Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.7

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Bill Burr: I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (2014) — 10/10
2. Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at the Lowry (2024) — 9/10
3. Mank (2020) — 9/10
4. Bobby Yeah (2011) — 8/10
5. Midnight Express (1978) — 8/10
6. The Infernal Machine (2022) — 7/10
7. Shrek the Third (2022) — 5/10
8. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) — 4/10
9. Everest (2015) — 7/10
10. Die Another Day (2002) — 6/10

Bill Burr: I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (2014) — 10/10

I’d last seen this in January of 2015, at which time I gave it a top rating, writing “I just saw this. I’m still in pain. That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at the Lowry (2024) — 9/10

Want Laughter Therapy? Watch Stewart Lee's 2024 Live Show Now Full | Full HD by Abdullah Media (YouTube)

This copy of the video probably won’t last because it’s not an official channel but I just wanted to remember I’d seen it. Stewart Lee is one of my favorite comedians. Whenever I listen to one of his shows, I almost always start off by wondering “what is he even doing,” and I always end up thinking that it was one of the most brilliant, funny, deeply philosophical things I’ve ever seen in my life. There is no other comedian like him.

“Don’t come and see me if you don’t know what anything is.”

At about 13:00,

“Right. That’s the end of the fun, topical bit at the top of the show. It’s not really of interest to me, that sort of stuff. I just do it because I’m sick of reading people going, ‘the reason you don’t see Lee on Have I Got News for You is because he can’t write economic, topical jokes. Well, I can write them. As we’ve seen, I can write them very easily. But, um, it’s beneath me. Uh, it’s beneath you. And it’s time now to move on into the punishing experimental standup that has kept me out of the arenas for 35 years.”

At about 18:00

“I’m not going to write any more jokes. I’m going to come out here with a blackboard, with a list of topics on it. I’m going to point at one of them and you can have a good laugh imagining what I might have said about it.”

At about 01:11:30

“[…] what’s this? What’s going on? He’s doing some kind of lecture. Of course I’m not. That’s what I do. That’s my comedy. It’s not a mistake. That’s kind of routine. That’s why the broad sheets call me the world’s greatest living standup—which they do, in case you—why have we not heard of him? I don’t know! There’s been an administrative error.

“It’s because of stuff like that. That’s what they like. It flatters their intelligence, the broad-sheet newspaper critics, because what I do is as close to being not funny at all as it’s possible to be. And then, just at the last minute, when you want to blow your own head off, you go—it turns around—you go, oh it’s brilliant.”

After a long, brilliant bit in which he ties together about a dozen threads into a repetitive, mesmerizing, and coherent jumble, all played as people endlessly visiting an office, day after day after day, he says, at about 01:27:30,

“This is my life. Pure. Simple. Classic. But listen to that. There’s no laughs, are there? There’s just a strange tense atmosphere of hopeless despair. A bit like the kind of atmosphere you might get at the end of an award-winning piece of theater.”

“I’ve only ever written one decent closing joke. I wrote it in September 1989. […] I’m going to finish with it now, without changing any of the now-irrelevant personal details and then I’m going to go. See you in a couple years.

“So, I was talking to my granddad the other day. He’s 94 years—he’s dead now obviously, but he was alive when I wrote this. I’m not sick, you know—so I was talking to my granddad the other day—he’s 94 years old—I said to him, ‘Grandad, you are 94 years old. What, in your experience, has been the worst thing about growing so old?’

“And he said to me, ‘Stu, in my experience, the worst thing about growing so old has been watching all of the friends that I grew up with slowly dying off one by one.’

“And I said to him, well, Granddad, ‘you fed them those berries.’”

Mank (2020) — 9/10

This is a nice-looking film and the story is interesting and well-told. But the real grabber is Gary Oldman as the titular Herman J. Mankiewicz (Mank). Mank is not only a great writer, he is an incorrigible alcoholic. Throughout the film, he is shown deep in his cups, speaking truth to power, sometimes slurring, sometimes incredibly eloquent. It is not always easy to watch these scenes but they’re magnificently acted.

Often, Mank is speaking truth to William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), who doesn’t appreciate it one bit. That’s how Mank ends up writing Citizen Kane as a thinly veiled, unauthorized biography of Hearst.

