Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.17

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

1. Pollock (2000) — 7/10
2. Equalizer (2014) — 9/10
3. Rush Hour 3 (2007) — 7/10
4. Murder Sheets (2024) — 8/10
5. Emotionally Exhausting (2015) — 8/10
6. Self Help Me (2020) — 8/10
7. Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It (2024) — 8/10
8. No Country for Old Men (2007) — 9/10
9. Fatherhood (2023) — 6/10
10. Abgang mit Stil (Going in Style) (2017) — 7/10

Pollock (2000) — 7/10

Jackson Pollack died as he lived: a miserable, self-pitying, drunken asshole.

Ed Harris produced, directed, and starred in this biography of the famous, early 20th-century American abstract-expressionist painter. I guess he really wanted the world to know what kind of guy he was.

He was a miserable drunk when he was poor and unknown. He was a miserable drunk when he was well-known and selling paintings for millions, and he was a miserable drunk when the mercurial art world’s roving eye moved on to younger, more dynamic, and perhaps less pickled artists.

He seems to have been a classic narcissist, thinking only ever of himself, with only his problems in focus, with little to no empathy for anyone else, least of all his long-suffering partner Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden). They are married but only because she told him that they would either get married or break up forever, which seems like an oak-planked foundation on which to build a life together.

She is quite aware that Pollock will fuck anything that will either advance his career or that is young and pretty. He takes a pathetic run at Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan), who is not exactly opposed, as she also liked to collect notches on her belt, but he is so pathetically drunk that all he can do is grunt once and ejaculate, so that seems like it was a lose-lose situation.

Pollock and Lee take a house in the countryside, where we see him invent his famous painting technique. Friends show up, some with booze. He visits the local store. He is absolutely antisocial. A photographer arrives to do a whole piece on his technique.

He starts a more earnest affair with Ruth Kligman (Jennifer Connelly), who is equal parts star-fucking and legitimately thinking that she’s bedding an art god. Connelly plays quite well, as ever, as we’re never sure how much of her character is being crassly manipulative of an over-the-hill, venal man, and how much of her character is naive and starry-eyed, seeing past all of his obvious faults—he’s a depressive, faithless alcoholic—to revere the artist underneath.

Was she doing it because she thought he still was that man? Did she wonder whether he had ever been the persona he’d projected, when she’s confronted with the reality? She doesn’t seem to mind bedding him, so there’s that, I guess.

She is repaid for her ardor in bed by him getting blackout drunk during the day instead of taking her and her friend Edith (Sally Murphy) to the beach, then bitching about them wanting to go to a party, then insisting on driving, then driving into a ditch, killing himself and Edith and seriously injuring Ruth.

Jackson Pollack died as he lived: a miserable, self-pitying, drunken asshole.

Equalizer (2014) — 9/10

This is the first outing for Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) but we watched it after having recently seen #3 and then #2. Like the others, this one starts slowly and deliberately, introducing us to the young Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), who is a Russian-American girl “working” for a local and brutal pimp named Slavi (David Meunier). Slavi, in turn, works for shadowy Russian godfather Pushkin (Vladimir Kulich), who only appears at the very end.

McCall works at Home Mart with Ralphie (Johnny Skourtis), whom he’s helping to pass a security-guard test. When Teri ends up in the hospital with a face nearly caved in by Slavi—or one of his customers—McCall pays Slavi and his crew a visit. Only McCall survives the encounter. He is untouched. This gets Pushkin’s attention, who sends ex-Spetznatz and ruthless mercenary Teddy (Marton Csokas), but he initially can’t figure out who’s actually behind the killings. His network of crooked cops is useless.

McCall is back to equalizing: he blackmails two crooked cops into returning their protection money; he hunts down a man who robbed the Home Mart, terrifying one of his friends and stealing her ring. She finds it in her cash register a couple of days later. McCall returns a sledgehammer to the store’s inventory.

