Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2026.01

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

1. Zurück in die Zukunft II (1989) — 7/10
2. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) — 8/10
3. Zurück in die Zukunft III (1990) — 7/10
4. Rambo: Last Blood (2019) — 6/10
5. Non c’è più religione (2016) — 6/10
6. King Arthur (2004) — 6/10
7. Triangle of Sadness (2022) — 6/10
8. A Knight’s Tale (2001) — 9/10
9. El Verdugo / 100 Rifles (1969) — 6/10
10. Paddington in Peru (2024) — 6/10
11. The End of the Tour (2015) — 9/10

Zurück in die Zukunft II (1989) — 7/10

The first part of this movie has not aged particularly well. It’s a convoluted plot where Doc (Christopher Lloyd) gets Marty (Michael J. Fox) to travel 30 years into the future with him, to save the fate of the children he will have with Jennifer (Elizabeth Shue). He manages it—the details aren’t really important—but meanwhile future Biff Tannen (Tom Wilson) has[2] stolen the time-machine and gone back 30 years to give himself a sports almanac, with which his younger self makes an incredible fortune.

The second part is much better, where Marty returns to an absolute dystopia, where Biff Tannen rules all. His old neighborhood is a war zone—and another family lives in hiis house. A black family. You know, because when the neighborhood goes to shit, white people don’t live there anymore. I feel like that was less intentional than just the most logical choice to make at the time, and thus … pretty racist. It’s not a big deal. It was the end of the 80s, a mere two decades after the Civil Rights Act and well into a phase of red-lining that had been renamed “gentrification” because it sounded fancier.[3]

Where was I? Marty wakes in his Mom’s (Lea Thompson) apartment in the Tanner Tower, where she lives with her husband Biff. Marty is apparently the only thing that’s unchanged. She recognizes him as her son.

Doc shows up and there’s a ton of exposition to explain what was immediately obvious. Doc and Marty must go back in time to 1955 (again) to stop 2025 Biff from giving 1955 Biff the sports almanac. Once there, Marty goes undercover in what he considers to be 1950s camouflage. He combines the Fonz’s leather jacket with a porkpie hat.

As noted above, the whole mission is to get the sports almanac back from Biff Tannin (Tom Wilson). He gets it off of Biff but then loses it again to Biff after having been goaded into a fight with him. How was he goaded? The same way as always: you just call him a coward, and Marty’ll do whatever you want to prove you wrong. So, he has to get the damned thing back again. This time, he does it with the hoverboard, emulating the scene with a skateboard from the first movie. This reboot/nostalgia/memberberries shit is not exactly new.

He gets the almanac back and the Delorean appears, to save him just in the nick of time, dropping a rope and pulling him up just as Biff is about to run him over. Instead of catching/killing Marty, Biff flies into a manure cart. Again. This must be hideously traumatizing.

Still in 1955, the storm is approaching. Doc has dropped Marty off by the estates and Marty burns the almanac, restoring the timeline and eradicating Biff’s reign in 1985. It’s interesting that this only happened after he’d burned the almanac, which suggests that Biff would have gotten it back somehow and kept his own triumphant timeline on track.

It’s also interesting that the newspapers, photos, and mementoes all retain their ability to track which timeline they’re in, and to report on even future events accurately and seemingly instantaneously. Are they somehow Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridges?

Lightning strikes. Thunder rolls.

The next strike hits the Delorean, still hovering overhead.

As Marty gapes in shock, wondering what to do next, a car approaches. A courier steps out. He asks Marty to confirm his name. He hands him a sealed envelope, saying that it’s been sitting with his company for seventy years, awaiting delivery to this precise spot, at this precise time.

The letter is from Doc and he has been thrown back to 1885 by the lightning strike. Marty races immediately to find the 1955 Doc in the streets, having just successfully time-traveled Marty back to 1985. And there Marty is again, standing before him. Doc faints.

