Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.14

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

1. Dante’s Peak (1997) — 9/10
2. Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) — 7/10
3. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) — 8/10
4. Jane Goodall: The Hope (2020) — 7/10
5. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) — 8/10
6. South Park S27 (2025) — 9/10
7. O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) — 10/10
8. Woman at War / La Donna Elettrica (2018) — 8/10
9. Richard Jewell (2019) — 8/10
10. Prigione 77 (2022) — 8/10

Dante’s Peak (1997) — 9/10

Volcanologist Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is called in to investigate suspicious seismic activity near the town of Dante’s Peak. He meets mayor Rachel Wando (Linda Hamilton) and they drive up the nearby mountain to see what’s what. They head up with her whole family: two kids, a dog, and grandma (Elizabeth Hoffman). They find two boiled bodies in their favorite swimming hole and Harry gets suspicious. He recommends an evacuation but the town board is worried about lost revenue. Harry’s boss Paul Dreyfus (Charles Hallahan) shows up to put him on a short leash.

Harry continues to investigate with a crew—there are some pretty spectacular helicopter shots of the mountains—and then shows up at Rachel’s café, where she invites him to dinner. They have a lovely time, of course. She’s quite smitten and brings him and his crew coffee the next morning. Greg (Grant Heslov) is great; he sees her car show up on the camera feed the next morning and starts sing-songing “Coffee! Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, Coffee!”

Harry and Terry Furlong (Kirk Trutner) are up on the rim of the volcano, using a robot called “spider legs” to investigate further down. Tremors tip the robot and break one of its legs. When Terry investigates, a further tremor breaks one of his legs and roughs him up pretty badly. Harry rescues him and they take an airlift out of there.

Harry demands that they evacuate but Paul—and the rest of the crew—think that nothing else is going to happen.

Guess what, though? Harry was right. On his last night in town, he’s about to get jiggy with Wanda when she’s interrupted by one of her kids, who wants a glass of water. The water is sludge. It’s sulphuric. They go to the water supply for the town and discover that there is some bad juju—the mountain’s going to blow. They call a town meeting to inform the townspeople but, as they’re about to evacuate, the mountain blows. A pillar of debris and ash rises hundreds of meters if not multiple kilometers in the air.

They’re trying to escape now but the town is being torn apart. Ash is falling. Tremors are collapsing everything. The bridge out of town collapses, taking dozens of cars with it. The utter lack of CGI is so f@&king refreshing that I almost had tears in my eyes. Those were actual cars on actual roads. That was actual rebar sticking out of that concrete. Someone had to set this up and film it instead of pushing pixels around on a screen. It looks so much better.

Harry and Wanda get back to her house to find her kids gone—they’ve stolen her car to go get their grandmother up on the mountain, who’d refused to come down, claiming that there was no way that the mountain was going to blow. Harry takes control, fording the river in his truck—which has a snorkel—while others follow but are woefully under-equipped. As it stands, Harry and Wanda barely make it across. The less well-equipped drift out of sight on the strong current.

The helicopter pilot abandons Harry’s team but is soon taken down by ash clogging his motor. Harry is just pure, cool competence, focused on getting Wanda’s kids—no questions asked. He knows the risks. He knows what he can do. He thinks it’s possible. Maybe he knows it’s not. But he knows no-one else is going to save those kids. He knows that he might be able to do it. HY LFG.

The effects in this movie are really quite spectacular.

They get to Grandma Ruth’s cabin, where she’s unrepentant. “This mountain’s never gonna hurt us, believe me.” They’ve got to get out of there. A river of lava pouring through the cabin encourages them to hurry. They escape in a boat across the little lake. OK, now there are a few fake-looking scenes (the lava river and the family in the boat).

The boat sinks further and further into the acidic water. The propellor is gone. The motor dies. They’re almost at the shore. Harry starts pawing his way through the water with his jacket wrapped around his hand, oaring them closer. Ruth jumps into the water and drags the boat ashore, sacrificing herself for the family, knowing that she was the reason that they’re all up there in the first place.

The next morning, the National Guard arrives. The dam blows, plowed out of the way by giant debris: logs, mostly, but also a tremendous amount of water that has rapidly melted.

The family hikes across fields of ash, finding a truck and hightailing it back down the mountain. Another spectacular scene of trucks crossing a crumbling bridge results in Paul getting washed away with the bridge. Again, the visuals are so convincing and spectacular.

