Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.01

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.

1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) — 6/10
2. Voyeur (2017) — 4/10
3. The Fundamentals of Caring (2016) — 9/10
4. The Old Guard (2020) — 3/10
5. Mute (2018) — 7/10
6. Nuhr in Berlin (2016) — 7/10
7. Dany Boon: Des Hauts-De-France (2018) — 8/10
8. Fucking Berlin (2016) — 7/10
9. The Pianist (2002) — 10/10
10. Ricky Gervais: Armageddon (2023) — 9/10

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) — 6/10

This movie is basically a collection of skits that follows a rough storyline.

1. We meet King Arthur (Graham Chapman) as he’s searching for other knights to join his quest. He’s accompanied by his squire (Terry Gilliam), who carries all of his stuff and bangs coconut shells together while Arthur pretends to be riding a horse.
2. Arthur encounters a knight in a castle who catapults a cow at him.
3. Arthur encounters the Constitutional Peasant.
4. Arthur relates the tale of having gotten Excalibur from the Lady in the Lake (the “moistened bink.”)
5. Arthur meets and defeats the Black Knight (John Cleese), whose limbs he hacks off (“it’s only a flesh wound”)
6. He observes a witch trial, where he recruits Sir Bedevere the Wise (Terry Jones), Sir Lancelot the Brave (John Cleese), Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin), and Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir-Lancelot (Eric Idle).
7. They do a musical number at Camelot (“Spamalot”), but quickly move on.
8. God orders them to find the holy grail.
9. They encounter the French Taunter (“I fart in your general direction.”)
10. They split up.
11. A modern-day historian filming a documentary on the Arthurian legends is killed by an unknown knight on horseback, triggering a police investigation. (This will be important later.)
12. They encounter the three-headed Knights Who Say Ni
13. Galahad ends up in a castle full of lusty women who want to be punished. Lancelot rescues him. Because he’s an idiot who can’t read the room.
14. Lancelot storms a castle to rescue a woman being held against her will (“huge tracts of land.”), but the cry for help turns out to have come from an effeminate prince. Lancelot is not not into it.
15. They get to a cave where the location of the Grail is hidden. It is guarded by the Rabbit of Caerbannog.
16. After it kills several of the “red shirt” knights who’d just joined the party, they use the Holy Hand Grenade to vanquish the rabbit.
17. They read the inscription inside the cave to reveal that they must find the castle of Arggh.
18. A cave monster gets the brother leading them (another “red shirt”), but the rest get away when the animator suffers a heart attack in mid-sketch.
19. They get to the Bridge of Death, which crosses the Gorge of Eternal Peril. There they are asked the Questions Three by the bridge-keeper (Terry Gilliam, at his most gruesome). (“Blue. No, green!” and “African or European Swallow?”)
20. Lancelot is arrested for having killed the historian earlier
21. Arthur and Bedevere proceed to the island on what feels like an interminable boat voyage.
22. The French have occupied the castle of Arghhh (“I blow my nose at you.”)
23. They are repelled by the French, reaching shore on foot (after having gotten to the island castle by boat).
24. They gather a ragtag army of knights that kind of appear out of nowhere. They charge the shoreline, headed for the water and, eventually, maybe, the castle.
25. Two police cars cut them off, arresting Arthur and Bedevere for the hit-and-run on the historian
26. One officer holds up his hand to cover the lens. The screen goes dark. The end.
27. The final five minutes are just the same 30 seconds of organ music, repeated over and over, on a black screen on which credits never roll. This is probably the most subversisvely funny thing in the movie. It plays on the frustration of expectation.

It’s not aged as well as I’d hoped it would, but it still has its moments.

Voyeur (2017) — 4/10

This is a documentary about how Gay Talese came to write a book documenting the story of a man Gerald Foos, who built a motel with the express purpose of spying on its customers. He built a spying network into the ceiling, where he could range along the rooms, looking down upon the inhabitants. He did this for decades.

The Articles Editor of the New Yorker Susan Morrison opines that he is “a sociopath”, which, honestly, is exactly the kind of superficial judgment I would expect to hear from her, given her position and appearance. I prejudged her and I was dead-on. Is wanting to watch other people sociopathic? His story is that he basically watched his own personal reality TV for decades. He was hoping to watch people have sex.

None of that is outside of societal norms, except that the voyeurism happened unbeknownst to the victims. I’m not saying it’s legal or moral but most of what he did—watch strangers do stuff—is what millions do every single day. And there’s a giant industry that profits from it. That’s not even close to sociopathic. It’s just illegal.

No? Billions of people watch other people every damned day, most of the time people they don’t know. Those people are nearly almost always aware that someone’s watching them, but a lot of times they aren’t. How many fail videos are there, taken from security cameras? From doorbell cameras? From camera-phones? Almost none of those people are aware that they’re being filmed. Is it sociopathic to watch those? Is it sociopathic to watch pornography? When something is done by nearly everyone, then it’s not sociopathic by definition.

No, I think the guy just loved doing it. He documented it like a lab researcher, too, perhaps to make it seem like the time he spent doing it was worthwhile. But he generally seems to have a pretty obsessive personality. He has about 2.5-3 million baseball cards, with 1 million of them sitting in unopened boxes.