To be continued…

I watched it in German.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) — 8/10

In inimical Terry Gilliam style, the real, the remembered, and the fantastical all mix in this retelling of the adventures of the Baron (John Neville). We start in an unnamed city under siege from Ottoman Turks. They have been under siege for so long that their supplies are running out. As a diversion, a theatre troupe puts on a relatively intricate show of the Adventures of Baron von Munchausen. They are soon interrupted by the real Baron, striding in, declaring it all a farce—slanderous, ridiculous nonsense.

He takes over the storytelling…and the stories become quite a bit more real. His first tale is of himself and his team—superheroes like Berthold (Eric Idle), who runs so fast that he has to wear a ball-and-chain on each ankle to keep himself in place, Gustavus (Jack Purvis), who is small but who has super-hearing and whose lungs pack a huge punch, Adolphus (Charles McKeown), a marksman who can see for hundreds of miles, and Albrecht (Winston Dennis), who possesses the strength of twenty men.

They are guests of the Sultan (Peter Jeffrey), with whom the Baron makes a bet: he will have a much-better bottle of wine delivered from the Queen’s court in Vienna before the sun sets. If he wins, he gets to take what one man can carry from the Sultan’s treasury; if he loses, the Sultan may have his head.

He wins, and Albrecht takes nearly every last doubloon from the room. On their way out, though, they are assaulted, and Gustavus and Adolphus demonstrate their respective skills to save the group. Somehow, the cannonballs and explosions bleed into reality, nearly destroying the theater. The crowd begins to run away. Munchausen begs them to stay.

The play’s producer The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce) isn’t even 100% mad. All of the actors play both roles: those in the tales of the elder Munchausen, which seem to be bridging fantasy and reality, and those as actors in the play.

In the ruins of the theatre, little Sally Salt and her dog discover the Baron lying behind the stage, with the angel of death sucking the life from him like a dementor. She rescues him but he wants her to let him die. He can’t resist telling one more story. She runs away when the ceiling starts to fall. It really is the attack of the Ottomans that is destroying the city.

Sally and the Baron head to the ramparts. He rides out on a cannonball and returns, having fought off death once again, and also reconnoitered the Turkish camp. Sally now believes that he is the real deal. They retreat to the theater, where the rest of the troupe has taken cover. Rose (Uma Thurman) is there. She must offer up her pantaloons to build a hot-air balloon (un montgolfier). He soars over the city, on his way to get reinforcements; the city cheers him on. Sally has stowed away.

The Baron sails for the moon, where he knows the king (Robin Williams) and queen (Valentina Cortese), and where the people can remove their heads. Sally doesn’t buy a word of it.

They awake on the moon, with their aircraft now having become a boat, “sailing” through the moon-dust. They are trapped in a Potemkin village of sorts, and meet the king of the moon, j’excuse, il re de tutto (the king of the moon speaks Italian half the time). He imprisons the Baron in a birdcage-like contraption, floating in blackness—which you’d recognize from Time Bandits—and, beneath the floor of the cage is Berthold, who’s been there so long that he doesn’t even remember who the Baron is.

The Queen of the Moon’s head appears to free them. Her body is distracting the King of the Moon, which causes her to ooh and aah throughout the escape. They escape by riding away on her hair/mane, shooting across the moonscape. The king discovers her treachery and hunts them down on a three-headed robotic bird named Sibyl. There are…difficulties, and he crashes without hurting anyone else. His body is dead but the head lives on. He sneezes himself off the moon.

Sally, Berthold, and the Baron climb to the tip of the moon’s crescent—what a lovely imagination—and attach a rope to it, which they use to descend to Earth. When the rope runs out, the Baron cuts the piece from the top so that Berthold can tie it to the bottom, in order to extend it. It doesn’t work, obviously. They land in a volcano—Etna—in the middle of a labor dispute. Vulcan (Olliver Reed) receives them. They ask him if he knows where their other three teammates are. He invites them to tea. But first, he shows them his latest weapon.