McCall visits an old friend and former fellow agent Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo) and her husband Brian (Bill Pullman) to find out who he’s dealing with. When he hears that he’s going up against the entire Russian mafia, instead of shrinking back, he squares his shoulders and goes about planning to finish the job.

Teddy starts taking out crooked cops, trying to figure out who did the wet work. He finally figures out that it’s McCall. Teddy straight-up just goes to McCall’s apartment, posing as a cop. McCall isn’t fooled for even one second, letting Teddy know all of the mistakes he’s making in procedure, and how’s he’s giving himself away. Teddy is an absolute psychotic but he must sense the danger pulsing off of McCall. Even his instincts of self-preservation kick in, even he must realize that he’s up against someone who’s at least if not more than his match.

Helping out the police, McCall takes out a giant warehouse owned by Pushkin. Soon after, he visits Teddy at his headquarters (it’s a bar). Teddy is sitting opposite one of his head goons. The goon gets up to take a slash. A minute later, his bloodied sunglasses hit the table in front of Teddy. “He won’t be coming back.” McCall gives Teddy a chance to tell his boss to pull out of the U.S. Like, the whole U.S.! Just shut down operations on that continent! Obviously, he doesn’t take it.

McCall destroys two oil tankers—yeah, I know, right? A Russian mobster has oil tankers, WTH—which finally causes Teddy to respond. He takes the coward’s way out, kidnapping McCall’s Home Mart coworkers. McCall skips the negotiation meeting, instead hitting the store where they’re being held and killing all of Teddy’s men, freeing the hostages. The trap is now set: Teddy and his remaining men arrive to finally take care of McCall. It doesn’t work out like that. McCall doesn’t leave unscathed but he’s mostly fine. No-one else survives. Teddy eats a bunch of nails from a nail gun.

A few days later, Pushkin is in his shower. He’s not alone in the bathroom. McCall is there, turning the lights on and off. Pushkin tries to buy him off. No dice. McCall has set a trap whereby Pushkin electrocutes himself. McCall is in the wind. Gone, like a ghost. All of Pushkin’s men are dead, littering the mansion.

The coda is Alina approaching Robert on the street, telling him that she’s used the money he gave her to turn her life around, once she was released from the hospital. The end.

Rush Hour 3 (2007) — 7/10

Officers Carter (Chris Tucker) and Lee (Jackie Chan) are back together when the shadowy Triads attempt an assassination of a top cop who wants to clean up the streets. Reynard (Max von Sydow) seems helpful but he also seems suspicious.

I didn’t recognize any actors other than Hiroyuki Sanada, who played Lee’s childhood foster brother and #1 baddie.

Oh, and there was Roman Polanski as Commissaire Revi, a French cop who gives them a hard time, again and again.

Carter and Lee gallivant all over, eventually ending up in Paris, where they end up in a giant set piece on the Eiffel Tower.

I gave it an extra star because I just love watching Jackie Chan work. And, honestly, Chris Tucker’s pretty funny. They were a good buddy-cop duo.

I watched it in German.

Murder Sheets (2024) — 8/10

This is the first special we watched with Liz. It is her fourth special. She’s fun. She tells good stories. She’s not clean but she’s not needlessly filthy.[2] She talks about her real life without leaning on crassness for humor. She leans on humor for humor, which is a nice change of pace.

You can watch the special below,

MURDER SHEETS FULL SPECIAL by Liz Miele (YouTube)

The video lists the following topics:

1. Intro
2. Online dating
3. My cat died
4. Dating apps
5. Murder sheets
6. Murder sheets plot
7. New Jersey
8. Dating
9. Witchcraft
10. Edibles
11. Squatters
12. Bike
13. Happiness
14. Packages
15. The wallpaper people
16. Traveling
17. Pakistan
18. Passport control
19. Baby of the family
20. Sam smokes
21. Kakei (no idea; probably transcription error)
22. Bkash (no idea; probably transcription error)
23. Taxidermy
24. Pet cemetery
25. Cat death
26. Pasta

This list doesn’t seem very accurate but, with AI, you get what you pay for.

