Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.13

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.

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019) — 8/10

This film is about the art world, presumably out in LA somewhere. Artist agent and gallery owner Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo) has a palatial home in the desert. Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a bitchy, catty reviewer who knows what he likes and whose favor everyone seeks. Jon Dondon (Tom Sturridge) is another agent/gallery owner who used to work for Rhodora, but is now poaching her talent, like Piers (John Malkovich). Gretchen (Toni Collette) works at a museum, until she becomes a buyer for private clients. Bryson (Billy Magnussen) is a wannabe artist who works for Rhodora.

Coco (Natalia Dyer) also works for Rhodora, until she doesn’t. Then she works for Dondon, until she doesn’t. Then she works for Gretchen, until she doesn’t. Then she works for Morf…until she doesn’t. Damrish (Daveed Diggs) is an up-and-coming artist who doesn’t want to be corrupted by that world. Josephina (Zawe Ashton) is an awful climber—perhaps the worst of them all—who makes an art discovery.

Ok. That’s the cast. Now the plot.

Josephina discovers a dead man in her building. It’s artist Vetril Dease (Alan Mandell). He’s left an apartment full of artwork with strict orders to destroy it all. Josephina thinks it’s magnificent, so she steals it—hey, there were no inheritors, and who cares what the dead man wanted?—and goes into partnership with Rhodora to sell it. Everyone who sees his work says its breathtaking. Lab tech Gita (Nitya Vidyasagar) discovers that he put his literal lifeblood into every painting.

Things start to go sideways. Rhodora sends Bryson with half of the collection to deep storage. She wants to artificially bump the value of the available Deases. He suspects that he has a cargo of Deases—which he’s seen and loved, in an obsessive manner—and he stops to have a look at them before heading out. They haunt him. He drops his cigarette, catches himself on fire, slides his truck into an abandoned rest stop, and almost crashes into gas pumps. He enters the abandoned gas station and, while washing his burns, monkeys from a painting that mysteriously hangs over the gas-station bathroom’s sink drag him into the painting. Gone.

Next up is Donjon, who hangs himself in his own exhibit. He doesn’t see it that way; he sees hands pulling him into the ceiling to kill him. Coco finds him there. Her first corpse.

At her next job, now working for Gretchen, Coco is allowed to go home. Gretchen stays late in the gallery with her Deases and her Sphere. She sticks her arm into the Sphere, which the demons in the Dease manipulate to take her arm right off. She bleeds out. The next morning, no-one notices that she’s not part of the exhibit until Coco shows up in the later morning to discover that she’s lost another employer. Her second corpse.

Josephina, meanwhile, has hooked up with Morf, who’s escaped the grasp of the Deases a few times. He sees them moving in the huge Dease hanging over Josephina’s bed. Josephina has also hooked up with Damrish, who’s also seen the paintings in her fancy apartment moving. Morf hires Coco—jobless again—to help him put his Deases into deep storage. The paintings get him first, though, in the form of the Robo-hobo, which he’d panned. Coco finds his body. Her third corpse.

Josephina finally gets hers in a fake gallery, located far downtown, after Damrish told her he doesn’t want to be in her art world. She’s on the phone with Rhodora, who’s almost killed by a falling statue. Josephina isn’t so lucky, as the paint runs off of the Deases that aren’t even there, oozing across the floor and gliding up her limbs to cover her face. Rhodora, on the other hand, survives and has movers box up all of her Deases. Sitting outside, with her cat, she looks just exactly like the painting that had hung in her bedroom. The velvet buzzsaw tattoo on her neck comes to life and tears through her thorax.

Damrish survives because he stayed pure. Piers survives because, while he appreciated the art, he didn’t profit from it. He was at Rhodora’s beach house making art. Coco survived because she also didn’t benefit—she’s headed back to Minnesota.

The remaining Deases show up in flea markets, selling for $5 apiece.

The Silent Sea (2021) — 7/10

This is a Korean sci-fi series lasting exactly one season—and meant to last only one season, I think. It tells the story of an Earth ravaged by drought, on which water is such a precious resource that many people have too little of it—and have no means to buy more. There are, as you can imagine, a lot of people who do have more than enough water for themselves. But most people spend large parts of their day standing in line with one or more jerrycans, waiting to fill them.