“Baron Munchausen: What’s this?
Vulcan: Oh, this is our prototype. RX, uh, Intercontinental, radar-sneaky, multi-warheaded nuclear missile.
Baron Munchausen: Ah! What does it do?
Vulcan: Do? Kills the enemy.
Baron Munchausen: All the enemy?
Vulcan: Aye, all of them. All their wives, and all their children, and all their sheep, and all their cattle, and all their cats and dogs. All of them. All of them gone for good.
Sally: That’s horrible.
Vulcan: Ahh. Well, you see, the advantage is you don’t have to see one single one of them die. You just sit comfortably thousands of miles away from the battlefield and simply press the button.
Berthold: Well, where’s the fun in that?”

At tea, they find Albrecht, who’s a servant and happy as a clam feeling small and delicate. Venus (Uma Thurman) arrives. A clam-shell rises out of a fountain, rises, and opens to reveal Uma Thurman at 18 years old, as God made her, and in her absolute prime. Two servants fly in (on cables, natch) to swathe her in clothing. Just stunning. What a lovely scene.

Vulcan is deeply in love. He calls her his wife. I’m not so sure that’s true. The Baron? He is enchanted. But so is Venus! The Baron pulls, man. He’s pulled pretty much everyone so far. So, they’re dancing on air together when Vulcan pulls them back down—I learned a lot of misogynistic words in French in this scene (e.g. salope, catin, dingue, gonzesse but also nicer ones like cocotte, pouliche)—then throws them into a river.

They pop up, upside down, in a lake at the center of the Earth. They right themselves and are no longer drowning. They spot an island. But it’s not an island. It’s a giant sea monster. It swallows them all up. They wash up on a shipwreck. The Baron’s in bad shape. They hear music coming from one of the myriad other wrecks. A warm light emanates from a cabin high above.

They find Adolphus and Gustavus there. They’ve not just aged terribly, but have nearly lost their powers, being nearly blind and deaf, respectively. They are playing cards with death. Sally’s shriek dispatches death again. The Baron’s horse breaks in to wake them all up again. The Baron ages when he’s close to giving up; he grows younger when Sally has inspired him.

The Baron throws sneezing powder out of the window, causing the sea monster to eject them and their boat from its blowhole. The baron is astride his horse while the others row. They arrive on shore, exactly where the Ottomans are. The Ottomans blow them out of the water. It’s not quit the returning-hero approach that Sally had imagined. She is growing … frustrated with the old, useless farts. The Baron looks younger again, though. He is also frustrated with the old farts. he enters the Ottoman camp to give himself up. His team rallies themselves to come to his rescue, as he knew that they would.

The mayor is there, trying to negotiate a surrender to the marauders. He derides the Baron’s fantastical life, preferring to use logic and reason. This is, of course, a recurring theme in Gilliam’s work: the triumph of art, of whimsy, over the crushing logic, the unyielding reason of society.

During the celebration, the mayor snipes the Baron from the clocktower. He is, once more, at death’s door. A doctor finally arrives, as the Baron repeats, for the fourth or fifth time, “pas d’medicin”, because it is, of course, the angel of death, peeling the Baron’s soul from this mouth, exactly like the dementors would 30 years later. The baron is lying in state. And … an older baron is on stage, reciting his own eulogy.

This is the showdown between the mayor and his ironclad reason and Munchausen’s world of fantasy, which is sometimes just the thing that people need. But the Baron sometimes wonders whether the world needs him anymore. He expressed it quite well to Sally when they were playing cards with Death on the boat,

“Baron Munchausen: Because I’m tired of the world and the world is evidently tired of me.
Sally: But why? Why?
Baron Munchausen: Why, why, why! Because it’s all logic and reason now. Science, progress, laws of hydraulics, laws of social dynamics, laws of this, that, and the other. No place for three-legged cyclops in the South Seas. No place for cucumber trees and oceans of wine. No place for me.”

But also the actor who plays the Baron says, as they advance on the mayor and his army,

“Open the gates, dear friends…
and let’s seize the day!
Or close our minds up
with inventions, death and fear.
There’s nothing so
destroys a man…
as ignorance and conformity!”

In French, it was quite nice as well,

“Ne cédez pas, Ouvrez les portes, chers amis!
Saisisson cet instant ou que tombe
sur nos âmes la mort de l’imagination.
Dans la peur, rien ne détruit plus un homme
que l’ignorance, le prosaïsme, le conformisme!”