Harry, meanwhile, is driving the family across a field of lava but they lose their tires and get stuck in a river of fire, wheels flaming. And then—and this scene I remember—Ruffy appears out of nowhere to jump in the back of their truck. The dog is alive! Pierce Brosnan grins his wide-ass Pierce Brosnan smile.

They’re back in town but there’s no way out of town. Harry heads to the office to pick up the ELF (Extreme Low Frequency) device and then they book it for the local mine, just seconds ahead of an oncoming pyroclastic cloud. Harry knows that they’re cutting it close. He blasts the truck right through the mine entrance, burying it deep, with pyroclasts filling in behind them.

They’re alive. Harry is relentless, moving them deeper into the mine. They get to the boy’s campsite there, where he has some food and water stashed. Harry has forgotten the ELF in the truck, though. When he heads back to get it, he’s cut off from everyone else. The tunnel is still coming down. He gets battered to the ground trying to get to the truck. He perseveres because that is what Harry does. With every fiber of his being, he perseveres. One arm is broken. He has to clear debris from the ELF one-handed while the weight of a mountain presses the truck’s roof and sides in on him. It’s pretty cozy now. The ELF starts beeping.

Back at his team’s ad-hoc headquarters, Terry notices a light blinking on a console. It’s an incoming signal from the ELF. They find Harry and, soon after, Wanda, the kids, and the dog. The end! ✊

Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) — 7/10

The best parts of this documentary about Kurt Cobain were definitely the recordings of him noodling on various instruments, writing his songs, putting them together. These were accompanied by cartoons depicting dark scenes that were taken from his notebooks. These notebooks also contained quite pithy philosophical musings combined with TODO lists as well as snippets and scraps of thoughts.

There was a ton of concert footage along with whatever home-video footage they could scrape together. They also had just a ton of other appropriate voiceovers from other things, interviews with the band members, all mashed up and chaotic and quite evocative of the band itself, as well as the mind of the man who would kill himself with a shotgun blast at 27 years old.

He was an old soul and perhaps too good for this world. His depression and his stomach pains drove him mad, drove him to suicide, in a world that couldn’t yet save him with high-grade pharmaceuticals that would have almost certainly robbed him of his gift in a way that the heroin never did.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) — 8/10

I watched and reviewed this in 2019. The rating stands.

I watched it in German this time.

Jane Goodall: The Hope (2020) — 7/10

This is the official documentary of Jane Goodall’s life and work, from when she first went to work with Chimpanzees, to building her environmental empire. She was a good woman. She was driven. She was occasionally a bit odd. She liked whiskey. She had tremendous vivacity and energy, even very late in life. She never wavered in her mission. Her single-mindedness was perhaps a bit off-putting, a bit blinding to other concerns, but she saved a lot of chimpanzees, and she shamed a lot of people into seeing animals as moral beings. She had incredible charisma.

You can watch it here:

Jane Goodall: The Hope (Full Episode) | SPECIAL | National Geographic by National Geographic (YouTube)

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) — 8/10

John Smith (Brad Pitt) is a decent husband, if a bit aloof and absent. Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie) is the same. They are in counseling because, well, it’s interesting. Given what both of them do for a living, neither of them would be particularly interested in counseling, so either it’s just a humorous plot device or we’re expected to believe that either one of them could have suggested it, thinking that it would be the convincing step to take in a marriage that didn’t seem to be working very well. If one of them would suggest it, thinking it was the appropriate thing to do, then the other would have to accept for the same reason.

We quickly discover that each has a large secret from the other. It’s the same secret. They are both assassins. They have unwittingly been circling closer and closer to each other as they gain notoriety for their exploits. They eventually collide when he screws up one of her contracts.

They eventually discover each other’s roles but are still unaware whether the other is aware that they are aware of the changed situation. They dance around the situation at home, with each suspecting the other of trying to eliminate them. They actually are trying to eliminate one another. John finally gets Jane to reveal herself when he deliberately drops a wine bottle near her. Her lightning reflexes in catching it give her away—and they both escalate the dance.

They chase each other outside, where John slips and accidentally fires a shot into her windshield. Now she’s pissed. She runs him over. Jane retreats to her large and well-equipped team, while John meets up with Eddie (Vince Vaughn), who organizes his hits for him…and lives with his mom.