This is a classic Netflix documentary: it blows up about 30 minutes of content to 90 minutes. The last half-an-hour is just about whether Talese’s book is going to tank or not, or whether Gerald was lying about part of what he said, or whether Gay is even a journalist, as he didn’t even check out any basic facts.

It’s chock-full of long interviews with Gerald and his wife Anita. Almost none of these are interesting, not really. It’s just kind of uncomfortable to watch, but I’m sure I’m in the tiny mintority here, as people love to watch other people. I don’t know how many montages they can cram in of people getting dressed—usually Gerald or Gay.

Gay is kind of a raging ego, though. I came out of this with a much worse opinion than when I went in. I know my Mom had liked him, for whatever reason, probably because he had an Italian background and was big in the late 60s/early 70s when she lived in New York.

The Fundamentals of Caring (2016) — 9/10

Ben Benjamin (Paul Rudd) is a freshly minted caregiver. His first job is with Trevor (Craig Roberts), a young man with Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. He and his strong-willed mother Elsa (Jennifer Ehle) had moved from England about nine months ago. The young man is funny, has a ludicrously strict schedule, and is soon getting along with Ben as the only caregiver he’s ever liked.

They go back and forth, Elsa finds out that Ben had lost his own son three years ago. Ben still hasn’t signed his wife Janet’s (Julia Denton) divorce papers. Trevor cons Ben into taking him on a trip to see roadside attractions and the world’s deepest pit. After his mother reluctantly agrees, Trevor starts to chicken out.

“Trevor: Well done. That was very heroic how you jumped in there without missing a beat. But I’m sorry, I can’t do it.
Ben: Why? This was your idea.
Trevor: I know, but I think I was caught up in the moment. That moment being you telling me to go fuck myself repeatedly.
Ben: This is great. The open road. You know what? I’m going to call the Make-a-Wish Foundation and I’m going to get Katy Perry to meet us in a motel in Missoula. What song do you want her to sing while she’s doin’ ya?
Trevor: [long pause] Fireworks.”

They’re on the road. 90 East.

Lots of newness. Trevor’s grumpy. But oho! A real-live chick. As he rolls by, she says “Cool fucking sneakers.” He says, “Mall.” His game needs work.

He finally eats a Slim Jim, then pretends to be choking, which he’s done before. It looks like it’s real this time. Ben veers to a stop. It’s not real. Trevor’s just fucking with him. Again.

At “Rufus” the world’s biggest bovine, some local guys have to carry Trevor’s wheelchair upstairs because they have no wheelchair access.

They’re at a restaurant and the girl from the other stop is outside, hitching a ride. Her name is Dot (Selena Gomez). Her face is very round and her voice is very deep and gravelly. She smokes what looks like clove cigarettes. She calls Ben Mervin.

“Trevor: Hi, Mervin.
Ben: Shut up. Or tomorrow I’ll put your clothes on inside-out.
Trevor: [Laughs out loud.]”

They pick up Peaches, whose car is broken down. She’s pregnant, and headed to Nebraska. Her husband is Afghanistan. They’re now a foursome on the open road.

At the motel, Trevor kind of works up the courage to ask Dot on a dinner date. Well, he convinces Ben to decide he doesn’t want to eat, which Dot sees through immediately. “Pick me up when you’re ready to go.”

Ben wants to give Trevor his pills before dinner, but then can’t find them. They’re panicking.

“Ben: I don’t know what happened.
Trevor: I know what happened. You’re an idiot!
Ben: I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. I’m not an idiot. … I’m hilarious [shows the bag of pills]
Trevor: Oh… Oh, my hands are numb. Are you kidding me? This is when you decide to play the prank? When I’m about to go on my first date?
Ben: It just seemed funnier that way.
Trevor: [long pause] Agreed.”

They stop in Salt Lake City to see Trevor’s father (Frederick Weller). It turns out that Bob hadn’t written all of those letters that Trevor had never read. Instead, it was his mother.

Trevor is shattered. He has a completely predictable fallout with Ben. He wants to go home. Dot puts her goddamned foot down. “We’re going to the pit.”

At the pit, Ben confronts the car that’s been following them for a while. It’s Cash, Dot’s Dad (Bobby Cannavale). He asks to be allowed to continue tailing them until Dot gets to where she’s going.

The phone rings. The gang needs help at the bottom of the pit. Peaches is having her baby. Why does Ben have to do this? He’s the caregiver. Dozens of people around, but Ben’s the one.

After the baby’s here and Peaches is taken away in an ambulance, Dot makes up with her dad and decides to let him drive her to Denver instead.

“Cash: What’s wrong with him?
Ben: Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. He’ll be lucky if he makes it to 30.
Cash: Is it rare?
Ben: It affects one out of every 3,500 males.
Cash: Life’s a real class-A bitch, isn’t it.
Ben: Not always. [They watch Dot and Trevor say goodbye.]”

As Dot’s leaving:

“Ben: Well, take care of yourself in Denver. There are a lot of perverts there.
Dot: Yeah? And how would you know?
Ben: We all keep in touch.”

