane was barely airworthy. He did his best. 22 dead.

They’re ghoulishly sorting through bags of dog-tags, spouting gallows humor. Soldiers file past them, glaring judgmentally at their macabre task. They finally get news of the correct Ryan. He’s been picked up in a mixed company to babysit a bridge. They move out.

They happen upon a German emplacement atop a hill. The Caption decides to take it out. The other six are not excited about it. The captain seems desperate to do something meaningful. There is a tremendous amount of machine-gun fire, then grenades, as the half-dozen of them approach quickly. There’s some fire from the Americans and everything goes quiet.

The Germans are dead, but Wade, the medic, has been hit—he’s taken several shots to the torso. They make a lot of frantic fuss, but it’s hopeless. He asks them if he’s been shot in the spine. They’re throwing sulfa and water all over his entry wounds.

“Is there anything bleeding worse than the others?”

They palpate him.

“Oh my God, my liver!”

“I could use some morphine.”

“I don’t wanna die.”

“Mama, mama, mama. I wanna go home.”

They’re now a band of six. They run up the hill to beat the shit out of a surviving German. They threaten to kill him. “Ich will mich ergeben.” Upham translates. “I don’t care what he said.” They tell the German to dig graves for all of the Americans, then they’ll kill him. Upham pipes up,

“Captain, this is not right.”

“You can help him with the bodies, then.”

“What is happening?”

After a bunch of waffling—during which Upham tells The caption that he can’t just shoot a prisoner—the captain blindfolds the German and sends him off 1000 paces to turn himself in somewhere else. None of them like it—the others wanted to shoot him. Reiben doesn’t like it and threatens to desert. Horvath has a solution for that. He points a gun at him.

“Are you going to shoot me over Ryan?”

“No, I’m going to shoot you because I don’t like you.”

That’s some classic Tom Sizemore right there.

The captain defuses the situation by finally telling them where he’s from and what he did back home. He was a schoolteacher.

“I’ve changed. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve changed so much, my wife isn’t even going to recognize me.”

They bury Wade and continue across fields.

A half-track appears. They drop. Something attacks it. German troops spill out. They shoot them all. Corporal Henderson (Max Martini) pops out of the grass with a couple of men, one with a bazooka. One of them is James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon).

Miller asks Ryan,

“What are we supposed to tell your mother when they send her another folded American flag?

“Ryan: Tell her that, when you found me, I was here and that I was with the only brothers I have left. I think she’ll understand that. There’s no way I’m leaving this bridge.”

Has no-one thought what he would think? How would he live with himself if he got to go home, knowing he’d gotten out because too much of his family had already been killed? If he’d never been drafted, that would be one thing. But, posted up on a bridge in France, with his company, how could he just leave them? To go home to his mama? To sit in his hometown without his biological brothers, knowing his remaining brothers-in-spirit were dying without him?

Miller and Horvath chat. They decide to stay. The company’s missing their CO anyway. Miller will fill in.

Time to defend the bridge. Time to build a “sticky bomb” to take out the tank. Jackson’s up in the bell tower. Upham’s carrying ammo. Ryan sticks to Miller like glue.

At 2:02:00, there’s a beautiful scene, where they’re listening to Edith Piaf on a Wurlitzer, with Upham translating and Horvath flapping his hand to the melody.

Saving Private Ryan − Edit Piaf − Lull Before the storm

The tanks are coming. There’s four of them. At least 50 ground troops. You can see their hearts sink into their stomachs. Miller: “You know what to do. Reiben, get on the rabbit.”

The attack begins. It’s overwhelming. The unit defends the enfilade well, but there are just too many vehicles, too many troops. The attrition on both sides is horrible.

Jackson is in his tower, sniping soldiers at a remarkable clip. A tank ponderously raises its barrel and blows him and his compatriot up. Mellish and his compatriot run out of ammo in their nest. Upham succumbs to the pressure and fails to bring them belts and ammo. Mellish dies by his own German knife. Upham is on the stairs outside, frozen. The German walks out and past him.

Miller and Ryan retreat back over the bridge, followed by Reiben and Horvath. Horvath takes a hit, but Reiben one-arms him to the sandbags. “Sergeant, you OK?” “Just got the wind knocked out of me.” Those were his last words. The tank keeps pounding their position; Miller is dazed. He’s hit. Reiben slams him behind the sandbags. Ryan is dazed. They’re losing the position.

They can’t blow the bridge; the plunger’s been blown into open territory. The Germans swarm at the other end of the bridge. Upham has gotten behind them, but doesn’t take advantage. He’s not a fighter; no experience; he’s completely overwhelmed; adrenalin has come and gone; he’s shutting down.

Miller walks right out into the fray to get the plunger. He’s stunned as well. He’s clipped in the left chest, coming to rest against a broken half-track. He pulls his pistol, firing blindly at the approaching tank. On the third shot, it blows up. It’s been taken out by the U.S. Air Force, which has finally arrived, following quickly by a ton of ground troops and artillery. They mop up quickly.

Upham jumps up and takes several Germans prisoner. Among them is the German they’d released on the hill. He’s the one who shot Miller. The German is slyly happy to see him and says “Upham!” Upham shoots him and lets the others go.

Ryan and Reiben watch Miller’s last breath. Reiben grabs Caparzo’s letter, which has traveled from Wade to Miller to Reiben now.

There’s a mawkish ending where Ryan wonders whether he’d lived a life that was worth the sacrifice. Honestly, though, the movie showed much more how arbitrary and useless war is. Why were they there? Why did they lose their lives there? Couldn’t they just have fallen back to merge with the incoming battalion and taken out the Germans with much less loss of American life? Of course they could have. War makes no sense.