They dance and taunt and circle and try to assassinate one another until they finally meet at their house in a pitched martial-arts-and-gun battle that nearly demolishes it. In the end, neither one of them can kill the other. They decide to ball instead. The neighbors pop by to see what’s going on, and the disheveled couple appears, quite clearly having just rutted like lions, standing in front of a ruined home. The neighbors retreat, some with looks of longing in their eyes.

Now that they’re teamed up, their respective employers want to eliminate them for real. It turns out that the botched hit that led to their discovery of each other’s respective secret lives had already been a setup by the two agencies. These agencies try harder now, sending wave after wave of assassins, none of whom come close to even putting a real dent in either one of the Smiths. There’s a huge battle with an ending somewhat reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, except this time we get to see what happens. And also, this time, they don’t die. Instead, they go to the marriage counselor and proudly brag about how much sex they’re having. It’s actually kind of funny.

South Park S27 (2025) — 9/10

I wonder how in God’s name I’ve not heard much—if anything—about South Park’s latest season. I saw some buzz about the first episode because it went so hard at Trump, going so far as to use AI video-generation software to create a video short of him, naked and lumbering across a desert, falling exhausted after his journey, only to be told by his tiny penis that he’s doing a great job. I find it a sad commentary on what passes for culture that only the crassest, broadest jokes bubble up to social media’s consciousness, while the far better, though more subtle, multi-layered, and meta-meta jokes are ignored, probably because their broad appeal is nugatory and would therefore earn few likes.

E01: Sermon on the ‘Mount

This one sets up what South Park’s going to look like. Donald Trump is a main character. He’s banging Satan. J.D. Vance is dressed up like Tattoo/Hervé Villechaize from Fantasy Island. PC Principal is now Power Christian Principal. Cartman and Butters try to commit suicide in a garage, but the car’s exhaust is nonexistent because it’s electric. Trump threatens to sue South Park for $5B. Jesus is invited to speak at the school. He has to be there as part of a lawsuit settlement with Paramount. South Park capitulates, paying Trump and agreeing to produce pro-Trump messaging. You can watch the last two minutes here, including the PSA. Jesus wept.

The PSA contains synthetic media by South Park Studios (YouTube)

E02: Got a Nut

Everybody does morally reprehensible work in order to make money. Mr. Mackey is fired and takes a job with ICE. They arrest Dora the Explorer and friends. Clyde starts a right-wing podcast. Eric is pissed because he feels ripped off. Cartman meanwhile is a straight-up parody of Charlie Kirk, in which he “masterdebates” all comers. Dora ends up at Mar-a-Lago, where she is made to service guests. Clyde is also there. So is Mackey, as Trump grooms him to take over from Noem, who creeps him out. The three of them escape, with Clyde and Mackey having learned that there is a moral limit to “getting your nut.”

E03: Sickofancy

Randy Marsh is back, and he’s addicted to ChatGPT. He quickly ruins his marriage with it. Also, ICE shows up and arrests all of the migrant workers on his farm, putting him out of business. He and Towlie rebrand as a techno-grifting business. Instead of pot, they take ketamine. They try to bribe Trump to reclassify marijuana but Randy betrays Towlie, leading to Towlie becoming the gift, and Trump using poor Towlie as a cum rag. For the love of God, guys.

E04: Wok Is Dead

Butters has to find a rare Labubu doll to impress Red, a shitty little girl at school. All of the kids are nuts for Labubus. Tariffs have driven all of the prices up, and the Shitty Wok is now a store where you can buy high-priced shit like Labubus. Butters has no choice but to buy loot boxes in the hope that one of them will be the doll he needs to give Red. Jesus warns everyone that Labubus are demonic toys that people are using in rituals. He turns out to be 100% correct as the birthday party is destroyed by a Satanic ritual carried out—and live-streamed, naturally—by the little girls at the birthday party. Satan and Trump are pulled through the portal. FOX News is there to report on the showdown between Satan and Jesus. Instead, Satan reveals that he is pregnant with Trump’s ass-baby. FOX News doesn’t even blink an eye.

E05: Conflict of Interest

This one is about a trans kid who’s really, really ambiguous. Ambiguous enough to make the prediction market for their gender explode. All of the kids are in on it. The bet that really captures their fancy, though, is whether Kyle’s mom will genocide some Gazans. Cartman quickly realizes that, unregulated as the platform is, he can easily manipulate public mood to influence prices and increase his potential winnings. Kyle’s mom even travels to Israel, sending the prediction through the roof. She’s there to give Netanyahu a piece of her mind, about how he’s ruining everything for Jews everywhere. Huh.