Coda:

“Ben: [typing his book] Soon after our trip, I resigned as his caregiver, but continued on as his friend. Two weeks ago, when I went to visit Trevor on his 21st birthday, I found him lying on the floor of his bedroom, finally at peace. The new caregiver, a kind woman in her 60s named Anna, was sobbing. She, like me, knew just how special he was. He was faking, of course. Anna quit the next day.”

I quite liked this movie. Pitch-perfect. All of the actors were great and natural. Would watch again.

The Old Guard (2020) — 3/10

This movie is f&@king terrible. It is so ham-handed and terribly made. It’s like a bad TV show. Even Charlize Theron can’t begin to save this thing. It’s so blatantly and stupidly manipulative. It’s entirely too long. They paper over terrible acting with a terrible hip-hop soundtrack that’s supposed to inspire “mood”. The acting is seriously about as bad as some of the more home-made-looking shorts on Dust. The fight choreography is so clumsy that it serves as a reminder for how much work goes into making good battle choreography.

I’m loath to describe the plot, but I’ll do it for my future self, I guess. It’s about a group of four immortal warriors who go around doing good deeds, like assassinating people for the CIA, but for good reasons. They agree to a mission with a dude from the CIA. It’s a trap, arranged by a big pharma company that wants to capture them to figure out their secret to immortality. They get away, surprise, surprise. They are captured again, to no-one’s surprise. They ostracize the member who betrayed them.

They end up getting the guy who betrayed them in the CIA to be the Charlie to their Angels. Some immortal lady they talked about having been thrown into the ocean in an iron maiden appears at the end, probably in the vain hope of inspiring a sequel. Oh, Jesus, it’s in the works.

All of the people are terrible. The ones who are good people are terrible actors. It’s a shit show.

Mute (2018) — 7/10

Leo (Alexander Skarsgård) is man living in a futuristic city who, as a young Amish boy, had his throat struck by a boat propellor. His parents refused treatment and he’s permanently mute now. The world is…interesting and rendered quite believably (if you don’t think about it too much). It looks nice. It almost seems as if the Amish have ended up in this world, as well. The PA announcements are in English and German.

It turns out that they’re in Berlin, but that the Americans are even more deeply nested there in the future than they are now. It’s like the cold war never ended, and has gotten hot. Also, there’s at least one Amish person living in Berlin. Either Germany has Amish people or he traveled quite a way in an airplane.

One of the main ideas is that the U.S. military has on AWOL problem. One of them is Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd), who was a medic in the military. He sports a gigantic mustache, has the standard Rudd-ian charm, but is darker. He’s a bad man. He’s only interested in himself and the welfare of his daughter Josie (apparently played by twins Mia-Sophie Bastin and Lea-Marie Bastin), for whom he doesn’t really know how to care. He takes her from seedy spot to seedy spot, but she’s a good sport, constantly drawing in silence. We don’t hear a word from her until the end.

Cactus Bill works for Maksim (Gilbert Owuor), a local Russian gang leader who needs Bill’s services to patch up his soldiers. Bill works with Duck (Justin Theroux), who’s also a former medic, but isn’t AWOL. Duck is not a good person either. He works on cybernetic prosthetics, but is mostly interested in the little kids, if you know what I mean. This would eventually result in a rift between Bill and Duck, as Bill is livid that Duck might be interested in Josie.

Cactus Bill’s story arc is that he’s trying to get Maksim to provide him with travel papers for himself and Josie, so he can get the hell out of Germany.

Amish Leo is a bartender in Maksim’s bar. His girlfriend Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh) works there as a waitress. There’s a lot of back-and-forth, but it’s not really that complicated. Naadirah is Josie’s mother. Cactus Bill gets mad about her relationship with Leo and kills her. Just kills her. He’s a psycho, as we slowly learn over the course of the film as the Rudd-ian patina wears away to reveal the monster beneath. He is not a sympathetic character, is what I’m saying.

Duck is just as bad, really. Duck’s messing with Leo because he keeps sending Leo messages on the phone that Naadirah had given him. Leo barely knows how to use it because he’s Amish, so we forgive him his not knowing that all messages don’t necessarily come from her. Knowing that Leo is looking for Bill and because Duck is angry with Bill, he leaks their location. Leo grabs a giant and very sturdy bedpost as his weapon and drives over to Maksim’s bar in Maksim’s car, which he’d stolen earlier (he’s kind of going off the rails looking for Naadirah).

Did I mention that Leo is really strong? We see him swimming a few times, holding his breath for a long time, etc. etc. Presumably this is how he’s worked through the trauma of the accident of his youth. We see him taking a deep breath, then downing an entire pint of water very dramatically a few times. This is a Chekhov’s gun, of course.

So Leo cleans house at Maksim’s bar, getting all the way up to Maksim’s office without a shot fired. He cleans Maksim’s clock with the bedpost, grabs Bill’s papers and leaves. At Bill’s house, he finds Nicky (Jannis Niewöhner), another torture victim, in the basement. He frees him, but the poor sonofabitch runs into Bill at the top of the stairs, who’s already back from his fruitless visit to Maksim’s.

