Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.9

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

1. Biking Borders (2021) — 8/10
2. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) — 7/10
3. The Age of Innocence (1993) — 8/10
4. Oppenheimer (2023) — 8/10
5. Star Trek: First Contact (1996) — 8/10
6. Madame (2017) — 6/10
7. Habemus Papam (2011) — 7/10
8. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2009) — 7/10
9. The Staircase (2004–2018) — 4/10
10. Louis Theroux: The Settlers (2025) — 9/10

Biking Borders (2021) — 8/10

This is a film about two guys, Nono Konopka and Max Jabs, who cycled from Berlin, Germany to Beijing/Peking, China as a sponsored stunt to collect €50,000 in donations to build a school in Guatemala. Thanks to an anonymous donation of €12,000, they had already collected the money by the time they’d made their way through Iran, about 1/3 of the way through their planned 15,000km trek.

They first crossed into the Czech Republic, then Austria, Croatia, North Macedonia, Greece, and finally entered Turkey to leave Europe behind. They were greeted with friendliness everywhere they went. In Turkey, though, they noted that the Gastfreundschaft was incredible. They spent most nights in a tent until the winter really set in. The Turkish people’s incredible friendliness helped them fight through the harsh Turkish winter, often offering their homes to the two filthy travelers so that they could overnight under a roof rather than in a tent.

In Istanbul, their girlfriends came for a visit for two weeks, after which the adventurers continued their journey toward Iran. In Iran, the people were just as warm as the weather was cold. They survived only thanks to the incredible generosity of people who have nearly nothing in comparison to westerners like them. And this is the country we’re supposed to approve of going to war with?

After they’d collected the money, they decided to continue traveling to China, even though their goal had already been completed. Nono’s ladyfriend left him and there was some tragedy there but they persevered, getting all of their visas for traveling through Turkmenistan and into China before crossing the border.

They had a five-day pass to traverse Turkmenistan, with an officially ordained path from which they weren’t to deviate. They camped on the border to get in at 06:00 but managed a bit of the distance before Nono fell seriously ill and they had to (A) go off of the approved route in order to find a hospital and (B) navigate a medical system with almost no language in common. Turkmenistan is very, very different than the western world. It is much more insular than either eastern Turkey or any part of Iran that they’d visited.

With Nono not getting much better, they capitulate and throw their bikes into several vehicles in order to rush to the border in time to be able to leave before their visa expires, which would incur serious financial penalties and possible jail time. They make it across the border to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where Nono receives more modern medical care and his serious stomach flu/infection is diagnosed and treated. A few days later and they’re back on the road with their bikes, soaring across Uzbekistan toward the border of China.

In China, they cross the border into Xinjiang district, where the train station strikes them as incredibly modern—it absolutely is, even in 2019—but where they feel the pressure of an onerous state imposing a tremendous number of anti-terrorist controls.[2] They are made to show their passports everywhere, even in restaurants and they rate their chances of being able to navigate across the whole province by bicycle as less rosy than it had looked from the comfort of their homes in Berlin.

Instead, they took a 30-hour train ride across all of Xinjiang province, getting back on their bikes at the eastern border and completing their journey to what they called Peking but what the subtitles (and the Chinese themselves) call Beijing. Their journey ended there, with enough donations to build two schools for Pencils of Promise. Their web site says that they’ve built five schools by now (€250K) and they’re on track to build 20, with €1M in donations.

I gave it an extra star because the two guys are so sympathetic. I hope they didn’t become investment bankers after this.

We watched it in German and English.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) — 7/10

We start on a playground. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) sits on a swing. Dudley (Harry Melling) mocks him, amusing his friends. Dudley is incredibly cross-eyed. The dementors arrive. Harry dispels them with a Patronus curse, saving Dudley’s life, though his filthy parents Petunia (Fiona Shaw) and Vernon (Richard Griffiths) would never be grateful for it. He is banned from Hogwarts for this “transgression”.