That’s actually the plot of the movie: how the script of Citizen Kane came to be written. Mank spends the entire film in bed with a broken leg while writing the screenplay because he has a broken leg. He is occasionally visited by Orson Welles (Tom Burke), who fights with Mank about the script, fights to keep him dry, then yells at him when he still manages to drink, then yells at him for taking a run at Hearst, then threatens to rewrite it without him, then is reminded by Mank that the Screen Actor’s Guild wouldn’t take kindly to that, then makes the movie more or less unchanged anyway, then sharing credit with Mank for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay that they won two years later.

We only see him on his feet in flashbacks, often discussing verboten topics with Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), who was Hearst’s much-younger life partner, or, as noted above, sloshing a glass angrily at a crowd of plutocrats who have, for their own mysterious reasons, invited him to their dinner. He was mostly yelling at Hearst for having sidelined the socialist Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye) in the California gubernatorial race.

That’s the other primary, though parallel theme of this movie: how the rich moguls of the California media and movie business conspired to torpedo the socialist candidate with a completely fantastical and fictitious smear campaign against him. Had Upton Sinclair become California’s governor at the time, who knows what might have happened differently? But isn’t that the story of the U.S. of A.? Just a bunch of people with a lot of power and money who want more of it, getting their way forever. Why? Because they convince us to like them more than we like ourselves.

But Mank gets his revenge in this excellent biography that not only shows him in all of his drunken madness but also as a deeply principled man, willing to throw away everything for what he believes in—and he believed in the equality of man, in justice for everyone, that there was no such thing as a “common” man, that there are only “people”.

This film is nice-looking because it was directed by David Fincher. It’s in black-and-white. And it’s nice-sounding because the soundtrack was by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, It’s lovely but it also gets an extra star for not only making a point but making the right point—a worthwhile, lofty, and worthy goal —-and for making it well.

Bobby Yeah (2011) — 8/10

This is a really well-made 23-minute claymation video about a creature purportedly named Bobby—none of the creatures speak or are named—who’s having adventures in a bizarre world populated by other creatures that have interesting alternate modes of procreation. The character’s names are,

• Bobby Yeah
• Crow Dick
• Potato Spider
• Baby Head
• The Spaghetti Worm of Radish
• Tonguely Cummer
• The Box
• Clock Face
• The Finger of Shrimp Car
• Toothy Cummer
• Button Boy
• Fetus

You can hardly even call it stop-motion video because it’s so smooth. The characters are really, really well-animated, with incredibly expressive body language and facial expressions.

There is a plot but it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Read the Synopsis of Bobby Yeah (Wikipedia) for the official version. Bobby encounters various creatures and pushes various buttons, causing usually even more bizarre things to happen. The final button, on Bobby’s chest, causes him to transform into an octopus-like creature, capable only of lovingly stroking his hairy-sperm-like friends, who were dead/not-dead throughout the video. Bobby’s eventual offspring lovingly decapitates him—without killing him—freeing his living head to rise and float away into a purple-tinged void.

Robert Morgan’s original web site described as follows,

“Bobby Yeah is a petty thug who lightens his miserable existence by brawling and stealing stuff. One day, he steals the favourite pet of some very dangerous individuals, and finds himself in deep trouble. He really should learn, but he just can’t help it.”

You can watch it here:

BOBBY YEAH by Robert Morgan (YouTube)

Midnight Express (1978) — 8/10

I’d last seen and reviewed this movie in 2012, when I’d given it a 6/10. I liked it better this time around, but my critique stands.

“The Turks are depicted throughout as either thieves, corrupt, homosexual, brutal, slovenly, unclean or a horrific combination of all of these. The warden in particular is portrayed as an Ottoman juggernaut, implacable and evil. Even Hayes—who actually served time in that prison—went on record saying that the depiction was over-the-top and wildly inaccurate.”

“The version I watched had no subtitles for any of the Turkish parts; it’s uncertain whether that was intended in order to give you the impression of what it was like for Hayes.”

I can confirm that there are no subtitles for the Turkish.

The Infernal Machine (2022) — 7/10

This movie is more-or-less a one-man-show starring Guy Pearce as Bruce Cogburn, a one-hit-wonder author whose titular book inspired a mass shooting from a clocktower in Knoxville. The shooting is 25 years in the past. The shooter Dwight Tufford (Alex Pettyfer) was 17 at the time and had driven 23 hours straight to get to the clocktower. He was driven by the words in the book.