O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) — 10/10

I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen this movie, but I can say a lot of the lines as they appear. We follow the misadventures of escaped chain-gang workers and prisoners Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro), and Delmar O’Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson).

“Delmar: The Lord has done warshed away all my sins and transgression!”

This is one of my favorite movies, even among the Coen-brothers’ films. The music is out of this world. Truly uniquely, American music. Bluegrass, soul, Christian hymnals. A Man Of Constant Sorrow gives me chills every time. They run into Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King), who plays guitar on that track.

Stephen Root as the blind, wall-eyed, casually racist Radio Station Man is an absolute revelation.

When they record the song, the blind radio station man tells them to sign the sheet to pick up their $10 apiece.

“Everett: [thinking incredibly quickly] Mert and Alloicious are gonna have to sign X’s;; only four of us can write.”

“Delmar: I’m not here to tell tales out of school but there’s a man in there who’ll pay you ten dollars if you’ll sing into his can.”

“Everett: Pete, the personal rancor reflected in that remark I don’t intend to dignify with comment. But I would like to address your general attitude of hopeless negativism. Consider the lilies of the goddamn field or… hell! Take at look at Delmar here as your paradigm of hope.”

Next, they meet George Nelson (Michael Badalucco) and come into some money that way, as he takes them along, robbing banks. He leaves them dejectedly in the night.

They steal another car.

Sirens are next. God, that song is beautiful. I guess it’s supposed to be.

“Go to sleep, little baby.
Your mama’s gone away
And your daddy’s gone to stay.

“You, and me, and the devil makes three,
Don’t need no other lovin’ baby.

“Gonna lay your bones on the alabaster stones
And be my ever-lovin’ baby.”

“Delmar: Can’t you see what they done to Pete? Them sirens done loved him up and turned him into a horny toad.”

This is how Delmar gets a pet toad.

“Everett: I don’t think that’s Pete.
Delmar: ‘Course it is. Look at ‘im. We gotta find some sort of wizard to change ‘im back.”

This is lovely foreshadowing because they meet one-eyed Dan Teague (John Goodman), who is more than a match for Everett in the category of the gift of gab. In the same restaurant, we meet Pappy O’Daniels (Charles Durning), who’s another local racist, running for office and losing.

Big Dan eats all of their food, then mugs them for the money they were flashing around, giving them both nice concussions. Then he steals their car.

Pete’s been captured. The sheriff (Daniel von Bargen) shows up, sunglasses at night, threatening to hang him. He gives up Everett and Delmar’s destination.

Pete’s back on the chain gang. Everett and Delmar drive by. Everett sees him and asks Delmar whether Pete has a brother.

They’re in town, where meet Penny Wharvey (Holly Hunter), Everett’s wife, his seven daughters, as well as Vernon T. Waldrip, Penny’s new “bona fide” suitor and soon-to-be husband.

They meet Pete at the movie theater and break him out of jail that night. Everett admits that he lied to them about needing to get to the treasure soon—he just wanted to stop Penny’s wedding. Pete is shocked because he had only two weeks left on his sentence.

They fight, wrestling into the bushes but are interrupted by a spectacular set piece: a KKK rally, with hundreds of “sheep” led by their cyclops (Big Dan), burning crosses, and poor Tommy, set for burning.

The haunting strains of O Death wafts over the forest.

“Oh, Death
Whoa, Death
Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year?
Well what is this that I can’t see?
With ice-cold hands taking hold of me
Well I am Death, none can excel
I’ll open the door to Heaven or Hell”

The grand wizard lays things out for us.

“Brothers! Oh, brothers! We have all gathered here, to preserve our hallowed culture and heritage! We aim to pull evil up by the root, before it chokes out the flower of our culture and heritage! And our women, let’s not forget those ladies, y’all. Looking to us for protection! From darkies, from Jews, from papists, and from all those smart-ass folks say we come descended from monkeys! That’s not my culture and heritage! Is that your culture and heritage?

“And so, we gonna hang us a negro!”

Our heroes dress up as members and fly to Tommy’s rescue. Big Dan unmasks them. They are still in blackface from Pete’s breakout.

“The color guard is colored!”

They make good their escape and make their way to the municipal hall, where they dress up as the soggy-bottom boys and take the stage.

Tim Blake Nelson steals the show with his voice; John Turturro steals the show with his dancing…and his yodeling. And then they break into Man of Constant Sorrow with Everett in the lead. They discover that they have become incredibly popular since they’d recorded that song for $10.

Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall) outs himself as the grand wizard but wildly misreads the room and gets run out of town on a rail.

Everett starts the song back up. The people rejoice. Pappy pardons them. Everett and Penny are back together. He just has to get the ring back from the old roll-top desk. Which is in the house that will be underwater soon.

“Penny: I’ve spoken my piece and counted to three.”

A lynch mob goes by, starring George Nelson, who’s been caught.

“Twenty thousand volts chasin’ the rabbit through yours truly! Gonna shoot sparks out the top of my head and lightning from my fingertips!”

The next day, they make their way to the cabin. Three old negroes are digging three graves near the cabin. The sheriff has chased them down.

“Everett: You can’t do this − we just been pardoned! By the Governor himself!
Delmar: It went out over the radio!
Sheriff Cooley: Is that right? [long pause]
Sheriff Cooley: …Too bad we don’t have a radio.”

Water trickles by. The flood comes. The gravediggers sing,

“You got to go to the lonesome valley
You got to go there by yourself
Nobody else can go for you
You got to go there by yourself
Oh, you got to ask the lord’s forgiveness”

Water flows, Dapper Dan pomade cans float by. A cow floats by. Our three heroes bob up, clinging to a coffin. Tommy’s riding a roll-top desk.

“Delmar: A miracle! It was a miracle!
Everett: Aw, don’t be ignorant, Delmar. I told you they was gonna flood this valley.
Delmar: That ain’t it!
Pete: We prayed to God and he pitied us!
Everett: It just never fails; once again you two hayseeds are showin’ how much you want for innalect. There’s a perfectly scientific explanation for what just happened -
Pete: That ain’t the tune you were singin’ back there at the gallows!
Everett: Well any human being will cast about in a moment of stress. No, the fact is, they’re flooding this valley so they can hydro-electric up the whole durned state…
Everett: Yessir, the South is gonna change. Everything’s gonna be put on electricity and run on a payin’ basis. Out with the old spiritual mumbo- jumbo, the superstitions and the backward ways. We’re gonna see a brave new world where they run everyone a wire and hook us all up to a grid. Yessir, a veritable age of reason − like the one they had in France − and not a moment too soon…”

We are back in town. The ring has been saved. The wedding is on.

It’s the wrong ring. “I counted to three.”

The MgGill girls trail along, one of them on a string-leash, singing the hauntingly beautiful Angel Band,

“My latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run
My strongest trials now are past, my triumph has begun
Oh, come angel band, come and around me, stand
Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings
To my immortal home
Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings
To my immortal home”

Woman at War / La Donna Elettrica (2018) — 8/10

This Icelandic film starts with a woman Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) shorting out high-tension power lines with a bow and arrow. The police pick up Juan Camilo (Juan Camilo Román Estrada), a Spanish cyclist for having done it. We see Halla crossing the Icelandic countryside, to oompah music—which is made diagetic by putting the band in the middle of the field through which she runs. She escapes from chasing helicopters. She happens upon a farmer and asks him to protect her. He asks what she’s done. She tells him. She’d already done it five times before. He is sympathetic to her cause and agrees to hide her.

Once the police have left, he offers her a car. She tells him that she’ll tell the police that she’d stolen it from him. He tells her that the familial lineage that she claimed cannot be correct because she’s not aware that his father had always lied about a part of his family tree—so they’re at best cousins. Is everyone in Iceland cousins somehow?

She drives away, past the oompah band.

She is conducting a chorus. This must be her day job. One of her choir members is in on what she’s doing but he’s concerned that she’s not taking surveillance seriously enough, that she’s crazy for taking on Rio Tinto (one of the world’s largest mining companies, based in Australia). He’s very, very paranoid. They put their phones into the freezer in the kitchen before they say anything.

She’s back at home, doing tai-chi and watching the news, listening to how the country considers these attacks to be an attack on national security (naturally), aimed at destroying Iceland’s access to industry (naturally). She has two posters behind her: Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi.

She picks up the phone. A four-year-old application to adopt a Ukrainian orphan has come through. Piano music plays; we see the pianist in her living room. She goes into a room to find all of the stuff she’d bought for the child years ago and which she’d packed away.

The adoption agency tells her that she must decide quickly. She seeks out her (twin?) sister for advice. She tells her to give up the terrorism and become a mother.

Hella takes a swim, accompanied by diagetic traditional Ukrainian singers, dressed in traditional Ukrainian garb.