The aurors of the Order of the Phoenix—Nymphador Tonks (Natalia Tena), Mad-eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson), Kingsley Shacklebolt (George Harris) and others—arrive to rescue him from his suburb, taking him to the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, where he meets his godfather and proprietor of the house Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), Remus Lupin (David Thewlis), and Arthur (Mark Williams) and Mrs. Weasley (Julie Walters).

I last saw this just a year ago but it was on in German and I don’t always have control over the TV. That review stands.

The Age of Innocence (1993) — 8/10

Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder), binding two of 19th-century New York City’s most powerful aristocratic families in what would be a triumph for squat, city matriarch Mrs. Mingott (Miriam Margolyes), consolidating her empire even further. The film begins at the sumptuous opera, where Archer meets Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), who’s returned from what amounts to exile in Poland, where she’d married an abusive husband but escaped with her humor and sass intact. She sets up in an apartment of her own in a perfectly respectable but not fashionable district.

“Ellen Olenska: Is fashion such a serious consideration?
Newland Archer: Among those who have nothing more serious to consider.”

Archer takes her under his wing, at first at the urging of his family and even his betrothed, who fears that her caste will ostracize the poor woman further. Little does show know that Ellen is unlikely to be cowed by the disapproval of the so-called nobility of New York, who would be surprised to learn that anyone would even consider characterizing them as anything other than the misbegotten woman’s betters.

Newland is a lawyer and his firm puts him in charge of Ellen’s divorce. He convinces her not to pursue it, as it would reflect badly on her, and the New York City aristocracy is petty and ruthless.

“Newland Archer: What could you possibly gain that could make up for the scandal?
Ellen Olenska: My freedom!”

Ellen and Newland spiral around one another until they profess their mutual love.

“Newland: You gave me my first glimpse of a real life. Then you asked me to go on with the false one. No one can endure that.
Ellen: I’m enduring it.”

“Ellen: Newland. You couldn’t be happy if it meant being cruel. If we act any other way I’ll be making you act against what I love in you most. And I can’t go back to that way of thinking. Don’t you see? I can’t love you unless I give you up.”

Newland’s simultaneous desire to be married more quickly is granted by Mingott, who cannot attend, but does host the wedding breakfast. Newland and May travel and get to know each other much better, to Newland’s dismay, as he realizes that there isn’t very much behind her dull, empty, obedient eyes.

To be clear, she is only incidentally obedient to him, as the system has decided that he is to be her husband and she is nothing if not obedient to the system into which she was born and raised. She adheres unquestioningly to intricate, unjust, often incorrect, always self-serious, and severely constraining rules. She dismisses Newland’s attempts to expand their horizons by deeming his proposed conversational partners as too provincial. And that is the end of that. May is uninterested in knowing anything that she either doesn’t already know, or that the system hasn’t given her as an assignment to learn. Newland becomes dismayed and thinks more and more often of Ellen.

Ellen, meanwhile had not attended the wedding but had traveled back to England, though not back to her husband in Poland. Newland continues to pine for her but they only very lightly act on it, with a bit of kissing but no more. The entire rest of the family, though, are almost certainly aware that there is something going on. They assume that a positively torrid affair is afoot, circling the wagons in panic to ensure that Ellen goes back to Europe and that Newland comes back to the fold.

He is to rededicate himself to devotion to his actual wife, May, and he is to stop thinking of what might have been and what he thinks could still be. There is no way that May will allow anything to happen, other than what must happen. There is no way that the family will allow it to happen. The system corrects itself. It re-ingests Newland. We watch as the realization dawns on him that they will ingest rather than egest him and that he is incapable of making himself break the mold that he has been in so long that he has become that mold.

We watch him sit through one mindlessly dull dinner after another with stultifyingly insipid people whose only concerns are superficial, people who are utterly unaware of the incredible level of privilege that they enjoy, never once questioning why they, in particular, should enjoy it. We watch him as he watches himself in horror, knowing full well that he is watching a stretch of decades unroll before him of exactly the same worthless conversations that produce nothing, that lead nowhere.