Bill tosses Leo the keys to the storage area in the cellar—a classic apparatus of wooden slats that Leo could have pulverized if he hadn’t left his bedpost bludgeon leaning on the bannister by the stairs. Leo finds Naadirah’s body in a plastic bag and hauls her out of there. Bill watches, then grabs his giant hunting knife from its sheath behind his back, tussles with Leo, and realizes to his horror just how goddamned strong Leo is. Leo easily and slowly shoves the knife through Bill’s trachea and out the back of his neck. He leaves him to die slowly on his basement floor. Leo carries Naadirah outside and mourns her, leaning against a tree.

Duck shows up and finds his best friend choking on his own blood on the floor. He decides not to save him because Bill had threatened to reveal his pedophilic predilections and because Bill had brought this on himself by killing Naadirah. Duck grabs Bill’s keys, turns a camera monitor so Bill can see him walking into his daughter’s room, then goes up and grabs Josie. He doesn’t do anything to her right then, but Bill’s dying thoughts will be dominated by knowing that Josie is in Duck’s filthy, filthy hands—and she has no idea of the danger she’s in. Lights out for Bill.

Duck is still pissed that he’s lost his friend, though, so he goes upstairs, finds Leo against the tree and kicks him in the temple, taking him out in one blow. We watch as Duck gives Leo a cybernetic larynx.

Leo awakes in the back of a car, with Duck driving himself and Josie…somewhere that is not Berlin. Duck drives them to a bridge, then drags Leo out onto a bench in the middle. Duck tells Leo that this is where he’d taken that photo of Naadirah that Leo had been showing to everyone. He’d loved her, at least as a friend. Now he’s going to dispose of Leo. He cuts the lock holding a gate closed. No-one knows why there would be a gate there, but it helps the plot, so it’s there.

Duck is the second person that day to be surprised at how strong Leo is. Leo rope-a-dopes Duck and, as Duck grabs him to push him over, Leo locks his arms around him, gulping huge breaths, then tips them both off the bridge. Duck is utterly unprepared and untrained and gives up the ghost quite quickly. Leo swims to the surface to see Josie dangerously close to the edge, looking down at him. She calls to him. He waves her back, then finally croaks out a warning that she understands.

He’s back on the bridge. Josie is comfortable with him. They travel on together. The end.

Nuhr in Berlin (2016) — 7/10

This is a classic standup set from Dieter Nuhr, delivered in Berlin to a relatively sympathetic crowd. He starts off with some red meat for Germans: how silly and stupid Americans are, how uncomprehending they are, and how badly his subtitled comedy show will do when shown on American Netflix. He’s probably right, but it seemed a little overly harsh and not very funny. The laughter came not from the jokes, but from “hurdur Amerikaner sind so DUMM.”

Anyway, he moved on to cleverer stuff. His modus operandi is verbal subterfuge, contrarianism, and reductio ad absurdum. He doesn’t range too far into the absurd, though. He sticks to stuff like the weird Internet, the judgmental Internet, kids these days, women vs. men—the usual fare. He delivers with aplomb and he’s clever—although sometimes his persona of knowing how clever he is threatens to lose the crowd, he generally wins them back when he’s able to convince them he’s just kidding, he’s just playing a role, he’s just trying to make them laugh. If they’d just relax and lean into it, they’d be having fun instead of judging.

He’s also very much against the overly judgmental and vindictive style of the moment, even though his own personal favorite saying is, “Wenn man keine Ahnung hat: Einfach mal Fresse halten,” which is good advice, but sometimes lands a bit poorly. I think he’s an intelligent, funny guy with interesting takes—even if I have no idea which of them he actually believes in, it doesn’t matter.

I watched it in German with German subtitles (most of it while riding the indoor bike).

Dany Boon: Des Hauts-De-France (2018) — 8/10

This is a one-man show. Dany starts out singing a little song, one that he apparently began his career with. He tells us about himself—although the audience clearly knows everything already, laughing at the appropriate spots. E.g., when he talks about how a promoter/agent had told him what a bad idea it would be to emphasize his having come from from the north, the Ch’tis. He was told to clean up his accent, then laughs and says, yes, having focused on the Ch’tis was the greatest mistake he’d made in his career (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis was his breakout film; it’s pretty awesome).

He moves on to a long bit about how slow and inefficient La Poste is, doing a lot of pantomime. From there, he’s talking about the old telephone book, and how it helped him find one of the most famous people in the Ch’tis and helped him get his first gig. He pantomimes the people and his first gig. He was attacked by the owner’s dog, with the four besotted members of the audience cheering them both on. Afterward, they wonder where the dog’s gone.

Next up is miming and robot noises. He segues into pretending to be a massively over-musclebound friend of his—Fred Martens—who’d been a bouncer at a night club called Macumba. He is also not particularly clever. Hilarity ensues. It’s pretty lowbrow, but it’s perfect for my French, as he’s a very physical comedian. It’s bad for me because he speaks very quickly and in a strong northern accent. I learned a lot of words, though. I had the subtitles on in French, and had my online dictionary ready.