Emotionally Exhausting (2015) — 8/10

This is Liz’s very first special, recorded at a comedy club. Even ten years ago, you can see which parts would develop into the persona she has now: she was already telling stories then, and she was fresh and adult without being crass. She’s not clean but she’s clever.

You can watch the special below,

EMOTIONALLY EXHAUSTING FULL SPECIAL by Liz Miele (YouTube)

The auto-generated chapters are spotty:

1. Chronic back pain
2. Paleo diet
3. Online dating

Self Help Me (2020) — 8/10

This is Liz’s second special, and probably my favorite one.

You can watch the special below,

SELF HELP ME FULL SPECIAL by Liz Miele (YouTube)

The auto-generated chapters in the video are as follows:

1. Intro
2. Why are you scared?
3. Middle East tour
4. Australia tour
5. Hair
6. Living in New York
7. Drugs
8. Friends
9. The One-man Show
10. Road Rage
11. CVS Rage
12. Grumpy Cat Death
13. Self-help Guru
14. My Mom
15. Family
16. Abortion
17. Cat abortion
18. Dyslexic
19. Instagram filter
20. Professional Relationships
21. Relationship Story
22. What are we?
23. Things are getting serious
24. Therapy

Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It (2024) — 8/10

This is a stand-up set. The official description is relatively complete,

“Ronny Chieng unpacks fertility treatment fiascoes, the dark side of men’s self-help and scam-sensitive parents in this witty stand-up special.”

Citing from the Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It (2024) | Transcript, here’s a sample from the bit about scammable parents:

“Just falling for every basic bitch internet scam possible. These fucking baby boomers tumbling into internet scams like pandas rolling down a hill.

“Just jujitsu-rolling into scams every single day.

“Loving scams.

““Oh, what do you want? 20 Target gift cards?”

““Yeah, sounds like a legitimate way to pay for antivirus software on my phone.”

““Everybody, look. Look at this link. Look, there’s a…”

““‘What’s the one trick your doctor doesn’t want you to know?’”

““Okay, I’ll click on that link.”

““I knew it. I knew my doctor was scamming me!”

““That was a trick he didn’t want me to know.”

““I’m gonna invalidate his medical degree with one click right now!” [grunts]

““This is not the scam. My doctor is the scam. Let me…” [grunts] Click on this…

“These fucking internet idiot savants who can’t remember a single goddamn password, but for some reason, can make any piece of misinformation go viral.

“Like a Russian cyber army, just spreading misinformation around the world in family group WhatsApp chats. Everywhere.”

No Country for Old Men (2007) — 9/10

We’re in 1980 Texas. No cell phones. Pay phones. No GPS. No Internet databases.

Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) kills a policeman who had dared to arrest him. He’s a psychopath, deeply unpleasant. They are not even trying to make him an antihero. He terrorizes every person he meets. He is violence personified. He is capricious. He tries to make people responsible for their own deaths by giving them a chance to save their own lives if they correctly call a coin toss. This mercuriality makes him even more unpleasant, like watching a boy torture animals or insects.

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a hunter with no disinclination to picking up some easy cash with some illicit work or by taking advantage of a windfall that life might send his way.

Life does send him a windfall, in the form of a drug deal gone wrong, where all of the people are dead and both the drugs and money are just lying there, out in the desert. Scratch that: one man had survived. He was badly wounded and begging for water. Llewelyn chooses to ignore him and takes the money home.

This could have been a really short film, but Llewelyn’s conscience won’t let him sleep. He returns to the site with a jug of water but the man has been murdered. The cleanup crew spots Llewelyn, chasing him into a river, clipping him in the shoulder. He gets away but sends his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) to stay with her mother in Oklahoma.