It is impossible to tell whether May is conniving or naive. In the end, it doesn’t matter. The result is the same. Newland stays with her and fathers child after child with her until she dies in her early 50s of something or other. Before she dies, she reveals to her eldest, Ted (Robert Sean Leonard) that she’d known all along that Newland had given up his greatest love and desire to stay with her and found a family.

She preferred living a lie of a quasi-arranged marriage to losing face, to disappointing the family. The family, which is filled with insipid and worthless creatures, nattering nabobs of no value to society but somehow so wealthy that they barely even know that money exists. The enormity of that injustice alone is gobsmacking, though we’re meant to pay attention to the injustice of Newland and Ellen’s unrequited love.

At the very end, Ted convinces his father to travel to Paris with him on a supposed business trip prior to Ted’s own impending marriage. However, he is there to visit Ellen, as the family said that he simply must. Because his mother had confided in him, he wanted his father to come along, to perhaps help him pick up where he’d left off decades prior.

Newland stays the same man to the end: old fashioned. Instead of going up to the apartment, he sits on a bench and observes the balcony, waiting for Ellen to appear. She does not. He stands and, leaning on the cane he now relies on, walks slowly off across the square, disappearing around the next street corner.

Martin Scorsese has directed a gorgeous picture, with incredible costumes and sets, all of which were real, not computer-generated and therefore more impressive in the sheer logistics involved. Day-Lewis and Pfeiffer are incredible, as is Ryder, though perhaps less so, considering her role was to play a character one couldn’t distinguish from a simpleton. But the first two were exquisite in their minute hand motions, eye movements, expressions, and meaningful silences. An excellent if depressing film.

Oppenheimer (2023) — 8/10

Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is testifying on his own behalf. Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) must also answer questions about Oppenheimer, who has, it seems, fallen out of favor with the U.S., which demands fealty before all else. We flash back to Oppenheimer studying, meeting Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), at that time studying theory rather than application, presumably at the ETH in Zürich, judging by the glimpses of Einsiedeln, and then Fraumünster and Grossmünster.

We get into the meat of the story as Oppenheimer gains fame and power, the film limning him as perhaps a more complex person than he really was. His complexity comes from an ability to deviate from what he might have deemed principles when they become necessary to jingoism, a flexibility of mind of which a simpleton like Einstein seemed incapable. Where Einstein refused to advance mad efforts to build weaponry with scientific advancements, Oppenheimer quickly saw a way to not only defeat the Nazis but also his rival Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer).

Oppenheimer’s nascent communist and labor leanings disappeared in a trice as the military—in the form of Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) puts military oomph behind the project, joining forces to create the bomb for the U.S. of A. One of Oppenheimer’s professorial friends finds him dressed in a military uniform and tells him to knock it off.

People whose opinions and principles you can respect are few and far between in this movie. Most of them are bloodthirsty xenophobes. Even Oppenheimer is a conflicted individual, compromising his principles in order to build the bomb, telling himself that it will be used to defeat Germany, when he of course knows that evil men will do evil things with it. It is hard to tell whether he is partially naive or whether he is just ambitious.

Niels Bohr visits him in Los Alamos, urging/begging/admonishing him not to build the bomb. Despite his professed respect for his erstwhile mentor, Oppenheimer doesn’t listen. I think his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) is also horrified at his lack of principle, but that’s probably more because he keeps pumping babies into her while cheating on her with various other scientists’s wives. His most famous affair is with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a sexy communist who ends up committing suicide. Not unpredictably, Oppenheimer makes her suicide all about himself.

Vannevar Bush (Matthew Modine) was also very much into building the bomb(s), as was Edward Teller (Benny Safdie). David Hill (Rami Malek) seemed to have reservations but he still did what he considered to be his patriotic duty—which was to grant the world an atomic age. Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett)—an applied physicist—was never on board with Oppenheimer’s union agitation, although he would, in the end, not testify against him. Boris Pash (Casey Affleck) was delighted to testify against Oppenheimer in the kangaroo court that was held long after the war was over.