In a second-hand shop, a dozen musicians build up an instrumental song as she browses, thinking.

Out on the street, the oompah band is there again.

I really like this diagetic touch.

She’s not done with her old life, though. She prints up an anonymous confession, sneaks into a building, then climbs up on the roof to throw them all into the streets. Her band is there to provide her soundtrack. Ukrainian singers join in from the street. People read her words and spread her message. The band members retweet pictures of the documents.

The prime minister’s staff reads him the whole document over several long minutes, as they walk along an Icelandic shore.

Her coconspirator is angry because she didn’t let him edit the document. And he’s worried that she has missed some detail that will implicate them both. He’s terrified that the Americans and even the Israelis are involved now (not unlikely).

She swims with her sister and they discuss how big the Ukrainian girl might be. The band plays as they swim back and forth. Hella finds a little girl hiding in her locker. How bizarre.

Three women in the locker room discuss whether it’s OK to be an industrial terrorist in order to save the planet. One of them says, “La goccia scova la roccia, ” which I only know in German as Steter Tropfen höhlt den Stein, which doesn’t rhyme, so it’s not nearly as cool. On the news later, they compare La Donna Elettrica to Anders Breivik, which upsets her considerably. She’s now torn between the new life she might have, and trying to clarify the interpretation of the one she’s trying to leave behind.

This is made even worse when she sees the Prime Minister announce that, as a result of the terrorist attacks, they’ve been forced to increase their dependence on Rio Tinto. Although this is almost certainly a lie, an attempt to draw her out, she takes the bait, committing another terrorist act. She breaks in somewhere to steal Semtex, then we see her at a florist, buying nitrate fertilizer, then stuffing the bags with Semtex (to disguise it from the dogs). She gets past the guards with this bit of flimflammery—there’s a really lovely shot of her bright-blue car against the green Icelandic backdrop, with the police officers around it; I’m surprised they didn’t use that shot for the poster—and then brings the car back to her “cousin.”

She’s hiking with a backpack full of Semtex. Juan Camilo is still trying to find Reykjavik with his bike. He can actually see the diagetic band. A drone flies by.

Halle has a tent set up. She’s doing tai-chi and communing with the Earth. The drone finds her with an infrared camera. Troops drop in, in the dead of night. Halle senses them. She awakes.

The troops have found Juan instead. They assault him in the middle of the night, hauling him in, again, as the terrorist. Halle is free to do her thing. A piano joins the oompah band as she carves through the guy wires on the rower. The battery dies. A hacksaw backup will have to do. When the wire goes, it slices her hand open. The band looks up, worried. She places a grapefruit-sized clump of orange Semtex in the tower, unrolls trigger wire, and takes the tower down.

The drone appears. It flies over her head, unaware that the tower is down. It finds her. It hovers. She has a Nelson Mandela mask on and her bow and arrow out. Thump. Right through the body of it. She reels it in and kills it with a rock. This lady’s awesome. She hides under the tufa, under a space blanket this time, until the chopper passes.

She’s climbing over the landscape. The landscape is beautiful. Forlorn and beautiful.

She arrives at a glacier, taking refuge. Hood up; it’s cold. She sees a sheep corpse. Covers up with it. Escapes the helicopter again. She’s dragging the corpse with her now. Stops to smell the roses, communing with the Earth. She leaves the carcass to ford a river. The drone’s back. She drops under the water. No choice.

Later, searchers with dogs find the sheep corpse. She’s still moving. She must be freezing. It’s nearly dawn. Headlights spring on. She stares, freezing, despondent, having given up. It’s her “cousin.” He throws her in the back of the truck with his sheep, tells her to drop under them. It’s probably warmer there. At the roadblock, he and his dog make a big stink about how the roadblocks are fucking up everything for farmers. They get through.

It’s daylight now. He carries her to a hot spring, where she recovers. They hear on the radio that the latest act of sabotage was quite damaging this time. He takes her back to her home, where she showers while he looks around. He drives her to the airport, to Ukraine. They pass Juan on his bike, on the highway, again. Hella finally sees a diagetic drummer.

One more hurdle. Investigators found blood and are forcing DNA tests on everyone before they can board. But people say that La Donna Elettrica has turned herself in. On someone’s phone, she sees her sister. She leaves the airport and hears that the police are still looking for her. She begs the taxi to stop so that she can vomit. She runs into Juan, who asks her if she needs help. That is just wonderful, because despite all that the country has done to him so far, he’s still willing to help.