Next up, he accompanies himself on the piano with an ode to Ch’Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, where he grew up. His voice is actually pretty good. Apparently, in 2016, the region was renamed to “les Hauts-de-France”, eradicating his heritage with a new name. He is not happy about it. He goes into all of the name changes, how the region welcomes you with a new sign, how you no longer say “wassingue” for mop, but “serpillière” (which is, presumably, more sophisticated). Belgium is now called “le Royaume du Dessus des Hauts-de-France d’En-Dessous”.

The joke is that renaming the region doesn’t change its inhabitants at all. Still hicks. Still proud of it. This is quite good, actually. He segues into a demo—with slides—of the “new GPS” with all of the new names and regions. He has a lot to say about the French government’s desire to “simplify”.

The next sketch is about Euro Disney, about the “it’s a small world” ride. He calls the song a virus that even Alzheimer’s couldn’t eradicate. He accompanies himself on the guitar to a French rewrite of the song. He goes off-script and rewrites it with the “world as it is”.

Now he’s onto the “youth of today”. No reading, no writing, no expressing themselves, no consonants—he’s kidding, of course. Kind of. He shows a WhatsApp conversation. It’s actually quite brilliant seeing a foreign language mangled into another, shorter one, as we do with numbers-for-letters, etc.

He is now pretending to read a book, a work of great literature from the French canon: Harlequin. The mispronunciations and misapprehensions he pretends to have, as a young reader, are … f&$king hilarious. They just are. He reads a word “sulfureuse” that he doesn’t know, assumes it’s a family name, then checks himself because “it doesn’t start with a capital letter”. Even the subtitles show what’s he’s pronouncing, which aren’t actual words. “Un petit frigo a braguette” and so on.

He then demonstrates how to read a book, not how he first tried it—across both pages. Stop at the fold, read until the number—which isn’t part of the story—jump back up to the top, over the fold. Clever, actually. I’d never thought about how I’d had to learn how to read a book—and that those familiar with only screens might be tripped up.

He talks about older people a bit, but then moves right back to teenagers and watching his own children mutate into people he doesn’t recognize. He mimes an exorcism of his teenager. He says that he went to a child psychologist because of the aggression, but they were too far gone. He was sent to a lion-tamer at the circus instead, who informs him that the only language that beasts—and teenagers—obey is German. He says it worked like a charm and now his teenagers jump through flaming hoops, and he can place his head in the mouth of the eldest without fear. He mimes a morning at home.

He mimes a bit about having a bad back, talks about getting older, and having his body start to fail him. He cracks everything, then plays some nice jazz piano, breaking off to crack his knuckles grotesquely. He’s quite talented. He pretends that the only song he remembers in its entirety is—wait for it—”It’s a Small World”. He dedicates the show to his mother, then sings a song in Spanish for her. He spits on the consonants, then leaves them off. It’s a bit overdone, but the public loves it. The finale is great. He’s really talented.

I watched it in French with French subtitles.

Fucking Berlin (2016) — 7/10

Sonja (Svenja Jung) is a 20-year-old student in Berlin. She studies mathematics. Her best friend in school is Jule (Charley Ann Schmutzler). She is wild, but harmless. She just wants to get laid. Sonja hooks up with bartender Milan (Christoph Letkowski). It’s on-again, off-again with him, but she moves on, for now.

Sonja’s enjoying the night life. She meets Ladja (Mateusz Dopieralski). They move in together. They’re super-good at partying, but bad at making money. She loses her job as a waitress because she’s only got time for Ladja and her studies.

She gets a job as a camgirl. Money’s coming in. Things are better. With the job and her studies, she hardly ever sees Ladja. She gets fed up with that job and decides to move on. On Christmas, she calls a madam Anja (Judith Steinhäuser) who runs a small brothel out of her apartment. When she gets back to her apartment, she find Ladja on the steps. They’re back together.

It’s back to partying, studying, and satisfying customers’ kinks without doing more than hand stuff (and maybe mouth stuff, it looked like?) It’s relatively innocent. She becomes good friends with an older guy Karl-Heinz (Axel Gottschick), who just likes to take pictures. He gives her a square meal, paying her as well to sit under the table and photograph up her skirt. He tells her to come by every Sunday for a meal whenever she wants.

This is all not enough because the party life is having an impact. Ladja spent all of her money on a few all-night ragers where the two of them tore through Berlin. She wasn’t aware it was her money fueling it, though.

When she’s helping a new recruit at Anja’s, Anja walks in and says that there’s a customer who wants to fuck (not there for a kink). It’s Sonja’s first time. It’s her math professor, who doesn’t recognize her. With that dam broken, she starts to gladly take the extra €50. As she says, at first, it was with guys who she’d have gone home with sober, then with guys who she’d have to have been drunk to go home with, then with those she’d have to have been really hammered to go home with, then it didn’t matter anymore.

She comes to view Anja’s Oasis (die Oase) as her home, the people there as her family. Anja tells them that the Oasis is going out of business. After that, things get tougher; they have to take whatever customers they can get.