Now, guess who the drug dealers get to find the missing money? Anton Chigurh, of course. And Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is on the trail of both of them, putting the piecesof Chigurh’s MO together while trying to get through to Llewelyn to try to protect him from what he strongly suspects is a murderous force of nature.

There’s this whole cat-and-mouse game at a motel, where Llewelyn hides the briefcase in an air duct, to which he has access from the adjoining room. Llewelyn is clever but he discovers far too late that the briefcase has a tracking device in it. Chigurh finally has Llewelyn in his sights but Llewelyn is slippery and gets away into Mexico. Each wounds the other. Llewelyn hides the briefcase again—this time in the reeds by the Rio Grande—and makes it to a Mexican hospital. Chigurh stitches up his own wounds in a motel room.

Bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson)—who’d been hired by the other end of the transaction, in the person of, literally, the Man Who Hires Wells (Stephen Root)—shows up by Llewelyn’s hospital bed, telling him to give it up. He knows—and fears—Chigurh, and says that Llewelyn has no chance.

Wells is right. Chigurh finds Wells before Llewelyn can contact him after having retrieved the money again. Chigurh eliminates Wells while he’s on the phone with Llewelyn—and Chigurh whispers into the open line Carla Jean is next, that he knows where she is.

Llewelyn contacts Carla Jean to give her the money and protect her. He can’t even protect himself, as Carla Jean’s mother inadvertently tells the Mexicans where Llewelyn is. They find him and kill him, all without Chigurh’s involvement. The Mexicans get their money.

This is very typical of the kind of dark fare that the Coen brothers like to make: the universe doesn’t care about plot, characters, or story arc. The universe grinds on, inexorably, regardless of what you think should happen, or what you’d like to happen. Llewelyn is dead. He doesn’t get the money. Neither does Carla Jean. The drug dealers get the money.

Even Chigurh doesn’t get any closure because he didn’t get to kill his target. How will will he close this naggingly open circle? Well, he’s got to clean up the loose end that is Carla Jean.

He leaves her house, mission accomplished, driving away, … and is T-boned, breaking his arm and dazing him, temporarily. Sirens wail. Two boys on bikes appear. He buys one of the boys’ shirts for $100 and limps away. It was really unclear whether they would survive their encounter with this eldritch horror of a man.

The film ends on a retired Ed Tom Bell wondering aloud to his wife about what he’s going to do that day, and then recounting a couple of dreams that he’d had.

Fatherhood (2023) — 5/10

Matt (Kevin Hart) became a widower just days after the birth of his daughter Maddy. Despite the unalloyed shittiness of his mothers-in-law—they are frustratingly dumb, portrayed like simple-minded bumpkins who prefer the newest child over everything—he decides to raise the child himself.

Like, instead of what? Giving her up to foster care? Giving her up to her grandmothers? Like, is he supposed to leave a paying job in this economy just to move closer to a family that will likely make his life so miserable that he’ll want to kill himself? Like, was that the bargain? “Move closer to us, you fucking idiot, because you’re obviously incapable of doing anything right by yourself? Also, I never thought you were worthy of my daughter and I largely blame you for her death.”

As you can tell, Matt’s mother-in-law Marion (Alfre Woodard) really rubbed me the wrong way. The part that annoyed me more was that she made me think of the most-likely overwhelmingly large percentage of people who didn’t share my annoyance. People think that this kind of behavior is OK. It’s propaganda. It enables people like this because they can point to popular culture and say “see? I’m not the only one.”

It’s like making endless movies about bratty, shitty kids who never get any comeuppance or discipline, or movies in which cops and military get to do whatever they want, all the time. That’s how you drum up support for spoiling children, that’s how you drum up support for a police state, that’s how you drum up support for foreign wars, and that’s how you propagandize the notion that—while single mothers are reprehensible, it’s not because they’re incapable but because they are an affront to God—single fathers are a logical impossibility.