My favorite voice of moral reason was Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz), who begged Oppenheimer to see reason and stop building the bomb. Einstein (Tom Conti) also was an avowed pacifist and refused to have anything to do with the project.

Spoiler alert: they built the bomb and Truman used it to annihilate a bunch of Nips—civilians—in order to cow a different perceived enemy—the Soviet Union. Look: the United States has never been the good guy. This has always been a fairy tale that the empire tells about itself. I think that that part shines through pretty well in this Christopher Nolan film, but I’m also afraid that this is the baggage that I bring with me—which I definitely do—because this film’s incredible success in the U.S. suggests that a much more realistic interpretation is that most of the people who saw it felt patriotic pride about us having built the bomb first.

While there are some interesting stylistic and directorial decisions in this movie (a naked Pugh hanging off of Oppenheimer juxtaposed over his trial comes to mind), I admit to being mystified by how people made this the must-see movie of the summer, the one to see “on the big screen”. It was mostly a bunch of 40s-era guys in suits talking to each other about physics.

Maybe I was less excited about the revelatory nature of this movie because of my familiarity with not only the basic outline of the history but also with the utter mendacity of the U.S. government and its minions—like Strauss—as well as the persistent and virulently strong anticommunist bent that continues to this day.

All together, it’s not nearly enough to sustain the three-hour running length. This could have been ninety minutes if it hadn’t had so many people who needed to chew the scenery.

I gave it an extra star because it made so many people actually go and watch a history lesson about how the U.S. really is. Even if it didn’t get even half of it right, the half it got right is still more than most people hear every day.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) — 8/10

The camera pulls back from Picard, who is a prisoner of the Borg, revealing the incredibly large, blocky ship. We pull back further to reveal that Picard (Patrick Stewart) was having a waking nightmare within a waking nightmare. His nightmare was a warning, a twanging of the psychic thread still connecting him to the Borg, who are back and laying waste to entire star systems. Ship after ship falls, although the Federation is giving the Borg hell.

Picard is reluctant to return to the Borg; not out of fear, but out of caution. He thinks that he would be an unreliable element in a battle against them, that they might regain control of him.

As the Enterprise enters battle, Picard directs all fire to a specific location, one that ends up destroying the cube. It egests a smaller sphere, one that immediately makes its way to Earth, aiming to travel back in time, dragging the Enterprise in its wake. They end up in the 21st century, after the third world war—in 2063, to be precise. The Enterprise destroys the smaller Borg sphere but must still thwart the Borg’s attempts to hinder the first contact with alien life due to happen any day now.

The gang’s all here: Data (Brent Spiner), Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Beverly (Gates McFadden), Worf (Michael Dorn), Georgi Laforge (Levar Burton), and Troi (Marina Sirtis). On the surface, they encounter Lily (Alfie Woodard) as she tries to shoot them. They take her back to the Enterprise just as the Borg have infiltrated the Enterprise and taken over deck 16. They are making their way to other decks.

The crew is back on the Enterprise and shooting up the Borg. The Borg adapt, as they do, and the crew must switch from phasers to hand-to-hand combat. Picard escapes but is captured by Lily, who’s hiding in the crawlspaces. Data is taken prisoner by the Borg, who connect him to their central collective that they’ve started building on deck 16. The Borg have taken most of the “red shirt” crew and outfitted them as Borg. Dorf is on the bridge with Lt. Hawk (Neal McDonough), trying to figure out why the Borg have stopped assimilating.

Meanwhile Ryker, Jordi, and Troi are trying to convince Zefram Cochran (James Cromwell) to help them by conducting his flight, as history expects. He’s a bit of a drunk and seems quite unlikely as the inventor who’d kicked off humanity’s colonization of other star systems.

Data meets the Borg Queen (Alice Krige). They have a Shakespearean dialogue. She grants him some flesh. He becomes very confused. Things get a little hot and heavy.