The Batman (2022) — 6/10

The movie begins with a gravelly voiceover. It’s The Batman (Robert Pattinson), of course. He narrates like he’s captioned by comic-book panels. Some of the shots look like comic-book panels. It’s not even close to Sin City but it nods in that direction.

The incumbent mayor Don Mitchell, Jr. (Rupert Penry-Jones) is brutally murdered in his own home. The killed is masked and swaddled in thick clothes. It looks vaguely female.

The mayor’s son (Archie Barnes) finds him, propped up in a sitting position, blindfolded, with a sign on his face that says he’s a liar. There’s graffiti all over the room that declares him a liar. There is a riddle, “What does a liar do when he dies?” … “He lies still.” That’s a really nice wordplay right there, playing on the homophone “still” to suggest both that he “continues to prevaricate” and that he “doesn’t move from a supine or prone position”.

Alfred (Andy Serkis) and Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson, in case you know literally nothing of the Batman canon) later solve a cipher that accompanied the message, figuring out that it says “drive”. This leads them to the mayor’s huge garage full of cars. I guess he was on the up-and-up, right? Anyway, it is there that they find the shears the killer used to chop off the mayor’s thumb. Then find the mayor’s thumb attached to a USB drive inside the car. The thumb drive must be unlocked with that thumb. It’s cleverly gruesome.

Then the Batman and Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) just go ahead and stick the assassin’s USB stick right into Gordon’s laptop, with his full account logged in. Yeah, I guess a movie that’s already running to almost 3 hours is going to have to take a shortcut or two. This is a shockingly unaware breach of even the most basic computer-security protocols. The only sane protocol would have been to plug the stick into a completely air-gapped machine or, at the very least, a throwaway virtual machine. This is something that police should probably have for just this purpose.

Instead, they plug the stick into Gordon’s laptop, whose OS is also set up to just chirpily auto-run stuff from USB sticks. They watch it send out a whole bunch of mails in Gordon’s name, chock-full of pictures of the former mayor—along with his girlfriend and a smattering of mob bosses—and also including the Penguin (Colin Farrell). What a shitshow.

Anyway, Batman walks around a lot in this one. They like to show his boots hitting the pavement. I haven’t seen any cable-work or flying about. He just kind of walks places. It’s kind of neat, a nice change of pace. He just fights real normal-like, like a boxer. He takes a lot of blows on his armor. He’s not magic, just well-armored and a skilled but not infallible fighter.

Also, so far, he seems to be driving a Captain America-style motorcycle. No fancy gimmicks. Well, he rides it in the absolute pouring rain. He’s not alone, though, because Selena Kyle/Catwoman (Zöe Kravitz) also rides in the rain, dressed in a skin-tight leather suit that I bet she picked out just for this kind of weather.

It’s super-convenient for the lady burglars that no-one has any alarm systems on any of their windows or skylights. Just drop in, no security. Just the Batman, who also just tromps in wherever he wants without ever triggering any security mechanisms. In a city that seems as dangerous as Gotham City, there are an awful lot of open windows and unlocked doors on really nice apartments.

This movie might as well be in black-and-white. The only color is orange, from the sodium lamps. The whole mood, shots, and low-key criminality feels a lot less like a superhero movie and much more like Max Payne. The Joker was like that as well, but it was … different. In this one, it’s Bruce Wayne who’s pretty unbalanced, but nowhere near as loopy as Arthur Fleck.

Selena teams up with Batman to help her friend, an eastern European immigrant. She goes into the club within a club to help him see who’s there. She runs into DA Gil Colson (Peter Sarsgaard). She also runs into Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), with whom she’s had a relationship. This makes Bruce jealous. He plays the recording over and over. It makes a “rewinding” noise, even though it was recorded on digital. We just can’t get away from certain tropes.

Bruce Wayne drives his own car. It’s a pretty awesome car, a low-slung British-looking hotrod. Maybe an MG or a Triumph. My bad. It’s apparently a Corvette.

Bruce Wayne shows up to the mayor’s funeral alone, with no bodyguards. The mayor’s rival candidate just hits him right up at the funeral, no qualms about being seen as crass. She’s supposed to be the nice one, but that’s a pretty shitty move. The DA’s car comes flying into the funeral, right up the church stairs. Colson is driving. He gets out with a bomb around his neck.

The Batman meets the Riddler (Paul Dano) via video call. The Riddler has a gimp mask on. He sounds like a combination of Bane and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Batman, on the other hand, sounds exactly like Pete Holmes doing his impression of Christian Bale’s Batman. See The dark Knight rises 2 : Batman’s dirty mind (YouTube).

Bomb goes off because Colson refuses to give up the rat. Batman was so dead-set on finding out the name that he stayed there until the end. He’s knocked right the f&@k out—but nobody took his mask off. He’s surrounded by cops. This is pretty terrible, honestly. Chief Mackenzie Bock (Con O’Neill) is just cartoonishly against the Batman.

Batman escapes with Gordon’s help, running part of the way, then taking a grappling-hook ride up to the top floor. They show how terrified he is of the height—then he wing-suits his way out of it, but it does not go well. His little parachute catches on a bridge, dropping him into the street—hard. He’s fine, though. Fresh as a daisy for a meeting with Gordon.

Another stakeout. It’s raining again. They’re looking at a drug lab. It’s just pouring. Selena Kyle shows up on her motorcycle. She and Batman find her friend, right before the fireworks start. Machine pistols flare, spraying the Batman, knocking him to the ground.