The plot was stamped out with a cookie-cutter: Matt manages to raise Maddy into whatever people are accepting as a reasonably OK child these days. Matt avoids women like the plague because he lost his true love and he will never love again. The very first person with whom he is set up—Lizzie (DeWanda Wise)—lights a spark. And why wouldn’t she? She’s young. She’s gorgeous. She’s funny. She has a cool job. And Maddy likes her, after only the minimal hesitation required by movies like this.

But Matt is a conflicted dude and Maddy is nothing if not deeply aware of how to manipulate her emotionally stunted father, so she gets him to leave her with her grandmothers … ah who cares? He’s made to choose between an incredible job opportunity or getting his daughter back to live with him, and also ends up with Lizzy. Also, he gets the job anyway, so God is good, and the universe rewards those who choose wisely. The end.

I took away a star because it was only about half a movie. It became so clichéd and filled with unappealing characters, like the mother-in-law, that I was distracted from how good Kevin Hart is at these kinds of roles.

Abgang mit Stil (Going in Style) (2017) — 7/10

Joe (Michael Caine), Willie (Morgan Freeman), and Albert (Alan Arkin) are old and busted. They’re living out their last days in Brooklyn. This is fine. They’re fine with it, that is, until Joe learns that the bank has raised his variable-rate mortgage payments[3] and will take away the home where he lives with his daughter and granddaughter.

Nearly simultaneously, he is a bystander during a robbery of that selfsame bank, exchanging a few friendly words with one of the robbers, where the robber sympathizes with his plight.

“It is a culture’s duty to take care of it’s elderly.”

Things get even tighter when, in classic U.S-American fashion, the company for which they’d all worked, and which manages their pension fund, announces plans to finally close out all operations in the U.S., oh, and, also, incidentally, the money in the pension fund is all gone. And it’s gone.[4] Just like that.

The saddest part of this is that this is not an unbelievable plot point, it’s just how things work in the U.S. Large corporations can just up and legally empty out the saving accounts of their employees and keep it for their more highly paid executives. This is just how things work there. It happened to an uncle of mine.

Joe decides that he’s going to rob a bank. How hard could it be? Willie and Albert are appalled at first, but they slowly come around. Willie needs a kidney transplant, so what does he have to lose? And Albert is lost without his pension, so it’s only upside for him: if they get arrested, at least he has a bed and three square meals per day.

They try their hand at some shoplifting at a local grocery store and they are not good at it. They get some help from Joe’s former son-in-law Peter (Peter Serafinowicz) and a guy he knows, Jesús Garcia (John Ortiz). They set up an elaborate plan whereby they all are all observed—and filmed—working at a carnival put on my their retirement home, while they rob a bank.

The robbery goes relatively smoothly—with only Willie slightly revealing himself when the mask suffocates him—and they’re off and back at the carnival to put in another appearance for the cameras. The only witness the police can get is the deeply addled Milton Kupchak (Christopher Lloyd), who is great.

They get away with $2.3M but the FBI is hot on their tails, in the form of agent Hamer (Matt Dillon). He can’t make the case stick because the only witness at the bank was a little girl who saw Willie’s face but he was nice to her, so she buttons up.

Hamer catches thinks he’s caught Joe red-handed in a diner. I mean, he kind of had. Joe was getting a puppy from Jesús, who had not only trained him and helped him on the robbery, but was also the original bank robber with whom Joe had spoken at the start of the film. 🤯 Anyway, Hamer goes away empty-handed, presumably forever. You know, like the FBI does when millions of dollars have been stolen from corporations by people who aren’t already millionaires. 🫠

What else happens? Oh, let’s see: they get away with it, distributing the money in a satisfying and moral manner, Albert donates a kidney to Willie, Anne (Ann-Margret) marries the cantankerous Albert, and the movie ends on their wedding, where the old farts have gotten a new lease on life. You know, because they have money now and aren’t dying in destitution.

I gave it an extra star because the heist was quite a lot of fun, and the cast is really, really good.

I watched it in German.