Ladja still doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t seem to be trying too hard to find out. On the way to a club, one of her customers recognizes her and calls her Mascha (her trade name).She introduces Ladja so that the customer doesn’t talk too much. But then the two start speaking Russian with one another. It’s clear that the customer told Ladja that she doesn’t work at a call-center.

At the club, Ladja is watching her dance, lost in thought. She meets Milan in the bathroom. Jule is mad at her because she’d had her eye on Milan (I guess?) and asks him if he’s one of her johns. He still wants her, although she asks him why? He has everything one could want.

Ladja locks her out of her apartment. She calls Milan. They hook right the hell up, doing it standing up on the balcony, with her skinny ass right up on the railing. He tells her he loves her. She wakes in his apartment in the morning. There’s several hundred euros waiting for her.

She gets to school and Jule has told everyone that she’s a prostitute. Jule is tearing into her, but at least one girl defends her. The Oasis has a new owner. It’s the dude who ran the cam-girl shop she used to work at. You can imagine that it’s going to be great. We see her take a job for €40 (she had to haggle) for a gang-gang with five guys watching. She pukes on the guy under her. She’s takes a pregnancy test.

Ladja shows up at the Oasis, sees her, then runs away. It’s unclear what the fuck he was looking for there. Such a child. A little Polish man-child. One of her friends clocks him. He judges her pretty harshly considering he’s told her that he’d been peddling his ass to men before he met her.

She meets one of her old friends from the Oasis who said that she’d be leaving to get straight. She’s back on drugs. She asks for money. Sonja takes her whole wad out. Peels off €30 or so. Her friend peels off the larger part, smiles at her, and walks away. OK, I guess?

She visits Milan to give him back his wallet.

I deducted a star because the ending was pretty cheesy. Oh, this was apparently based on a true story. It still felt a bit trite.

I watched it German. There were some cool Berlin accents in there.

The Pianist (2002) — 10/10

The eponymous Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a pianist, perhaps the finest in Europe, living in Warsaw with his bourgeois family. It is 1942. The family watches as their lives become increasingly circumscribed. As with most films of this kind, we are invited to see how bad it was for those who had grand pianos and hand-woven carpets to sell, for whom there was at least somewhat of a buffer, at least at first.

The unnamed thousands who simply died or were killed immediately don’t have an interesting story to tell. We do see them in this film, though, in the form of corpses splayed on the sidewalks, either having been clearly shot or just having starved or frozen to death. The other people hurry around them. People in general are shown to not be helpful, to not have engaged in petty acts of resistance. Even those commanded to lie on the ground, do so, seemingly in the hope that there is somehow a conclusion other than the obvious final one.

Others turn their backs and raise their hands. They are indoctrinated by the desperation of their situation, I suppose. It’s impossible to judge them. The situation is so mind-bending, so horrifying. One thinks “I would have resisted”, but then, perhaps, one convinces oneself that this act of resistance would be futile, better to wait it out until it means something. It is only later, when you see that you’ve ended in a cul-de-sac that you realize you had nothing to lose by standing up for yourself earlier, when you still had some pride, some dignity. Now you have nothing, and you gained nothing for having given what you had away. Oh, to know in advance that your adversaries are heartless and will take everything you have no matter what you do.

This movie covers all of the bases of Warsaw Ghetto horror, hitting all the notes of Holocaust-porn. The Germans raid an apartment at night, demand everyone stand up, then throw the man in the wheelchair off the balcony for not following orders. A woman asks where they’re being taken and an officer shoots her point-blank in the forehead without changing facial expression or breaking stride. A German officer shows up, selects nine men out of a group of a couple dozen, then orders them to lie down. He walks along, shooting each in the back of his head with his Luger. It’s only an eight-shot, so he has to wait to reload for the last one. A German steals an old man’s violin. Petty things.

The family—along with all of the other Jews in the city—are pushed out of their apartment, moved to a much smaller one in the ghetto. They are moved into camps in the streets. Some of them are part of work gangs. A wall is built to block off the ghetto. It is horrifying. The cruelty is nearly indescribable. The Germans pound on the Jews, enjoying it like they’re in the ninth circle of hell.

Wlad’s entire family is taken away, on a train. Wlad is saved by the chief of the Jewish ghetto police, who are collaborating, but still capable of small kindnesses. Wlad ends up on a work gang, in the ghetto. He is finally allowed to take part in some minor smuggling operations for the resistance. He eventually asks them to help him get out of the ghetto. They tell him that it’s easier getting out than surviving on the outside, but agree to help. He contacts his old friends, who help him into an apartment, a mansard, where he lives alone for at least half a year. He is visited once or twice a week by his friends.

He watches a heroic, if ultimately futile, resistance attack on the Germans in the street. The battle ends with a giant hole in the wall separating the Ghetto from the German area, and the entire resistance building bombed and in flames.

One day, his handler appears to tell him that the jig is up. His own cover has been blown, the two friends have already been arrested, and it’s only a matter of time before the Germans find the apartment. He chooses to stay, seeing that he has no chance on the outside. One day, he hears a car stop outside and hears boots and German voices in the stairwell. They don’t find him. Days later, he is running out of food. In his search, he tips a shelf and shatters plates. The horrible lady next door demands he open up or she’ll call the police. Wlad collects his things and creeps out of the apartment, but she’s waiting. She demands his papers. He flees into the night.