Cogburn is being harassed by a writer named William Dukent, who sends hundreds of identical letters to Cogburn’s home, which is off-the-grid in New Mexico. In order to call the number in the letters, Cogburn must drive 14 miles to a public telephone.

There is an anticlimactic reveal when Officer Higgins (Alice Eve) turns out to be a hired con-woman who spends some time at an arranged dinner talking about how smart and awesome she is before taking off, never to be seen again. The person who hired her turns out to have been Elijah Barett (Jeremy Davies), a former student of Cogburn’s, from whom—wait for it—he’d stolen the original book.

He didn’t steal it outright, though! He’d encouraged an unconfident Barett to continue writing his fascinating book. Instead, Barett finishes the book, then calls Cogburn to meet him in a giant warehouse. He sits in the center of all of the pages of his book, concentrically arranged. greets Cogburn, then sets himself on fire. Cogburn thought he’d died in the fire. He’d heard from Barett’s parents that they were going to take him off of life-support.

The book made Cogburn famous, then even more famous after Tufford’s serial shooting. He’d naturally been completely unable to follow up the book (reminding me a bit of The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz).

Cogburn is back on the bottle and he’s finally discovered that Barett is alive and has arranged a confrontation, during which a Rube Goldberg device is configured to appear as if it will cause another conflagration but that will actually send Elijah’s second manuscript—the story of Cogburn, right up to this very minute—to Cogburn’s publisher. Instead, the explosion that should have taken both Cogburn and Barett’s lives—right after the e-mail was to be sent—goes off early, killing Barett but not Cogburn.

Cogburn drives his nearly fatally injured self to a mailbox to crawl across the ground to mail the letter he’d written, confessing everything to his publisher.

I liked this movie while I was watching it but must admit that, though it was filmed quite well, the plot is quite contrived and has quite a few unexplained and seemingly trite parts.

Shrek the Third (2022) — 5/10

I watched and reviewed this movie in 2012.

Shrek (Mike Meyers) and Fiona (Cameron Diaz) are living in Far Far Away with Donkey (Eddie Murphy), Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), the Queen (Julie Andrews), and the King (John Cleese). Early on, the King dies, leaving the question of succession open. Shrek is charged by the King with searching for the true heir, Arthur/Artie (Justin Timberlake). Prince Charming (Ruper Everett) is determined to steal the crown, though.

This is basically the legend of Camelot with Shrek and fairy-tale characters. There’s Merlin (Eric Idle), Lancelot (John Krasinski), as well as a handful of well-known fairy-tale characters like Sleeping Beauty (Cheri Oteri), Captain Hook (Ian McShane), Snow White (Amy Poehler), Rapunzel (Maya Rudolph), Cinderella (Amy Sedaris) and the two ugly stepsisters, Mabel (Regis Philbin) and Doris (Larry King).

Shrek’s journey to find Arthur ends up at a medieval high school, where they work through all of the high-school movie tropes with Arthur as the nerd and Lancelot as the jock. Meanwhile Charming takes over Far Far Away and most of them lose their shit, with some pretty funny montages of Gingerbread Man (Conrad Vernon) dreaming of himself as the Bionic Man while singing “Good Ship Lollipop”, Pinocchio brutalizing the English language to avoid lying, and a lot of the characters losing their shit under even the suggestion of torture.

Merlin gets Shrek, Arthur, Donkey, and Puss home, but Puss and Donkey have switched bodies. Charming is putting on a play in which he will finally gets the ending he wants.

My review from the time stands; it’s not the worst thing in the world but it’s very much phoning it in relative to the first and second installments.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) — 4/10

Spielberg is trying to out-Spielberg himself in this one. Harrison Ford is not believable as a hero here. The green-screening is shockingly obvious and bad. The enemies this time are, predictably, Russians. Cate Blanchett’s accent is terrible. Ford phones in his awful quips and stilted lines.

It’s painful because I like Harrison Ford, I like Spielberg, I like Blanchett, I like Shia Labeouf. But this movie is a muddled mess that wastes all of their talents.

Oh, wow. I’d forgotten about Jones surviving an atomic blast by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator that was catapulted kilometers through the air, bouncing across the ground and depositing him, unharmed, on the ground far away. There are, inexplicably, prairie dogs. There is a rocket sled. This is completely incoherent.