He retreats to his Batmobile, which, you know, obviously, just had to be introduced in a flashy way. At least it adds another color to the movie’s palette: blue. The flame coming out the back is blue. The car looks all old-timey, though, too. A lot of this film is chronologically ambiguous. It feels a little bit like Dick Tracy.

The car chase in the rain is pretty unique, with a lot of realistic damage to the Batmobile, an absolute clusterfuck of crashing caused by The Penguin, then the Batman flies over a ramp, through a ball of flame, and flips the Penguin’s car dozens of times. He’s perfectly fine.No seatbelt. No airbags went off. Not a scratch on him. Not dazed. Just…fine. Cartoonish.

Falcone is Catwoman’s father, not her former lover. My bad. I read that one wrong. Bruce visits Falcone to find out that he’d killed one of Thomas Wayne’s political enemies—a journalist. Alfred is mind-fucking Bruce about what really happened. Somehow Alfred is now the bad-ass who taught Bruce how to fight—he was apparently the one in charge of keeping Bruch’s parents alive, but he’d failed. What is happening?

They’re just chatting by Alfred’s hospital bed—did I forget to mention that he’d almost gotten blown up? It doesn’t really matter.—and this section is interminable. No wonder this movie clocks in at almost three hours.

Selena Kyle is a one-dimensional character. Utterly terrible. Woodenly acted. She goes to take out Falcone, but can’t hit the broad side of a barn, although she can take a punch. She takes a crowbar to the back of the head and is only temporarily dazed. No blood. Throws off a choking that would have crushed her windpipe, but … didn’t. This is just silly.

Also, her mask sucks. I have no idea what kind of Gen-Z bullshit balaclava that is, but it’s got to stop. I would attach a screenshot, but they’re all so muddy and dark that you can barely see the damned thing.

Carmine’s been arrested. Carmine’s been killed. The Riddler has given himself up. The police are ransacking his apartment. Batman is there. Cop: “There must be thousands of ledgers, filled with codes, ciphers, and scrawls.” Batman: “I found the one that contains the Riddler’s origin story and flipped right to that page within seconds.” Everybody: see nothing out of the ordinary.

Why would they? They can complain that he’s not a cop and that he shouldn’t be on the scene, but he’s the one finding everything and explaining everything. He’s the one who knows immediately that the chisel is the murder weapon that killed the mayor. How? No-one asks. Is it somehow obvious? If so, why don’t the actual detectives see the connection? An emo, shut-in billionaire knows better than all of them?

“He’s been posting online. He’s got like 500 followers.”

That’s not really a lot.

But it’s enough, if all of them join Riddler’s army.

So, the Riddler had an unstoppable plan to blow the seawall with seven truck bombs. This happens. All of the people of Gotham head for a central arena for shelter. The Riddler’s Army is waiting for them, armed to the teeth. They start shooting. They clip the new mayor.

Batman interrupts the party, attacking them one-on-one, taking shots and bullets, but making progress. Finally, he gets caught full in the chest by a shotgun blast. Hanging on by one hand (with what must be 50 pounds of armor hanging with him, by the way). One of the last of the Riddler’s Army lines up his shot—and is knocked the hell out by Catwoman.

She pulls Batman up—him with his 50 pounds of army and she with her 85 pounds of counterweight—and they roll around, having a moment that … isn’t sexy at all. Of course, he is grievously injured. She kisses him when he can’t stop her. She get clocked on the head by a Riddler’s minion. He’s still nearly incapacitated. He injects himself with some greenish adrenalin and flips the fuck out, just pounding on Selena’s attacker. Gordon pulls him off. Batman seems totally fine now, not even injured at all.

The sea breaks into the arena, drowning everyone else—Gordon, Selena Kyle, and Batman are on a catwalk far above. Batman throws himself down into the water, pretty needlessly dramatically—to what? Help people? Yup, he’s fine now. He ignores everyone else and saves the ex-mayor’s son, as well as the new mayor, who 100% no longer remembers that she’d just been shot ten minutes ago. It’s a prettily shot scene, but it’s pretty stupid.

But not as stupid as the final voiceover during the rescue effort. Like, just. spell. it. all. out.

“Vengeance won’t change the past, mine or anyone else’s. I have to become more. People need hope. To know someone’s out there for them. The city’s angry, scarred—like me. Our scars can destroy us, even after the physical wounds have healed. But if we survive them, they can transform us. They can give us the power to endure, and the strength to fight.”

You know, this might have felt deep in a comic book, written in that cool handwriting, in those thought-bubble boxes. If I’d read it when I was fourteen. They tried to do it for this movie, but it just sounded so trite. It’s like Batman giving a TedX talk.

And now they’re lingering on Batman and Selena’s goodbye. Did they think they’d made us care about their relationship at all? The music suggests that they think we should care very much. They moodily ride their motorcycles away, racing each other on slick tires and wet streets—perfectly normal. This is interminable.

Look, I gave it the benefit of the doubt because they let the bad guy win, more or less. His plan worked. I took away a star for the bizarre self-conceit that the movie had earned being three hours long. It’s also just so goddamned dark. Just almost no lighting whatsoever. Barry Lyndon was lit better.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) — 9/10

This movie is unconventional. It’s chronologically unclear. The narrator is extremely unreliable. Pretty much everybody and everything is unreliable. Parts of it reminded me of The Shining. It takes some getting used to, until you start to see the reasoning behind the at-times stilted dialogue. I took copious notes because it’s a thinker. Most of my notes will be belied by later notes, as the movie peels the onion skin of its script. I left everything because I find it describes the feeling of watching the movie much better.