He goes to the address of his emergency contact. They shuffle him off to another apartment, this one deep in the German zone. They take care of him, but it’s long weeks between food deliveries. One of the guys complains that it’s hard to buy food with no money; Wlad gives him his watch, “Food is more important than time.” Adrian Brody has the perfect body type for this film—he’s naturally gaunt. He’s in bed the next time they visit, delirious, starving. He has jaundice. They bring a doctor.

The next and last time they visit, they bring news that the allies are getting closer—the Americans on one side and the Russians on the other. Wlad recovers. Weeks later, he sees the resistance—much stronger now—assault the German headquarters across the street, using bombs, automatic rifles, and a grenade-launcher.

Days later, the city is in shambles. His water tap no longer delivers water. He hears a tumult in the hallway, “Get out! The Germans have surrounded the building!” He discovers that he is locked in his apartment. A tank rolls into view outside the window, lumbering into place, ponderously taking aim and blowing part of the floor of his building apart. He escapes through the now-accessible apartment next door. But he flees upstairs. Hearing more Germans, he escapes onto the roof. More Germans shoot at him from across the way. He gets away, fleeing down to street level. The resistance is everywhere and well-armed but so are are the Germans still. He hides behind trash cans in the street and falls asleep, despite the battle.

When he wakes, it is nighttime. He ventures back into the street. Troops approach. He drops to the street and blends in with the dozens of bodies already there. He’s in a hospital, looking for food, looking for water. Gunshots and explosions sound in the distance, no longer close. No water, no electricity. He makes a fire and cooks two large root vegetables he’d found. He eats millet dry, by the handful.

The Germans are back, cleaning up the bodies, burning them. What is left of the resistance is marched past. The Germans retain control for now. They’re back with flamethrowers. He escapes out a back window, twisting an ankle on the fall. He’s got moxie, though. Over the wall. The city is in utter ruins. A brilliant shot of him walking away, looking like that lone penguin heading into the wastes of Antarctica.

He scavenges the wastes, looking for food, hair and beard long, pants held up with a rope, his body emaciated, limping on his damaged ankle. He cradles a can of pickles that he’s found, escaping from the next German voices to the attic, right up to the top. He has the can, but no can-opener. He pulls up the ladder.

The Germans are gone. He’s back downstairs. He finds fireplace implements to open the can. It drops. He lets it roll away because there is a German (Thomas Kretschmann), impeccably dressed, watching him. You can see Wlad’s breath, but not the German’s. The contrast between the two could not be more striking. The German asks if he lives there, if he works there. Ludicrous questions. The house stands alone in a wasteland of bombed-out buildings and rubble.

Wlad tells him that he a pianist. The German leads him to the piano that Wlad had heard being played earlier. He sits. Calms his hands. It’s heart-wrenching. He beings to play. It’s Chopin—Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23. It’s beautiful. The moonlight shines in on him, heavenly. The German officer watches and listens. His face reveals almost an awareness of what he and his country have done, watching this ruin of a man, capable of producing such beauty with his hands. Or maybe he regrets a bit having to kill him. Who knows? He’s nearly inscrutable. Wlad continues to play, perhaps in the hope that, as long as he continues to play, he can live. The German lets him live. He tells his driver he’d found nothing.

The house becomes a German Stützpunkt. Dozens of German officers are on the ground floor, busily administering their war. The officer returns to Wlad, He throws him a package of food.

“Wlad: Was bedeutet die ganze Schiesserei?
German Officer: Die Russen. Auf die andere Flussseite. Ein paar Wochen müssen sie noch aushalten. Mehr nicht.”

They meet once more. he brings a lot more food, and even gives him his coat when he sees that Wlad is freezing.

The Germans are gone. It’s dead winter. People are there. he goes out to meet them, still wearing the German greatcoat. People scream that he’s German. Soldiers shoot at him, throw grenades, he manages to yell to them in Polish that he’s Polish. They finally believe him. He is saved.

A friend of his leaves the camp in which he’d been imprisoned, still alive, walking past a pen full of captured Germans. One of them is the German who’d helped Wlad. He jumps up to ask him if he’s heard of Szpilman. He begs him to tell Wlad that he’s there.

Wlad is playing piano again. His friend watches from the booth. They are both overcome with emotion, but Wlad doesn’t miss a note. They actually return to the field to find the German, but the whole camp is gone. The Russians have taken him away. His name was Captain Wilm Hosenfeld and he did his part to gift the world the playing of Wlad Szpilman, who lived in Warsaw until he died in 2000 at 88 years old. The credits say that Hosenfeld died in a Soviet camp seven years later. This was, apparently, also a true story.

This is a powerful and extremely well-made movie with an absolutely brilliant Adrien Brody as Wlad. And it is chock-full of my favorite pianist’s music. I think, given the current conflict in the Middle East, that it would be extremely illuminating to re-dub the ghetto slave-camp parts of this movie with all of the German parts in Hebrew and all of the English parts in Arabic.