The mayor is trying to continue to keep everyone inside, terrified of leaving, imposing a siege from within, a siege of the mind. This is also a recurring Gilliam theme, one I quite admire. They throw open the gates to prove to the mayor that he is wrong, that Munchausen and his team had vanquished the Turks. Munchausen rides off. The end.

The sets and costumes are absolutely incredible. It’s 1988; it’s all real. It’s no wonder that Gilliam’s movies always cost so much and took so long to make. He’s a genius. There’s no-one else who’d ever made movies like he does. The sets are intricate, lived-in, real, dusty, dirty, and wonderful. The camera angles are inventive.

Even the smallest scenes—the mayor and a dozen scribes in a room piled high with papers and devices—don’t skimp on a single detail. The battlefield has miniature elephants with siege towers on them. They’re on-screen for seconds…but I remembered them. It’s just incredible.

Zurück in die Zukunft III (1990) — 7/10

This film begins immediately after the end of Zurück in die Zukunft II, with Doc (Christopher Lloyd) lying in the street after having fainted at seeing Marty (Michael J. Fox) again.

They learn that the Delorean was irreparable with 1885 technology. 1885 Doc had included instructions on how to repair it in 1955, though, and how to find the Delorean that he’d packed away in a cave. They’re ready to send Marty back to 1985 with the Delorean.

Outside the cave, Marty trips over Doc’s headstone, from 1885, learning that Doc had died just days after having sent the letter. He didn’t live out his days in peace and happiness. Marty elects to travel back in time to 1885, where he is truly a fish out of water. He stows the Delorean, meets his great-great-grandfather, great-great grandmother, and his great-grandfather as a baby.

Marty gets into town and immediately gets into Buford Tannen’s hair, which seems to be an unavoidable feature of the space-time continuum. Guess what, though? The Delorean’s gas tank ruptured, so it can’t get up to 88MPH. They’ll have to push it with a train. Emmett’s shop is wonderful, chock-full of machines, one of which is two stories high and produces ice cubes. He has a Rube Goldberg machine to cook breakfast for him.

While they’re inspecting the rail lines that they’ll follow with their “borrowed” train, Doc saves Clara (Mary Steenburgen). They fall immediately in love, with common interests like science, teaching, Jules Verne, etc. At the town festival that night, they dance and are interrupted by Tannen, who wants to kill Doc. Marty manages to draw his ire instead and they have a Tuesday morning showdown. Marty had previously impressed the guy running the stall selling Colt 45s, so the man gives him one with which to kill Tannen, if he can.

At some point, Buford Tannen (Tom Wilson) bragged that he’d killed 12 men, not counting Injuns and Chinamen. I can’t tell how ironic that was. The next morning, Marty starts practicing quick-drawing, and we get a quick view of Fox’s little heinie, which must have been deliberate.

Doc and Marty talk about their plans and Doc must reluctantly agree that he belongs in the future, and must break up with Clara. He does so but … not well. He is devastated and tries drowning his sorrows in whiskey. he spends so much time blabbering that he blabs the whole night away. Marty wakes on the morning of his shootout to find Doc is gone. He finds Doc in the bar, still getting ready to take his shot. His binge lasts one shot and he passes out.

Tannen has arrived. Marty doesn’t want to go out. But Tannen keeps calling him a coward. He finally manages to break the curse by not rising to the challenge and goes out the back way, with a by-now revived Doc. They’re shot at and Marty bumps into a stove, jostling the door free.[4] With Doc in danger, Marty walks out to challenge Tannen. Tannen blows him away. When Tannen goes to check on the body, Marty brains him with the iron plate, then works him over.

Tannen’s going to jail. It’s weird, though, did they just realize that he’s a criminal? Because the U.S. Marshal didn’t even try to arrest him two nights before. Were they arresting him for a bank he’d robbed in the interim? He had mentioned something about having a prior engagement on the Monday.