She will never pick up the little girl. She sees the Ukrainian singers. They stand silent. She buries the little girl’s picture in the moss. The band appears, encouraging her to run. The police arrest Juan, of course. But they also arrest her.

She’s in prison.

Her cousin is under power lines. Her sister Åsa visits her, telling her that she will go to Ukraine and become the girl’s mother while Halle stays in prison, which she will make her refuge. I kind of forgot to mention that her sister is a guru and is now basically offering to switch places with her so that Halle can be a mother and Åsa can be a guru in prison for her. The cousin cuts the power. They switch places.

Åsa stays. Halle walks out.

She drives to the airport, passing the band one last time, joined by the Ukrainian singers, once again raising their voices in song.

She is in Ukraine, meeting Nika. Poignantly, they show other children sitting on the floor, watching them. Two other little girls walk in, wanting to join them, but they are gently shooed away by an employee. It’s sad because, although Nika will be adopted, there are so many more children.

It has rained so much that their bus is prevented from proceeding by floods. The passengers all get out and walk through hip-deep water. The band and the singers follow.

So many lovely images in this film. I would definitely watch it again.

I watched it in Italian, with Italian subtitles. (The supposedly English audio channel was in Icelandic, the film’s original language.)

Richard Jewell (2019) — 8/10

Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) works in supply at the office where lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) works. They become friends, playing video games together at the local arcade. Richard tells him of his dream of becoming a cop, then an FBI agent, and then maybe Secret Service. The man has delusions of grandeur.

When he’s ready to move on, he gets a job as a security guard at a local college. He’s soon fired from the job for having too many citations for hassling students….and pulling over drivers on the local highway (for which he has no authority). Richard still lives with his mom Bobi (Kathy Bates). The Olympics are in town and he’s got a job as a security guard again.

Reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) and FBI agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm) know each other, and they’re both working the Olympics beat. They’re all at a show where Kenny Rogers is singing one of the world’s greatest songs The Gambler. Richard is living the dream, hobnobbing with real cops, who don’t really take him seriously. He spots a guy he thinks is suspicious but it’s only because he’s got long hair and sunglasses at night. His “suspicious” backpack just has beers in it.

The next night, he’s not feeling well because he ate too much fast food. He goes to work anyway. A group of young drunk guys are breaking bottles. He tries to break it up but has to get the real cops because the young hooligans just make fun of him. The cops then discover a “suspicious package” under Richard’s bench and he’s adamant that it be handled by protocol. Richard is loving this. He’s getting all excited to be handling this officially.

At the same time, an actual bomb threat is called in by someone from a “militia”.

Holy shit. The backpack actually has a bomb in it. Three pipe bombs, to be precise.

This level of danger—and Richard having been the one to discover it—is exactly what the doctor ordered for Richard’s ego. People are still reluctant to believe him.

The bomb goes off. Nails fly everywhere, wounding over a hundred people and killing two. Richard is credited with having discovered the bomb, so he’s on CNN with Katie Couric (or wherever she works, it doesn’t matter). Everyone sees it. This is the attention he’s always sought. His former employer at the university contacts the FBI and reveals his suspicions that this seems a bit too on the nose.

Richard calls his old buddy Watson for help on his book deal. Watson could use the business.

Richard’s now at dinner with his mom and a friend, a cop who’s wearing a wire. Richard’s just running his mouth about what kind of bomb it was, how the bomb was supposed to have blown out but the backpack tipped over, so it blew up. He speculated about what kind of a timer was in it, the composition of the explosive, and so on.

Scruggs approaches Shaw, offering a quid pro quo: he tells her who they’re looking at, and she’ll fuck him. “We’re kind of pressed on time; do you wanna get a room or should we just go to my car.” She says she won’t run with it until she gets corroboration. She lies about the corroboration, her newspaper runs with it, forcing the FBI’s hand. They are pissed and Shaw just barely avoids blame. They drive out to Richard’s place to interview him, claiming that he’s going to be in an educational film about detecting bombs. The press has descended on his home and reveals to him that he’s the prime suspect. He doesn’t believe any of it, though. He drives to the FBI headquarters without incident.

The FBI—Shaw and co.—are doing such a terrible job of railroading him that he calls Watson (his lawyer) for help. Watson’s secretary/boss Nadya, who’s originally from Russia, tells him that Richard is desperate to find him, showing him the paper. Watson says it looks pretty bad.