Ricky Gervais: Armageddon (2023) — 9/10

This is a pretty great show that’s very much classic Gervais: interesting insights about how our culture works combined with shocking humor. The quotes below are taken from the beautifully formatted Ricky Gervais: Armageddon transcript (Scraps from the loft).

He starts off by examining the word fascist and the odd trend of explicitly saying that you’re not a fascist in online bios. Then he notes how you’re not legally allowed to call someone gay when they’re not, but you are allowed to call someone straight when they’re not. He slags on Britain’s obsession with illegal immigrants. Then, it’s on to climate change and armageddon.

“We’re gonna be the first generation that future generations are jealous of, right? ‘Cause we had it all, and we’re using it all up. We’re using up all the fresh water. We’re using up all the fossil fuel. Usually, you look back in history and you feel sorry. You go, “Oh, how did they live like that? Oh, how did they get around?” “No indoor toilets.” I’ve got nine toilets in my house.

“And sometimes, I just run around flushing ’em for a laugh. Like that. [audience laughing] Just so that in 40 years’ time, Greta Thunberg has to shit out of a window.

“I’ve got 28 radiators. I always have them on full. Then I put the air con on full, and it sort of settles at about 20 degrees. A lovely… It’s how the cat likes it. She loves it at 20 degrees. ”

Next it’s disabled people swimming with dolphins, big families, and then legacies.

“Eminent people going, “There is a statue of me in the town square.” And now, they’re pulling down the statues. “Pull down this fucking statue.” “Why?” “He was a slave trader. Pull down the fucking statue.” “He built the hospital. Should we pull that down?” “No, leave the hospital.””

Then there’s sort of a meta-bit about infant mortality, Africa, “Jeff and Tracy”, growing up, and back to pedophile stories from his youth. China, Homelessness, drug-use, little people, actors playing only roles to which their identities conform, then cultural appropriation.

“[…] in my day, it was considered a good thing to swap ideas with other cultures, with other nations, to share things with other races, to assimilate. It was the opposite of racist. Now it’s racist. Gwen Stefani got in trouble in her last video ’cause she had her blonde hair in dreadlocks. People were going, “No. Black people invented dreadlocks.” “You can’t have ’em. You’re white. That’s racist.” Jamie Oliver got in trouble when he put out an authentic jerk chicken recipe. “No. Black people invented that.” “You can’t have it. You’re white. That’s racist.” Now, Black people, they use the n-word, don’t they? We invented that!”

On to critical race theory.

“Critical race theory, have you heard of that? Being taught in schools now, particularly in trendy areas like L.A., to, like, five-year-old kids and six-year-old kids. If you haven’t heard of it, in a nutshell, critical race theory says that all white people are racist. We’re born racist, and we continue to be racist, ’cause we’re affording the privilege of a racist society set up by our forefathers. Okay? So basically, all white people are racist, and there’s nothing we can do about it, which is a relief.”

Philosophical:

“I think the world’s gonna get harder and harder to understand as I get older and more bewildered. A new dogma arises in the name of “progress.” Now, dogma is never progressive, however new and trendy. But I think soon I’ll be outnumbered.”

This segues into talking about a terrible pair of pants he’d ordered online:

“Now, I don’t know what sweat shop they were made in, or what little eight-year-old Chinese kid made them, but he should be fucking punished […]

“And I was looking up where to fucking complain to get him fired, right? [audience laughing] And I found out that these kids only get two dollars a day in these fucking places, right? But what happened to pride in your work? Do you know what I mean? [audience laughing]

“And I can tell some of you are thinking, “But he didn’t think Ricky Gervais would order them.” Maybe he should be told there’s a chance that Ricky Gervais might order them. His owner should sit him down, right, and say, “If Ricky Gervais orders these and complains, I’m gonna rape your mummy again.””

He’s back to talking about the end of the world, and “disableds”, as he’s still delighted to call people with disabilities. He says he’s grown because they used to be called “crippled”. On this topic, he starts to examine various films through the filter of the web site Does the Dog Die?, a site that started off as a way for people to check whether a dog died in a film, and has since expanded to include all sorts of emotional triggers.

“Check it out. Schindler’s List. Right? Someone says, “Are there any fat jokes?”

“[audience murmuring]

“Would that make this worse? Wh… Imagine the real thing. Imagine I’m in a concentration camp, right? I’m naked. Everyone around me is naked. We’ve got a commandant herding us towards the gas chamber, and he goes, “Move it, fatty.” Right? And I go, “Rude.” [audience laughing] “Nope.” “That has ruined the whole experience if I’m honest.”

“[audience laughing]

“Someone asks, “Is there hate speech?”

“Yeah, there is.”

Wrapup:

“Another theme of the show has been, “words change, and I’m woke, ha-ha.” But here’s the irony. I think I am woke, but I think that word has changed. I think if woke still means what it used to mean, that you’re aware of your own privilege, you try and maximize equality, minimize oppression, be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic… Yes, I’m definitely woke. If woke now means being a puritanical, authoritarian bully, who gets people fired for an honest opinion or even a fact, then, no, I’m not woke. Fuck that.”