Clara, meanwhile, hears from other passengers on the train bound for San Fransisco how much Emmett had loved her and she stops the train and heads back. Marty and Emmett catch the train and hijack it. They’ve got it on the right track and up against the Delorean. They’ve got fuel sticks to get the train up to 88MPH. This has to work because the track ends over a canyon in 1885. The hope is that the bridge will be there in 1985. Clara is trying to catch them on a horse but they’re starting to go too quickly. The first booster fuel kicks in just as she jumps onto the locomotive.

Doc’s trying to get to the Delorean and Clara is there, beaming her love. It looks a bit silly and she seems to be largely unaware of how she’s putting a serious crimp in their plans.

They’re going 50MPH. She has to climb to the car as well because she’s not going to be able to get off now. She’s got very practical train-climbing boots.

They’re going 72MPH now. The next booster blows. Clara and Doc nearly fall off the train. The locomotive engine is about to blow. Marty sends them the hoverboard.

82MPH.

Emmett rescues Clara and they fly off on the hoverboard. He’s not going back to the future.

Marty is, though. The Delorean disappears, as it should. The flaming train plummets to the bottom of the canyon.

The Delorean appears on the bridge in 1985 … and Marty gets out just as an oncoming train annihilates it. Marty finds his family at home, then picks up Jennifer (Elizabeth Shue) in his truck. Needles (Flea) pulls up in his truck and challenges him to a drag race. He pretends to go, but J-turns out of there instead.

When he returns to the site of the Delorean wreckage with Jennifer, Doc shows up with his souped-up time-travel train. All’s well that end’s well. I guess Doc built another time-travel machine in the late 1880s. He’s also already gone to the future to soup that thing up. It’s a flying train, is what I’m saying.

I watched it in German.

Rambo: Last Blood (2019) — 6/10

John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) has gotten older. But he’s still useful. The movie starts in a torrential downpour, a storm with flooding, with Rambo saving a few people from floods. He gets to show off his horse skills. I guess he likes horses now.

He’s living on a horse ranch with Gabriela (Yvette Monreal) and her guardian Maria (Adriana Barraza). Gabriela is 17 and bored. She no longer believes anything that the only two people who have done nothing but love and care for her her entire life have to say. Everyone else in the world is smarter and better than they are. Rambo tries to placate her by letting her friends throw a party in his tunnels, but it’s not enough. At the party, her friend Gizelle (Fenessa Pineda), a nasty little piece of business, lets Gariela know that she’s located her long-gone father in Mexico.

She asks to go see him. Rambo says no. Maria says hell no.

She goes anyway, a 17-year-old driving to a terrible-looking neighborhood in a city she’s never been to, to visit a man who she’s been told a million times is a terrible, terrible person. What could possibly go wrong?

Surprisingly, Gizelle does actually take Gabrielle to her father, who immediately proves to her what a terrible person he is, in no uncertain terms. He tells her she means nothing to him and send her on his way. This is, honestly, a much better outcome than I’d expected going in to this scene.

Gabriele is devastated, of course, so Gisele takes her to a club to cheer her up. Just kidding, Gisele wanted to get hella drunk, steal her friend’s gold bracelet, and let some local guys who collect underage prostitutes roofie her. YOLO.

Let’s go back quickly to her conversation with Rambo, right before she drove her underage ass to a country she’s never been to, all alone.

Gabriela: Uncle John, I have to do this. I need to hear it from him. I need to understand why he would just do that.
Rambo: Because he’s not a good man.
Gabriela: Can’t be that simple.
Rambo: It is.
Gabriela: Uncle John, l’ve heard the stories. I know you’ve been through a lot. But my world is a lot different from yours.
Rambo: No, it’s not. It’s worse.
Gabriela: No, it’s not. People don’t just act bad for no reason.
Rambo: There’s no reason for a man to throw his family away. He’s lucky he has one.
Gabriela: Why are you getting so mad?
Rambo: Because you don’t know how bad it is. I know how black a man’s heart can be. There’s nothing good out there, Gabrielle.
Gabriela: Maybe he’s changed.
Rambo: Men like that don’t change. It only gets worse.
Gabriela: You changed.
Rambo: I haven’t changed. I’m just trying to keep a lid on it, every day.