We start out on a road trip with Jake (Jess Plemons) and a Young Woman (Jessie Buckley). She is called alternatively Lucia and Louise throughout the movie. It is rife with symbolism that the viewer is expected to put this together, or not, and it doesn’t really matter. They are both eminently awkward people. He’s awkward but seems quite nice most of the time. He says very strange and abrupt things sometimes, but it’s unclear whether those are things she’s imagined. She is not a very nice or interesting person. She thinks she’s the one who’s going to end things, and thinks, because she’s the active one, that she is also the better one. This attitude is obvious. She does not really like him, or what he is.

They are driving to his parents’ house. It’s a farm in the middle of nowhere. The road is straight and obviously fake. They are not really driving anywhere. They are, but the movie doesn’t care about making it look like they are. At the house, time…slips. She sees his father (David Thewliss) as an old, dementia-addled man, she sees him at dinner with a bandage on his head, she sees him at the end as a vital man, while his wife (Toni Collette) lies in a bed in the living room, obviously in hospice, and quite apparently dead, although Jake claims that she’s sleeping. But they were just eating dinner before. Or, rather, they were sitting at a sumptuously covered table from which no-one ate. A long-dead dog appears and disappears.

In the car, on the way there, she recites a poem, leading us to think that that is her line of work. At the house, Jake calls her a painter. She shows the parents some of her work, on her phone. Jake’s mom asks how her doctorate in quantum physics is going. Jake is in the same field. Jake later introduces her as a gerontologist. In his room, she finds Jake’s old paintings, which are the ones she’s shown his parents. She finds a book with a poem by another women, which turns out to be the poem that she’d recited on the way there, claiming it as her own. Or perhaps she is that person from the book.

She goes to the basement with a nightgown covered in Jake’s baby food, handed to her by a very young version of Jake’s mother. The basement is dark and the machine is already running. It is filled with janitor’s uniforms from the local high school. We see glimpses of the janitor (Guy Boyd) working at the school. These glimpses are scattered throughout the film. It is unclear whether this is Jake’s real father or whether it is perhaps Jake in the future. It is unclear whether the young woman is in Jake’s mind.

The janitor cleans up as students practice Oklahoma! He watches a romantic comedy that seems to reenact one of the two versions of Jake and the young woman’s meet-cute story that they tell his parents.

When they’d first arrived at the farm, he didn’t want to go in immediately. He shows her the sheep pens. There were dead, frozen lambs outside the barn door. There is a dark spot on the floor of the now-empty pigpen, where the two pigs that used to live there rotted alive, eaten by maggots.

Jake’s hand is damaged by what look like a fight when he hands the bill to the girl at Tulsey Town, who also has unmentioned bruises on her upper arm and forearm—or perhaps its a rash. She is accompanied by what look like blond twins, who at first ask for orders, but afterwards huddle up like NPCs in the corner of the starkly lit booth, grinning and giggling endlessly but silently.

Neither of them wants to eat the giant ice-cream desserts they’d purchased in the dead of night in a blizzard. They decide to stop off at the high school to dispose of them.

They converse. He tries to discuss with her. She is not interested. His conversational gambits are often clumsy. They have read so many esoteric books in common that they must be the same person, a person conversing with himself or herself. He is quite neurotic. He calls her “Ames” at one point.

“Jake: Everything is tinged. Colored by mood, by emotion, by past experience. There is no objective reality. You know there’s no color in the universe, right? Only in the brain, just electromagnetic frequencies. The brain tinges them.

“Lucia/Louise/Ames/Young woman: Yes, I am a physicist. I know what color is.

“Jake: Yes, yes, yes. You are. You do.

“Lucia/Louise/Ames/Young woman: Color is the deeds of light. It’s the deeds and suffering.

“Jake: That’s beautiful. It’s not physicist talk, but eminently poetic.

“Lucia/Louise/Ames/Young woman: Yeah, well, I am a poet after all.

“Jake: You are. It’s beautiful.”

They arrive at the giant high school. There’s a truck in the parking lot.

They argue about Baby, It’s Cold Outside. Is it a rape song? Is it playful? Is there room for playfulness anymore? Does it matter that it was written in 1936?

He admits he was wrong. She accepts his apology. They kiss. He snaps back, interrupted by a vision of the janitor peeping at them through a hole in a wall.

Jake leaves the car to go into the high school. She is freezing in the car, arguing with herself. She gets out, then is locked out.

She follows him into the high school, where she finds the janitor mopping the floor. She hides from him. He finds her, huddled on the floor. He doesn’t speak, but she hears his voice in her head.

She tells him yet another story of how she met Jake. That she was with her girlfriend, celebrating their anniversary. In the first story, she talked of how they met at a pub-trivia night. Now she calls him a creeper who would not stop staring at her.

She says she can’t remember what he looks like because “it was so long ago.” She can’t remember because they didn’t interact.

They talk. They hug. He offers her house slippers because he’s just cleaned the floors. They’re the same shoes Jake gave to her in his parents’ house. She says, “they’re yours.” Which makes sense, because I think the janitor is Jake. But I still think she’s a figment of Jake’s imagination. That he imagines how much she hated seeing him staring at her, even while he’s imagining a relationship with her, imagining taking her to visit his parents..

She finds Jake. They stare at each other along the high-school hallway. Doppelgängers appear behind them, cut around them, and begin to dance a lovely ballet in a suddenly brightened hallway. The drinking fountains sprays a cascade up and down the wall.