“Nadya: Where I come from, when the government says someone’s guilty, it’s how you know they’re innocent. It’s different here?”

✊

Watson calls the FBI office and they hang up on him. He calls back,

“My next call is going to be to Mike Wallace of ‘Sixty Minutes’ to ask him why the FBI would deny a citizen his constitutional right to legal counsel. Can I have the spelling of your name, please?”

Watson is taking this on. He believes Richard. But Richard’s past starts bubbling up. Watson’s pissed. But he’s going to do his job. He and Nadya map out the distance from the pay phone where the 911 call was made to where the backpack was left. There’s no way anyone could have made that distance, least of all Richard. He’s weird … but he didn’t do it. Unless he had help.

“This kid’s getting railroaded.”

The FBI has brought about 30 people to take apart the house. Richard cannot stop talking. The FBI draws Watson away, then Shaw gets Richard to read the 911 message into the phone “to get a voiceprint.” HOLY SHIT BRO DON’T DO IT. Watson breaks up the party but it’s too late. Though Watson says “we’re going to get all of this excluded,”, Shaw whispers, “we got it.”

They keep at it. The FBI bugs the lawyer’s office as well as Richard’s home. Nadya found the bugs. This is all highly illegal but 100% SOP for the FBI.

“Richard Jewell: Oh my lord. How can they do that?
Watson Bryant: It’s easy. Cause you don’t matter. That’s how come.”

Now the FBI is trying to implicate his best friend Dave Dutchess (Niko Nicotera) as the person who called it in (because they know that Richard couldn’t have called it in and also gotten to the scene). They’re accusing them of being a gay couple. No scruples. What happened to the lone-bomber hypothesis?

“Watson: Are you about ready to start fighting back?”

Richard takes a lie-detector test, which he passes. Watson and Richard go to Kathy Scruggs and tear her a new asshole in front of her whole office before going to talk to her publisher to demand some retractions.

Now they’re at the FBI offices for another interview.

“Watson: Stop calling them sir.
Richard: They’re still the U.S. government.
Watson: No. Those just three pricks who work for the U.S. government.”

They still haven’t charged him. He handles himself extremely well in that interview.

88 days after having opened the investigation, Shaw shows up at a diner where Watson and Richard are having lunch. He gives them a letter that says that the investigation is closed. He is a class-A prick about it. Jon Hamm is so good at that kind of thing. He will always be Don Draper, just a little bit.

The FBI show up at Richard’s house, returning boxes. Silently.

Six years later, the FBI finally finds Eric Rudolph, who was the real bomber. Watson tells Richard about it, visiting him at the police station where he is working as a cop.

Richard died of a heart attack at 44, just four years later. Nadya and Watson marry and have two children. Richard’s mother Bobby babysits for them once a week.

What an unexpectedly great movie. It helped a lot that I could not remember at all what had actually happened in that case. I love to see me some justice served. I love to see me a good lawyer. I love to see the railroading man get it shoved right back up his ass. ✊

Prigione 77 (Modelo 77) (2022) — 8/10

From the Wikipedia,

“Taking place from 1976 to 1978,[3] during the so-called Transition, the plot is inspired by the real attempted prison break from Barcelona’s Cárcel Modelo attempted by 45 inmates in 1978, after a rebellion led by the Coordinadora de presos en lucha (COPEL).[4] The fiction follows two of the prisoners, José Pino and Manuel, an aged inmate who has passed through several prisons and a young accounting assistant who has just entered the prison, respectively.”

I recognized Miguel Herrán as Manuel, the young accountant. He’d played Rio in Money Heist.

What kind of stands out in this movie is how much freedom and how many rights the prisoners have, even after so much insurrection. It was the 70s, though, so maybe even guards at a prison run by a fascist dictatorship just hadn’t yet been worn down to the humanity-hating nubs that we seem to see much more of today. Or maybe the movie took it too easy on them.

The main thrust of the plot[2] is that the prisoners are seeking a general amnesty: they want everyone imprisoned to be released. How could they even possibly want this? How could the public even begin to support it? During that dictatorship, everyone knew that pretty much every long-term incarcerated prisoner was a political prisoner, sentenced for having offended the regime. The public knew that the criminals were in the government.

The prison-break scene in the final third is pretty great. Most of the prisoners are picked up again.

We watched it in Italian, with Italian subtitles (original is in Spanish).