Lily and Picard discuss economics.

“Lily: How much did this thing [the Enterprise] cost?
Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.
Lily: No money? You mean you don’t get paid?
Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

Star Trek is fully automated luxury communism and always has been.

Picard, Worf , and Hawk go on an EVA to stop the Borg from building a weapon out of the Enterprise warp drive. It’s actually a pretty well-choreographed scene, with Worf using a torn-off Borg arm and cable to plug a hole in his suit while he blows the remaining Borg and their weapon to kingdom come.

Unfortunately, the Borg still have the ship, and they still have Data. Picard gives himself up, offering to trade for Data. The Borg Queen accepts but Data does not. He continues to help the Borg—until he doesn’t. He deliberately misses when told to shoot down Jordi and Ryker’s ship, then looks the Queen in the eye, saying “resistance is futile” and blows the Borg stronghold, freeing Picard.

Picard’s pretty jacked in this. Data drags the Borg queen into the acid smoke (or whatever it is). All the Borg are dead. What remains of the Borg Queen’s endoskeleton—a skull and spinal column—lies discarded on the ground. Picard tears it in two. Data has survived, in need of some repairs.

Zefram flies his little warp-drive-enabled craft for the first time—with Riker and Jordi in tow— and secures humanity’s future. The initial contact with the Vulcans will ensue. The end.

Madame (2017) — 6/10

Bob (Harvey Keitel) and Anne (Toni Collette) are rich and live in Paris. Bob’s son Steven (Tom Hughes) arrives from London in time for a dinner party of a dozen people. His father adds him to make thirteen. Anne cannot have this, so she gets the head of the household Maria (Rossy de Palma) to sit in with the aristocrats at dinner to make fourteen. A generous attitude toward the excellent red wine loosens her up and she is the hit of the party with her style, which contrasts sharply with the uptight stuffiness of the others.

There’s a wealthy guest David (Michael Smiley), who is quickly smitten with Maria. Even after the evening is over, he continues to try to contact her. She is horrified that her subterfuge will be discovered but then gains confidence. His ardor appears to be genuine and she wonders whether she should be toeing the class line, simply because Anne has told her to.

Anne, meanwhile is having an affair with one of Bob’s younger friends, a mid-life crisis that reveals her deep insecurity about being a trophy wife whose only asset—her looks—is rapidly depreciating. Bob doesn’t seem to care, being focused laser-like on selling a painting, whose sale should save his fortunes.

Their son, meanwhile, is an incorrigible alcoholic and budding writer, who begins writing the very story that we’re watching. The film becomes about telling the story about how its story was written. It’s a bit of an odd choice but it kind of works.

In the end, David cannot leave his classism behind: as the dastardly Anne allows him to discover, at a tea arranged for the occasion, that Maria is actually Anne’s head maid, he smoothly manages to ignore her and pretend that she’s not there. She is, after all, just the help.

Luckily, though, Maria hasn’t forgotten what she’s learned. She quits the job without any rancor or revenge and leaves, elegantly dressed and with an easy smile dancing lightly across her face.

We watched it in French with English subtitles. It’s unclear whether the original had the English speakers speaking English.

Habemus Papam (2011) — 7/10

The film begins with a funeral and then a conclave to select a new pope. Nobody wants to be pope. After several votes, it falls to Melville (Michel Piccoli). Before he can appear on the balcony for the first time ever as pope, he trucks away and hides somewhere in the papal palace. A day later, the conclave gets a psychoanalyst (Nanni Moretti), who is to very carefully question the new pope—before all of the other cardinals. This doesn’t work so well and they all continue to be trapped in the conclave, with no contact to the outside world.

The cardinals amuse themselves with jigsaw puzzles and solitaire—one of the cardinals plays with Swiss Jasskarten. The new pope continues to have nightmares. The psychologist recommends that they take him to his wife (Margherita Buy), who’s also a psychologist. He admits that he is always tired, and that he loved the stage, when he used to travel with a company. He emerges to announce to his handler that he will need three meetings a week for several years before ducking away under cover of a passing delivery truck.