There’s a Korean moonbase, a research facility called Balhae Station. Bad shit went down there several years ago, taking the lives of 117 people. The company that owns it wants to send people back up to try to salvage…whatever it was that they were all working on up there. Some people know bits and pieces of the danger, but they’re not the ones going on the mission. Song Ji‑An (Bae Doona) is going on the mission. Her sister was one of the 117 who’d died. She, like her sister, is a formidable researcher.

Han Yun‑Jae (Gong Yoo) captains the space shuttle that takes them there. We’re introduced to a few more of the people in the run-up to the excursion. Ryu Tae‑seok (Lee Joon) of the Ministry of National Defense “volunteers” to be part of the mission, but he’s a secret agent, communicating with his real masters, who have him running a side mission. We’ll soon learn that he’s not the only one.

So the shuttle takes off, headed for the moon, presumably to land there, with its stubby wings providing lift … in the atmosphere. Look, it doesn’t matter, right? It wouldn’t matter anyway, but it really doesn’t matter because the shuttle starts shaking itself apart before Han can even think of landing it. It then lands extremely hard on the lunar surface, killing no-one important. Instead of harming anyone important, the crash leaves them all with just the spacesuits on their backs and no other usable supplies. They are kilometers away from Balhae Station and have to hoof it.

One of them is injured and expires along the way, but not before slowing everyone down so much that they’re all nearly out of oxygen before the captain can unlock the airlock and they can all flop inside and finally draw breath in a quickly re-oxygenated moonbase that had been abandoned for five years. Phew.

Once inside, they discover dozens of corpses, all of them looking like they’d drowned. This strikes pretty much everyone as highly unlikely and they scoff at Dr. Hong Ga-Young (Kim Sun-young), who’s charismatic and spunky and all-around a pretty good character.

The crew has their orders: they are to search the base in very specific locations for samples. They come up empty everywhere. There are sample canisters around but they’re all empty. Song’s team detects another presence in the station, staying just out of site, but definitely alive. No-one knows what it could be. Engineer Gong Soo-chan (Jung Soon-Won) gets too close to a corpse and something puffs up into his eye. On the way back to the central command, he drops farther and farther behind his team, getting sick.

As one other member Lee Gi-su (Choi Yong-Woo) also dies—seemingly after having been attacked—they discover that he’d been secretly communicating with unknown other parties on an alternate plan. Soo-chan, meanwhile, has worsened, and soon expels what seems like several aquariums full of water from his mouth before dying horribly. No-one knows where all the water came from, but they’re no longer so mystified by the corpses. Song and Dr. Hong urge caution, to avoid further infection. Han is unconvinced and will not deviate from the mission.

They reestablish communication with Earth—well, official communication, because some people seem to have been in near-constant contact with their handlers—and are ordered to stay on mission: retrieve a viable canister. What do they canisters contain? Lunar water, baby. It’s what killed Soo-chan. It has a virus-like ability to propagate itself nearly infinitely. It could solve the Earth’s problems for good. The Korean company is trying to keep it quiet so that it can refine it, make it safe, and, above all, profit from it first. The crew is increasingly leery that it’s even possible to control it, especially when more members fall ill from it, dying explosively.

Song stumbles on a secret chamber positively filled with canisters, hundreds of them. But it’s guarded by a feral-looking girl who (A) seems to have survived five years on an empty moonbase by herself and (B) seems to be immune to lunar water and (C) actually seems to thrive on it, being able to magically heal herself.

What is Ryu’s side mission? Well, instead of finding out what happened at the base, he’s to obtain samples of the lunar water that the base had been researching, and to bring it to a pickup point somewhere else on the moon. As everyone else is busy trapping the girl Luna 073 (Kim Si-a), he steals all the known samples and hustles off to a rendezvous point.

And yes, we learn that the first 72 subjects didn’t fare nearly as well as Luna 073. We learn this in a few flashbacks when Song cracks the data storage to get at the research data. We also learn that they started with fish from a neat video of a fish being infected with lunar water, then producing so much water that it prevents itself from asphyxiating and is soon swimming around again. Ryu is infected, soldiering on, but he’s not long for this world (or that one). Song is also infected but, because Luna had bitten her on capture, she’s now partially immune to it and avoids the worst effects.

Realizing that Luna’s immunity to lunar water may be what allows mankind to greet lunar water as a salvation rather than as extinction, they decide to get the samples and Luna 073 to an international space station, rather than returning both to The Company, where it’s unclear what will happen to her. Captain Han and Chief Gong Soo-hyuk (Lee Moo-saeng) sacrifice themselves so that Dr. Hong, Song, and Luna can escape the flooding base.