Their dance ends in a mock wedding, interrupted by a janitor dancer, who takes her away. She is rescued by her beau, who fights the janitor. The janitor pulls a knife. Snow falls. They are in the gymnasium. Atonal fighting music fades. Red handkerchiefs fly, signifying blood and death. Jake appears again, as Jake. The janitor cleans up the snow around the corpse, morphing back into the janitor in the school hallway. Was this a daydream of his, imagined as he cleaned the floors at night?

He grabs his thermos. It’s just like the thermos that Jake had when he arrived at his parents’ house. It’s just like the drawerful of thermoses to which he added his at his parents’ house. Or was it the janitor’s house?

The janitor cleans the snow off of his truck. He gets in. He sits there, mumbling to himself, imagining Jake’s parents fighting. He shakes. he suffers. He strips.. He hallucinates.

The pig infested with maggots shows up. “Come.” He follows the pig back into the high school, naked as the day he was born. The pig says, “Let’s get you dressed.”

Jake is on stage, accepting an award. The stage is dressed for Oklahoma. Jake is much older. His mother, father, and the young woman are in the audience. They are all heavily made up. He is accepting a Nobel Prize. The entire crowd looks like the photo at the end of The Shining.

He sings Lonely Room from the musical Oklahoma!. He sings wonderfully.

Morning comes. There is a car buried in snow in the parking lot of the high school, under a blue, blue sky.

The credit pages flick past in silence.

This is pretty avant-garde stuff, but kind of fascinating. It’s just nice to watch something that’s not predictable. Now that I know who Charlie Kaufman is, I’m not surprised. He’s made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Synecdoche, New York, all of which I liked very much.

Captain Phillips (2013) — 7/10

I’m struck by the apt representation of American empire. We see Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) getting ready for his next job at his house in Vermont. He is headed for Salalah, Oman, for a delivery to Mombasa, Kenya. He probably only knows English. He can’t understand a word anyone else is saying in the part of the world he works. It doesn’t matter because he is part of Empire. Those people, in their homelands, will speak the language of Empire to make themselves understood by it. They will have to put in the effort, not him.

The shot of him arriving at the port reminded me immediately of how the space stations were filmed in The Expanse. Giant cranes and containers everywhere. Enormous ships rearing up from endless docks. Phillips is a consummate professional. He gets a report that there are pirates in the area. He runs drills to fend off pirates. The pirates show up on his radar. He fakes a call to U.S. air support. The Somalis are listening in. One boat is scared off. Muse (Barkhad Abdi) is not scared off. He keeps coming, despite Phillips pushing his boat faster and moving 5º port and starboard to throw up a wake. When the skiff is only ¼-mile away, its motor dies, flooded with seawater from the heavy seas behind the freighter.

Phillips and his crew take stock. So do Muse and his crew. They join the other boat and are trying to fix his motor. He tells them to give him the motor from the other boat—which is just full of cowards anyway. That skiff’s captain takes offense, but gets a cool wrench up-side his head for all his bluster.

The next day, Muse—his mates call him “skinny”, which he most certainly is—is right back on their tail, announcing himself as the Somali Coast Guard. He is obviously ignored. They open fire. The ship blasts water from fire hoses from all sides, so that the skiff can’t approach. Shane (Michael Chernus) goes down to fix an errant hose. The Somalis shoot at him, approaching with a hooked ladder. It hooks. Phillips slues the ship 30º to starboard. They get on anyway. Port 30º, then starboard 30º. None of it helps. They’re onboard. They abandon their skiff.

“Four pirates on board. [Tom Hanks is doing his Vermont accent.]”

They’re on the bridge. After a bit of back and forth, the pirates call the captain’s bluff. He calls their bluff right back. They go to the engine room. Muse sends Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman) back to the bridge with Phillips. Muse is taken hostage by the crew.

They eventually give the Somalis $30,000 and the lifeboat. They kidnap the captain, looking for a bigger payday.

The U.S. Navy is on intercept course. The higher-ups don’t care, though. They’re going to send in a SEAL team to mop things up—without real regard for the hostage’s life. The main thing is to not let them get Phillips to Somalia, where it would be too expensive to secure his release. So, they’d rather have him killed than captured. Sounds like Israel’s Hannibal Directive. And Phillips isn’t even a soldier.

The Somalis mention that they used to be fishermen, until the big ships came and took all the fish. Now, they’re pirates. But they don’t realize that they’re fighting the biggest pirates of all: The U.S. and its hegemony don’t pay for anything that they can steal instead. If anyone objects to them stealing it, then they’re killed by the military. There is no real difference in ethics—just in scale.

You can see the massive imbalance in power with the four skinny, starving Somalis driving in a shitty lifeboat, being chased by a giant U.S. naval vessel (The U.S.S. Bainbridge). There are also several helicopters full of Navy Seals on the way. The important thing is not to give them any money. What kind of lesson would that be? You can only steal things if you’re big and strong. You can steal things if you already have the biggest weapons, not if you’re puny fisherman with no power.

Someone on the U.S. naval vessel actually speaks Somali—Nemo (Omar Berdouni). He starts negotiations. Muse speaks to him in English defiantly.

Simultaneously, the Navy boards the freighter and says they’ll escort it to Mombasa. Spare no cost, even if it would be much cheaper to just pay the pirates.

The Navy catches up to the lifeboat. Muse demands $10M. They show the captain. He says he’s in “Seat 15”, which is the seat he’s in on the boat—you know, for when they start shooting into it.

The U.S.S. Bainbridge captain Castellano (Yul Vazquez) is trying to resolve this peacefully before the SEALs arrive. Muse says he’ll negotiate when he gets to Somalia. No-one’s told him that that’s not going to be allowed to happen. He thinks he’s safe because he has a hostage, but saving the hostage is optional.