He ducks into a department store, then has a panic attack on an upper floor. A woman very kindly helps him, even offering to help him after she gets off work. He snaps at her that he doesn’t need help. He is very obviously depressed. Next stop is a small gathering, where children are singing. This fails to tug his lips upwards, though. He stops by a bar, where he asks to use the phone but it’s not for personal calls. A young lady offer her mobile. He calls Il portavoce (Jerzy Stuhr) at the Vatican but won’t tell them where he is. Il portavoce sets up a member of the Swiss Royal Guard (Gianluca Gobbi) to pretend to be the pope in his chambers. He will be there to fool the cardinals into thinking that the pope has returned.

The pope is on a bus. It is nighttime. He listens to people around him. He considers life, and the church’s place within it. He ends up in the early morning in a hotel kitchen, eating a pastry, then heading to the lobby to get a room. He sees the Vatican covering up his disappearance on television. He is woken like the rest of his floor by an actor (Dario Cantarelli) seemingly raving but actually reading all of the roles of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. The pope reads some of the lines with him, having heard them so many times before. The madman descends the hotel and leaves, taking a waiting ambulance.

We rejoin the pope in a theater, watching a troupe preparing their show., then dining with them and talking about the good old days. Meanwhile the cardinals and everyone in the conclave are setting up a volleyball league and building a court, with the psychologist in the lead. One cardinal suggests instead to play Völkerball (dodgeball), but he is voted down. The round-robin tourney begins, soon interrupted by the Swiss Guard shaking the curtains to show that he’s in his chambers. The cardinals all wear pinnies in various colors of the rainbow and seem to be having a great time.

The pope continues to wander the streets, reading newspaper and magazine headlines about himself, then visiting an afternoon sermon. He meets with il portavoce, who begs him to come back and take on the role he’s been given. He asks why he can’t just disappear? Why he can’t just go, as if nothing had ever happened?

The volleyball tournament is over. The cardinals collect to hear il portavoce admit that, although he had tried to rectify the situation, he must now admit that the pope is gone, and has been gone for three days. They will now have to search for the pope.

The pope, however, is at the theater, watching the theater piece. He mouths the words along with the actors. Nuns and cardinals file in the back, disturbing the production. The mad actor from the hotel is back to rescue the production, reading all of the lines with conviction as he had that night at the hotel. The cardinals wave to the pope in his balcony seat. After the end of the production, they collect him, seemingly at least partially against his wishes. He looks supremely ill-at-ease as he approaches the balcony, from which he will finally greet the world as the Pope.

He cannot give them what he wants. He declares that they must pray for him, as he cannot believe that God has chosen him, and he is therefore not worthy of the role. The cardinals are devastated.

The original was in Italian but that language wasn’t available on Arte, so I watched it in German.

Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2009) — 7/10

I last watched and reviewed this in 2023. My review stands.

The Staircase (2004–2018) — 4/10

This is a series about the murder trial of American novelist Michael Peterson following the death of his wife Kathleen Peterson in 2001. It was, apparently, a big deal in the states, like on the level of OJ or Casey Anthony. Like, people were utterly fascinated with this dude who seems pretty to have gotten his wife wicked drunk and high on barbiturates and then pushed her down some stairs. I honestly don’t care either way whether he did it.

I could only watch the first episode before giving up. The pacing is glacial. It is a documentary about deeply uninteresting people, depicted in long scenes of lawyers discussing the most banal details in the most simplistic terms. There’s one ten-minute scene in the first episode where two lawyers go through a family history in excruciating but somehow also superficial detail. Like, who cares? I guess a lot of people.

Louis Theroux: The Settlers (2025) — 9/10

You can watch the whole movie at BBC Settlers (full film) 2025 by zei_squirrel (Twitter). You can use Twitter Video Downloader to get a 720P version locally, so you don’t have to watch it in a web page.