At the very end, things get even crazier than a flood on the moon: Luna is shown to be able to survive vacuum without a spacesuit. The three are eventually rescued and taken to the space station. The end.

Boyz n the Hood (1991) — 9/10

We start off in 1984, with Jason “Tre” Styles III living with his single mother Reva (Angela Bassett). Tre gets into a fight at school, so his mother sends him to live with his father Jason “Furious” Styles Jr. (Laurence Fishburne). He’s been there before, so he has friends: Darrin “Doughboy” Baker, Doughboy’s half-brother Ricky, and their friend Chris.

We follow the boys’ adventures in Crenshaw as they tussle with local gangs, witness a dead body, and, finally, see a Doughboy and Chris being arrested for theft. We rejoin them seven years later, where Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), Doughboy (Ice Cube), Ricky (Morris Chestnut), and Chris (Redge Green) are at a welcome-home party for Doughboy, who just finished a bit in in prison. Chris is in a wheelchair because of a gunshot wound, but he’s pretty jacked and quite nimble. They’re joined by two fellow Crips: Dooky (Dedrick D. Gobert) and Monster (Baldwin C. Sykes).

Ricky is a high-school football legend, being recruited by USC. He needs to get a 700 on the SAT, though, which is a pretty big ask for him. He’s big, handsome, muscular, but he’s quite simple. He’s also already a father, living with his mother Brenda (Tyra Ferrell), his girl Shanice (Alysia Rogers), and their son. Brenda’s always got her eye on Furious, but he’s not having it. Tre has turned out pretty well, all things considered. He’s on track for college and trying to get his strictly Catholic girlfriend Brandi (Nia Long) to bang him.

Tre and Ricky drive with Furious to Compton, where Furious shows them how the world really works, talking to other members of the community who also draw nearer to hear him “preach”.

“Furious Styles: Would you two knuckleheads come on. I want you all to take a look at that sign up there. See what it says: cash for your home. Do you know what that is?
Ricky: A billboard.
Tre Styles: A billboard.
Furious Styles: What are you all? Amos and Andy? Are you Stepin and he’s Fetchit? I’m talking about he message. What it stands for. It’s called gentrification. It’s what happens when the property value of a certain area is brought down. You listening? You bring the property value down. They can buy the land at a lower price, then they move all the people out, raise the property value and sell it at a profit. Now, what we need to do is keep everything in our neighborhood, everything − black. Black owned with black money. Just like the Jews, the Italians, the Mexicans and the Koreans do.”

“The Old Man: Ain’t nobody from outside bringing down the property value. It’s these folk, shootin’ each other and sellin’ that crack rock and shit.
Furious Styles: Well, how you think the crack rock gets into the country? We don’t own any planes. We don’t own no ships. We are not the people who are flyin’ and floatin’ that shit in here.

“I know every time you turn on the TV, that’s what you see. Black people, sellin’ the rock, pushin’ the rock, pushin’ the rock. Yeah, I know. But that wasn’t a problem as long as it was here. It wasn’t a problem until it was in Iowa, on Wall Street, where there are hardly any black people.”

“Furious Styles: Why is it that there is a gun shop on almost every corner in this community?
The Old Man: Why?
Furious Styles: I’ll tell you why. For the same reason that there is a liquor store on almost every corner in the black community. Why? They want us to kill ourselves.”

One night, the crew heads to Crenshaw Boulevard to hang out, where Ricky gets provoked by a Blood, Ferris (Raymond Turner) before being rescued by Doughboy. Later, Ricky and Tre are on their way home and are pulled over and harassed by cops. The crew spend a lot of time hanging out at Brenda’s house, on the porch, not doing much at all. Soon after the incident at Crenshaw, Ricky and Tre go to the store for Brenda. On the way back, they realize that they’re being hunted by the Ferris and a few other Bloods.

Ricky thinks that they should split up—it’s unclear why Tre lets the mental invalid take the tactical lead—and is caught and gunned down in cold blood. Tre arrives too late to help him, as do Doughboy and his crew. They gather up Ricky’s bloodied corpse and bring it back to Brenda’s place. There are tearful recriminations, with Doughboy shouldering the blame, but not much to be done. Ricky’s SAT results arrive. He’d scored 710.