There are two more ships now—three enormous-looking U.S. naval vessels chasing them, dwarfing the lifeboat they’re puttering their way to Somalia in. Muse’s boss has cut and run. Muse won’t give up though—he’s got nothing to lose. “I’ve come too far. I can’t give up.” Even if it comes to sinking the lifeboat, he’d rather go under on the chance that they’ll get to Somalia first.

That lifeboat cabin must be funky,. I don’t see a bathroom.

The SEALs leap off the back of their plane into darkness.

Phillips gets up to take a leak. He’s on the back of the boat with Bilal. He pushes him in, then dives in himself. He starts swimming for the U.S. boats.

Muse says to find him, but not kill him. He knows Phillips is the only reason they’re still alive. Najee (Faysal Ahmed)—the psycho—fires on Phillips anyway. Phillips dives. The lifeboat drifts closer to him. Phillips rounds the boat, swimming under it. Muse jumps in and grabs him. They get him back into the boat. Najee beats the shit out of him.

This is dragging on a bit, to be honest.

Castellano continues to try to get them to give themselves up. Muse drags Phillips out the back hatch, alternatively pointing the pistol at Phillips and shooting at the helicopter.

The SEAL team leader starts negotiations, telling them all their names, then saying that he will give them money, but that it has to happen confidentially. The U.S. doesn’t want to be seen as having paid off pirates. It is pretty clear that none of this is true. Muse believes it, though. He has no other choice.

Muse thinks he’s going to the Navy ship to get money.

“Muse: It was supposed to be easy. I take ship… ransom… nobody get hurt.
Captain Richard Phillips: You had thirty thousand dollars, and a way to Somalia. It wasn’t enough?
Muse: I got bosses. They got rules.
Captain Richard Phillips: We all got bosses.
Muse: [gives him the look he deserves for thinking his own boss is as bad as Muse’s boss]
Captain Richard Phillips: There’s gotta be something other than being a fisherman and kidnapping people.
Muse: Maybe in America, Irish. Maybe in America.”

The SEALs hand Phillips a “uniform”, which is probably a bulletproof vest. I mean, the U.S. Navy has all of the advantages. Muse isn’t going to meet any elders. They’ve got a tow line on the lifeboat. The power advantage is overwhelming. “Where are the elders?” Muse realizes he’s been fucked, lied to. There was never going to be a deal. I mean, obviously.

They start towing. The lifeboat gets closer to the boat. There are a dozen SEAL snipers on the back of the Navy boat. The other boats start making massive lateral wakes to rock the lifeboat. They winch them closer, you know, to get them out of the big waves.

Najee catches the captain writing a note to his family, but the captain has had enough and attacks him, getting in a few good licks. The pirates get him under control and bind him up.

Najee is the only one who knows what’s going to happen. “You two are idiots. No-one is coming. Everything they told you is a lie! They will kill us all.”

He’s right. They stop the tow. All three targets sway into sight. All three targets are sniped.

They easily spent way more than $10M for this outcome. But neither the company nor the insurance company paid for it. The U.S. taxpayer footed the bill. The Navy arrests Muse and prepares to take him to America, where he will stand trial. Since the U.S. made sure that Somalia doesn’t have a government, so they don’t have to bother with extraditing a foreign national—not like they would give a shit about international law anyway. The U.S. Navy enforces its will off the coast of a country that it destroyed. Empire.

I’m taking away a star because it was too damned long. I guess they’d paid for all of that hardware and wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth. Anytime there’s that much military hardware in a movie, the Pentagon gets to write the script.

Now, how can I be so callous about poor Captain Phillips? He was a nice guy who tried to treat everyone fairly, and who seemed to have genuine empathy for even the pirates that had taken him captive—except, perhaps and understandably, for Najee, who was an asshole. I do, I do. But I see his suffering as the suffering of one man, whereas the film depicted the plight of an entire nation that had been destroyed, allowed to be destroyed, encouraged to be destroyed, by the same country whose navy rescued Phillips.

I cannot ignore the context. I can only assume that it was intentional in the film. Perhaps I’ve imbued it. Perhaps it was a film about an upstanding American who was rescued by his selfless government, who put down the filthy, upstart natives who can only steal, never produce. But this ignores the context that the U.S. is the greatest thief of all. It patrols and enforces what it deems “international waters”. The danger in those waters can only be addressed with military means. The solution couldn’t be to take all of that money and help Somalia back on its feet, to make it so that the country wouldn’t produce pirates rather than fishermen. I dunno.

The Social Dilemma (2020) — 7/10

Jaron Lanier is in this. At 21:12 he says,

“We’ve created a world in which online connection has become primary, especially for younger generations. And yet, in that world, any time two people connect, the only way it’s financed is through a sneaky third person who’s paying to manipulate those two people. So, we’ve created an entire global generation of people who are raised within a context where the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture, is manipulation. We’ve put deceit and sneakiness at the absolute center of everything we do.”

That NVidia Teraflops chart at 45;:00 was impressive.

Teraflops over time

“What people miss is that AI already runs today’s world right now.”

The side story is interesting, making it look like there is certain information that is definitely bad and other information that is definitely good. That doesn’t exist, not really. All information is on a spectrum. There is certain information that is reliable and true. If you never hear anything that you disagree with, then you’re probably not hearing the truth—or you’re hearing things that are true, but also not hearing a lot of other things that are not only also true, but would be useful.

The film does a good job of showing people that there is misinformation out there. However, while they’re willing to attack flat-Earthers, Pizzagaters, climate-change deniers, COVID deniers (“Querdenker”), or Q-Anon (which the extremist group in the film is definitely the model for), there’s no way they’ll mention the biggest psy-ops of our times, like WMDs (before social media), the pro-vaccine manipulation campaigns, or RussiaGate (both after social media).