Halfway through and I still can’t tell what sort of aesthetic the movie is going for. It looks like a faked, old Hollywood set, but it’s done with CGI, so it just looks like bad CGI rather than old-timey sets. The fight scenes with the Aztec ninjas is just weird. I don’t understand why Spielberg keeps lighting Blanchett’s face so harshly, unless he’s trying to fake that old-timey look. He should just let it be.

Oxley (John Hurt) shows up, another brilliant actor underutilized.

There is an absurdly long chase scene in the jungle, where Oxley, Jones, Marion (Karen Allen), and Mutt (Shia Labeouf) toss the crystal skull back and forth several times with the Russians. Mutt gets to pick up the Chekhov’s gun of his fencing skills to fight Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) before they finally all crash into a termite mound. The action is absolutely over-the-top cartoonish and the CGI continues to ruin everything.

The dialogue is nearly laughably stilted,

“Indy: I have to return it.
Everyone: Why you?
Indy: Because it told me to.”

Oh, hooray, now we’re on the Apocaplypto part, where Spielberg’s depiction of the native savages is somehow more racist than Mel Gibson, who treated his subjects decently. Spielberg has Russians slaughter every last one of them. The crew figures out how to get into the temple, triggering an ancient mechanism that moves a ton of stone with gravity. They get to the entrance of what is almost certainly the spaceship.

Wait. The what?

You don’t remember? A spaceship. Like the crystal skulls are aliens who needed the skull of their pilot in order to return home.

Does everyone survive? Of course. Except the Russians. None of the Russians survive. Do Marion and Jones get married? You betcha. Are John Hurt and Jim Broadbent clapping their silly hands off? Yup. Does Mutt try to put on Indy’s hat? Yup. Can he? No. Indy snags it first, a very clear sign that Ford will keep playing the role until he keels over.

Everest (2015) — 7/10

I last saw this movie in the theater, in 3D. The review stands.

This time I watched it on my TV, in 2D, in German.

Die Another Day (2002) — 6/10

This is the James Bond movie where Pierce Brosnan in the titular role kicks a tremendous amount of ass in North Korea—it was 2002, remember when North Korea was the enemy du jour?—and then gets captured, although he at least seems to have managed to send Colonel Tan-Sun Moon (Will Yun Lee) to his spectacular death over a waterfall. His right-hand man Zao (Rick Yune) escapes, though.

DId you catch that bit in the middle, though? James Bond is captured. Those dastardly North Koreans torture him for 14 months before the UK finally agrees to a prisoner exchange. Bond is looked haggard. Bond has long hair.

Not only was he tortured for over a year but M (Judy Dench) takes away his double-0 status because she no longer trusts him.

I think this is the first film where the U.S. agent is from the NSA rather than the CIA. Her name is Giacinta “Jinx” Johnson (Halle Berry) and she is ridiculous. Berry is fully pneumatic and as voluptuous as her thin frame allows. She looks good in that bikini NGL.

Bond starts hunting a diamond magnate named Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), as well as his luscious assistant Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike)—the name is so good, though! Get it! She works for a guy in the diamond business, so ice = frost, and also, the middle half of the movie takes place in an ice palace in Iceland (no less), where it’s cold, so … you get it. I see that you get it—and … where was I?

Oh yeah, Graves! So, he’s kind of a weird dude, kind of looksmaxing before it was even a thing. He and Bond fight with sabers in a museum, breaking a lot of shit. It turns out that Graves is actually Moon, who had never died but had only suffered massively and then suffered even more to get face-reconstruction surgery that, even back in 2002 was so good that he didn’t even end up with Mar-El-Lago face.

Where there’s a Moon, there’s a Zao, so Bond has to dispatch the henchman first. Frost reveals to him that she’s the one who betrayed him, playing a double (triple?) agent against MI6 and then having the gall to sleep with Bond before she was going to kill him—maybe she’s unaware, but that is literally the plot of half of these movies, but maybe she hadn’t seen them—and then she and Graves escape to Korea, where they reveal their real plan all along: using the giant space laser to destroy the Korean DMZ, assisting North Korea in uniting (taking over) Korea once again.

There is a whole thing in a plane that is crashing/not-crashing/disintegrating-in-a-space-laser but guess who dies and guess who survives? Spoiler: Graves/Moon and Frost are spot-cremated while Jinx and Bond end up fucking in a Buddhist Temple. The end.