I’d only watched the first couple of minutes and was already struck by the obvious fact that this Israeli settler is an American. So many of the Israelis interviewed by these western channels were very obviously born and raised in the United States. The bearded guy in the first could be from upstate NY for God’s sake. What the hell is he doing hating Arabs in the middle of a desert in Israel?

They have traveled to Israel to occupy Palestinian land because there’s apparently nothing to colonize in the U.S. It is gobsmacking to me how more people aren’t talking about how Palestine was already being occupied by Americans before Trump started drooling about building casinos on Gaza’s coastline.

“Jebediah: To understand the Arab way of thinking They understand, there’s a war, OK? They win the war if they get territory. They lose the war if they lose territory.
Louis: You could flip that and say that’s what, in a sense, you’re doing.
Jebediah: That’s what I aspire to do.
Louis: [speechless]”

Soon after, the next two settlers he interviews are obviously from the U.S. The lady has a broad American accent. The young man as well, although he says he moved when he was nine years old. They both claim that Gaza is obviously Jewish land and that nothing will stop them from taking it. Giant smiles on their young faces.

Among some Israeli protesters is a British-sounding man, who seems sensible about Israel’s role as a colonizer. The horse-wrangler settler learned his English in the U.S. or from Americans. He speaks very fluently with nearly no other accent.

As always, the interview with Daniella Weiss is completely unequivocal. The only problem she sees is that the project is taking so long. With one million settlers established, she wants two.

The next guy is Ari Abramovitz, born in Texas, who established a farm in Israel in 2014. He shows up on a side-by-side ATV (a Ranger). This is the guy from the start of the documentary. He says he moved when he was 16, after he did a “gap year” in Israel. He is an absolute religious zealot. He points to a set of dusty hills, proclaiming that “this is the most beautiful place in the world.”

Ari very clearly says that he doesn’t care about Palestinians. They’re not people to him. This is the kind of guy who cleared the prairies of North America of its native vermin. He is the exact kind of American that has been a problem for the world since the dawn of that country. He is an overpowered religious idiot with no morals and no principles.

I wonder if a similar documentary in Xinjiang would have Chinese Han talking about Uyghurs the same way?

Palestinians can’t pick their olives because settlers loom over them. The settlers call the army. The army comes and clears them off of their own land.

Louis visits Palestinians and hides from soldiers with them, at night, always uncertain. Settlers loom and attack.

“Show me your passport.
Why?
I need it.
Can I have it back?
You’ll get it back.”

They meet aggressive soldiers, dumb and filled with testosterone, armed, masked, arrogant, above the law (explicitly stated). They impose arbitrary rules. Isa, a Palestinian in a peacoat, beard, and woolen cap is great. He reminds me of a good friend of mine.

A car stops. An Israeli calls a greeting to Louis in a broad Brooklyn accent.

“Are you American?
Do I look Chinese?
Are you from Brooklyn?
[Broad accent] Yeah, of course.”

Americans are enjoying living in Israel because they don’t have to guard their speech there. You can be as inconsiderate as you like.

Back with Ari, Louis shares a coffee and a conversation, wondering why he wears his weapon strapped to his back, even in his home. He’s relatively articulate but he’s completely and utterly deluded. He’s utterly convinced of his anti-human beliefs, that he’s fighting a just war.

Louis is at a festival. It’s loud. It’s dusty. People look like they’re enjoying themselves immensely. I can’t get over how dirty and dusty and ugly everything is, though. It’s a dusty, ugly countryside. It fascinates me that people are fighting so hard over this land.

Louis speaks again with Daniella Weiss, who describes how there is no room for anyone other than Jews. Palestinians are not people. She describes death and destruction as “agitation”, When Louis calls it “death” and “tragedy,” she grins and says “Ah, yes.” It’s not that there is no destruction or death, it’s that there is nothing to care about because they aren’t people. They are, at best, sneaky terrorists, manipulating media to show the settlers in a bad light.