They, like so many others, have an enormous blind spot for their own propaganda. RussiaGate fooled so many dozens of millions of people and continues to do so, evidenced by the fact that you’re still not allowed to talk about it as a psy-op, even in a documentary about psy-ops of the 2010s. It’s incredible. Just the degree of self-deception they’re capable of, all while they’re supposedly exposing how we’re so manipulated.

“We’ve created a system that biases towards false information. Not because we want to, but because false information makes the companies more money than the truth. The truth is boring.”

Bullshit. That’s a nice cop-out that happens to exonerate you, but it’s not entirely true. You choose which slant to provide to the information. You allow yourselves to be bribed to only show certain information. That’s the truth right there. And that’s not boring. The “algorithm” doesn’t clamp down on news about Israeli slaughters in the West Bank—lobbyists and investors do.

The algorithm would promote the shit out of that stuff if it were allowed to, because it would drive engagement incredibly. But the companies are paid not to. So spare me your bullshit about how the “algorithm is out of control”. It’s a pat story that also happens to let you live with your hundreds of millions with a clear conscience. But it’s not true. The truth is far more exciting and interesting. These people may have been duped by the drive to make a lot of money, but they continue to be duped by those who really control information.

At one point, one of the dude-bros says that the goal was,

“[t]o reach anyone for the best price.”

Yeah, sure, Why don’t you talk about who was paying you that “best price”? It wasn’t just “advertisers”. It was large political organizations as well as the government itself, through various organizations and fronts..

Oh Jesus, now they’re saying that “we see Russia and China spreading these conspiracy theories.” Sure, sure, talk about everyone else running the psyops but never mention who’s running the biggest and most effective ones. I didn’t expect anything else of a Netflix documentary. It’s basically soma for liberals.

A Netflix documentary like this is here to tell liberalls that social media is manipulating all of us, but it’s especially manipulating those psychos who are outside of your silo. They cut to a montage of photos of COVID protestors, most of whom were protesting the mandates and crackdowns, rather than saying that it didn’t exist. There’s a little parallel story about Ben (Skyler Gisondo), who’s being radicalized, leading him to ignore hot girls in real life in order to watch content about extremist shit. He’s radicalized by libertarian hucksters, but never by liberal ones.

“Roger McNamee One of the problems with Facebook is that, as a tool of persuasion, it may be the greatest thing ever created. Now, imagine what that means in the hands of a dictator or an authoritarian. If you want to control the population of your country, there has never been a tool as effective as Facebook.”

Dude, I’m happy you’re so able to live in an irony-free world where you don’t notice that you just literally described the US of A as she is. I don’t have to imagine it! You’re literally in a psy-op documentary about psy-ops that the government of the U.S. Empire doesn’t like. They’re already using it—and it’s not the dastardly Chinese or Russians or North Koreans or Iranians. It’s your very own country. You’re part of the psy-op! You’re in this documentary convincing people that this could never happen in the U.S., when various powerful organizations are literally doing exactly that. All the time. Why do you think we haven’t mentioned bad actors like Russiagaters? Why do you think we’re seeing idiocy from only one silo? Is it because, no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t find any misinformation peddled by your own silo?

OMG now they’re reprosecuting the 2016 election. What the actual fuck!? They talk all the time about manipulative social media, then they make an extremely one-sided, manipulative documentary that doesn’t even know how ironic it is. 👏👏👏

It’d be fantastic if I thought this was a satire.

At 1:15:00, Cathy O’Neil says

“We are allowing the technologists to frame this as a problem that they’re equipped to solve. That’s a lie. People talk about AI as it will know truth. AI’s not gonna solve these problems. AI cannot solve the problem of fake news. Google doesn’t have the option of saying: ‘Oh, is this conspiracy? Is this truth?’ Because they don’t know what truth is. They don’t have a proxy for truth that’s better than a click.”

She’s very good. I like her. AI’s not gonna solve these problems is right! It’s going to exacerbate them. And, honestly, if we continue to make such slanted videos telling us about the problem of slanted information, then you can just save yourself the time spent watching this tripe.

“Tristan: If we don’t agree on what is true, or that there is such a thing as truth, we’re toast. This is the problem beneath other problems because, if we can’t agree on what’s true, then we can’t navigate out of any of our problems.”

Dude, you’re going about it the wrong way. Cathy is way smarter than you are (even though Netflix seems to think you’re the star). You’re getting all mucked up because you don’t have the required capacity for philosophical thought because your brain is no longer attuned to it. We will never agree on the important things being true. We can all already agree that there is truth, but can’t agree on what that is. If you don’t acknowledge that you’re part of a desperately manipulative video lamenting about people not knowing what’s true—then you’re part of the problem.

We don’t have to agree on what’s true. A nice basis would be good. But we’re in the murky waters of principles and ethics here, right? It’s more important for people to understand the truth that every human being has certain, inalienable rights. We can’t even agree on that.

Whether people think that the Earth is flat doesn’t matter. Almost everyone can act as if it isn’t every damned day and it won’t matter one bit. My life wasn’t affected by the gentle curvature of the Earth today. I’m happy to leave them their peccadillos. I’m more interested in whether they’re good human beings with actual, real principles.

The creators of this documentary are not those kinds of people. A principle is something that you apply, even when it reflects badly on you. If you’re against murder, unless you really think someone needs killing—then you’re not against murder in principle, you just think no-one else should get to do it. It’s the same with these people: they think the manipulation is bad, but then mention not a single goddamned instance when their own side did it, leading one to believe that they only think that manipulation is bad when their ideological enemies do it.