The crew takes off for revenge. Furioius at first stops Tre, but Tre sneaks out anyway. After several hours of driving around, Tre asks to be let out. He’s changed his mind and wants nothing of more killing. Soon, though, Doughboy and the crew find the Bloods at a burger joint. They try to run, but they gun them down. Two of them are still alive, crawling away. Doughboy gets out of the car and finishes them off. The police sirens get closer as they drive away.

Tre returns home to a furious Furious, who doesn’t say a word. The next morning, Doughboy quickly forgives Tre for having bailed the night before. He knows that Tre has a chance of escaping, whereas he doesn’t. His speech at the end is highly political, where he points out how the media reports on foreign violence, but not on the violence at home.

“I turned on the TV this morning, they had this shit on about… about living in a violent world. Showed all these foreign places… I started thinking, man, either they don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood. Man, all this foreign shit, and they didn’t have shit on my brother, man.”

Doughboy was killed two weeks later. Tre and Brandi made it out, to college in Atlanta.

The Purge (2013) — 5/10

The backstory is that the United States was taken over by the New Founding Fathers in 2014. Their aim was to avoid a civil war by, um, winning it before it starts, I guess? Anyway, they introduce something called The Purge, where there is no law-enforcement for twelve hours, from 19:00 to 07:00 one day per year. As you can imagine, it’s pretty much a time when a lot of poor people get killed, culling the useless from the population. Typical libertarian spank-bank stuff. Guess what? More fantasy: by 2022, there is virtually no crime outside of the purge window and nearly everyone has a job. That’s quite a spank bank. It’s like it was written by someone from Reason magazine.

James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) drives home to his swanky home in a gated community. He sells security systems. He’s sold a lot of them this year—many of them to his neighbors. He eats dinner with his wife Mary (Lena Headey) and his kids Zoey (Adelaide Kane) and weird little Charlie (Max Burkholder). They lock themselves in for the night, barricading the whole house from top to bottom.

After a while, a Bloody Stranger (Edwin Hodge) appears in the street and Charlie, feeling bad for him, opens up the house to let him in. They get the house locked back up just as the man gets inside. Meanwhile, upstairs, Zoey’s boyfriend Henry had somehow already snuck in before. They’re making out, but Henry says he has something else he has to do: he has to tell her Dad how he really feels. He tells he that he’s going to tell James about their undying love, but he’s actually there to purge him. He’s a terrible shot, though. James isn’t. Zoey gets Henry back upstairs, but he expires on the floor of her bedroom. The Bloody Stranger has meanwhile disappeared somewhere in the giant house.

A random gang of rich, white kids with murder on their minds show up to chew a tremendous amount of scenery, demanding that the Sandin’s release their prey. Or else. Or else what? Or else they’ll get a bunch of construction equipment to tear down Sandin’s house’s defenses and get him anyway—but also killing the Sandins. Cool. Cool. I honestly don’t know what we’re supposed to think of them. I don’t think they’re scary. They’re pretentious and ridiculous. But maybe we’re supposed to hate them especially more because of the inordinate power they’ve arrogated to themselves on account of their class privilege? I dunno. Seems a little highbrow for this movie.

The leader shoots his best friend as an example? WTH? This makes absolutely no sense. There is no pressure for the kids to purge, but when they do, they’re so psychotic that they shoot their own best friends, just to set an example? And then everyone else just drags away his body with no questions asked? I get that they’re trying to get us to believe that it’s a cult, but give us some foreplay, for God’s sake.

The teenage purgers cut off the power to the house. At this point—once they shut off the lights—the movie gets really boring for a while. The family members all spend what seems like an eternity walking around their mansion with weak flashlights, looking for the homeless guy that Charlie let in. Charlie eventually finds him with a stupid little robot and, whatever, the guy kidnaps family members and they go back and forth until they realize that the youth outside is probably going to kill them all anyway, so they might as well team up and fight back.

The Purgers are inside the house. Mayhem ensues, after a fashion. There are a bunch of set pieces. Charlie sees other neighbors approaching—none too pleased with the Sandins having made their tremendous fortune off of selling them their security systems. They’re there to have their revenge on Purge Night. With the help of the Bloody Stranger, they turn the tables—though not before James gets stabbed—and wait out the rest of the night, with the neighbors captured and all of the teenaged Purgers already lying dead all around the house.

It wasn’t nearly as good as its reputation and the several sequels that followed. I won’t be watching any of them.