Tristan just keeps getting it slightly wrong. He goes on,

“It’s not about the technology being the existential threat. It’s the technology’s ability to bring out the worst in society—and the worst in society being the existential threat.”

Did you practice that one in front of the mirror? That’s not the problem. The problem is the people in charge of these powerful tools. It’s not the tools that are manipulating. It’s the people that set up the guardrails that determine how these algorithms work. Of course, it’s arguable that the tool is too powerful for anyone. OK. But his argument is tailor-made to absolve him and all of the other sociopaths in this documentary of any blame.

The machine was too powerful for anyone!

It got out of control!

Who could have known!

Anyone who’s watched capitalists do their thing could have known—and, in fact, did know. You all participated because you were making a shit-ton of money for yourselves and you honestly didn’t care about any of the repercussions. Now you do—or at least pretend to, for even more money—and you’re still fooling yourselves into thinking that you’re not still manipulating people. It’s for a good cause this time, though, right?

He says that the platforms should be responsible—that’s his proposed solution. But I don’t think that’s correct. The platforms shouldn’t be in charge! They’re unelected.

Look, I wanted to like this documentary. I think it makes a few good points, but it’s so one-sided, so manipulative. Not a single Republican/Libertarian in here. You couldn’t get Glenn Greenwald? Matt Taibbi? Chris Hedges? No-one outside of your unalloyed, liberal silo?

here’s Jaron Lanier again,

“If we go down the current status quo for, let’s say, another 20 years, we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance. We probably fail to meet the challenge of climate change. We degrade the world’s democracies so that they fall into some sort of bizarre autocratic dysfunction. We probabaly ruin the global economy. We probably don’t survive. I really do view it as existential.”

He’s right, of course, but nothing else in the documentary is honest about this. You would get the impression that the only problem is climate-change deniers, like the really obvious dipshits from the other silo. But the problem is that everyone ignores the problem—does nothing meaningful toward actually solving it, like proposing reduction—because the narrative is being manipulated by the real powers, the real elites, all of whom go completely unmentioned here.

We are led to believe that the machine is out of control, despite our best efforts. That’s not true at all. The machine is very firmly under the control of those who run everything else—and it’s humming along just fine.

Look at Bill McKibben, chirpily writing in the NY Times that COP28 was much more hopeful than ever. That plus $2 will buy you a lottery ticket. But the machine is happy to promulgate these ideas—these myths—even though it’s also climate-denialism. It’s doing the dirty work of fossil-fuel companies who desperately do not want the world to change in any way that will stop the increase of their year-on-year profits. That’s the more insidious manipulation distribute by this tremendous machine—but it’s fully under the control of those who control the narrative.

They use the algorithm—the machine—to make half of us hate Biden for loving the environment so much that he wants to take away our cars, and the other half love him for being such an environmental president. This, when the truth—the meta-narrative—is that the damage is accelerating no matter who’s president because it’s all a giant fairy tale told by the powers-that-be, those that never seem to change no matter who’s in charge—the owners of capital.

They have this machine at their disposal to tighten their grip on the power they’ve always had. This documentary didn’t tell that story. It’s not allowed to. The producers and most of the people involved probably have no idea that this is the real story to tell. They would be shocked to read this review, shocked to think that Russiagate was disinformation, that selling Biden as a climate president is misinformation.

At then, near the end, they kind of hint at the problem being “capitalism”. Tristan again,

“What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, and shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.”

No wonder they made him the star of the documentary: he absolutely excels in telling stories as if neither him nor any of the other characters has any agency. Who can blame someone for acting in a certain way when all decisions have been taken completely out of their hands by the economy and the algorithm? Those poor, poor, deca-millionaires.

Another dude:

“I think we need to accept that it’s OK for companies to be focused on making money. What’s not okay is when there’s no regulation, no rules, and no competition. And the companies are acting as sort-of, de-facto governments.”

It’s adorable watching Silicon Valley libertarians re-invent regulatory frameworks after spending a decade or two dismantling them and making a tremendous amount of money while doing it. As soon they’re made their nut, then they’re ready to allow regulation again. After all, their companies are now big enough to deal with it—and it will nicely stifle competition.

Look, companies whose only goal is to make money will always end up dismantling regulations because they get in the way of making money. Are they making enough money within the regulatory framework? Of course they are! But they could make more money. And more money is always better. So you spend a little money to make more money. You pay some lobbyists to buy some legislators to weaken or eliminate the regulation—and then you make that investment back 20x over. Profit.

Jaron Lanier again:

“Financial incentives kind of run the world. So, any solution to this problem has to be aligned with financial incentives.”

Or…we could reexamine the axiomatic “financial incentives run the world.”

I mean, look, they tried really hard to make a documentary—but they couldn’t get out of their own silo, they couldn’t talk to anyone who didn’t already agree with literally everything they already thought before they made the documentary.

It ends on this soliloquy by Justin Rosenstein:

“We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it’s going to leave a worse world for future generations.

“This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What’s frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we’re the tree, we’re the whale.

“Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so, we’re seeing the results of that. We’re seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.”

OK. That’s nice. You get a star back for including that. You still lose two for not having gone far enough, for having only done the easy part—talking to your echo chamber.

In the end, not a single one of them says that “we need to change the system.” Even Jaron accepts the confines of “financial incentives […] run[ning] the world.” The problem is neoliberalism, hyper-capitalism. There’s not going to be “massive public pressure” because the Elite will use their machine to make sure that this never happens.