So, she’s been kidnapped by two extremely unsavory brothers. Look, everyone in this movie is a caricature but they all have their roles to play.

The first act was bucolic, establishing how well Rambo’s adapted. It shows how good he is with horses, how good he is with Gabriella. It also shows his extensive tunnels and weapons store that he has under the ranch. It was pretty wholesome overall.

Now we’re in the second act, which unrolls like Taken but with Sylvester Stallone in the lead role. With Gabriella gone in the morning, Maria and Rambo put two and two together, find all of the addresses he needs, and he rockets down there like an avenging angel. He pays a visit to papa but realizes quickly that, though he’s a piece of shit, he had nothing to do with anything. Next, he visits Giselle, who’s wearing the gold bracelet that had been Gabrielle’s mother’s. Rambo knows now how to handle her: roughly.

He forces her to take him to the club to scope out the men who’d abducted his “daughter”, then follows them to their lair. We are treated to a few scenes to let us know what human trafficking looks like. The first group of customers happen to be the local police. They let them in 40 or 50 at a time, as loudly declared by the madame, who runs the show for the brothers when they’re otherwise occupied.

On the street, Rambo has overestimated himself and gotten surrounded by dozens of guys. He confronts the brothers. They laugh at him and beat him within an inch of his life. One of them inaugurates Gabriella to a life of prostitution and heroin that very evening.

A local journalist Carmen Delgado (Paz Vega), who’d been following him, picks up his shattered body and takes him to her apartment to recuperate. A local doctor says he can’t move for a few days because he has a concussion. He stitches up some wounds.

Rambo’s on his feet again four days later and plans his next move. He breaks in to one of the houses, killing everyone who works there with what looks like a clawed hammer. He finds Gabriella upstairs, gone on heroin, arm full of needle holes. He carries her to the truck and they vamoose. She dies before they get to the U.S. border. He drives her body home, burying her under a tree, on the ranch.

Montage. Smithing. Preparing the tunnels. Claymore. Shotguns, Punji sticks. Fire traps. The works.

He drives back to Mexico, to the skinny brother’s house, the one who’d repeatedly raped Gabriella. He kills everyone in that guy’s home and leaves the brother’s decapitated body on the the bed.

Back home, he waits.

The other brother obliges by showing up with his posse in five or six vehicles. The fireworks begin. Rambo takes out half of the group before luring the others below ground. He picks them off one by one, saving the brother for last. Rambo takes some damage but we know that gunshot wounds mean nothing to a man on a mission.

Despite the wound to his shoulder, his arrows fly true, four of them pinning the brother to the barn wall. He plunges his Rambo knife into his chest cavity to pull out his still-pumping heart and give him a fleeting glimpse of it before he dies.

Rambo retreats to his porch. Everyone he’s loves is dead or gone. His ranch is ruined. But he will fight on.

I watched it in the original English and Spanish with German subtitles (I was riding the bike for some of it).

Non c’è più religione (2016) — 6/10

This is the story of the island of Porto Buio (literally “Dark Port”), an island with a small village on it, an island without children. They have so much religion that everyone’s either old or in the church. Young people move away. They are in crisis because Easter is coming and they have no Baby Jesus for their celebrations. There is only Lupo (Giuseppe Fiale), an overweight boy going through puberty. He’s at about 85kg, so yeah, he’s a big boy. Suor Marta (Angela Finocchiaro, a nun) isn’t a big fan of Cecco’s (Claudio Bisio) plan to scare up a baby from the thriving nearby Tunisian community but she is convinced to go have a look.

A committee of four stern-faced and probably deeply racist Italians make the excursion. They are shockingly racist but this is probably realistic. There are honestly a lot of funny touches here. It’s racist, but they don’t come off well at all. Their young tour guide Ali (Mehdi Meskar) is great. They are there to meet Bilal (Alessandro Gassmann). He speaks fluent Italian and seems to have an Italian mamma, who calls him during the meeting. He’s got a strong Benicio del Toro vibe to him. He is accompanied by the lovely Aïda (Nabiha Akkari).

They’re in—they’ll loan the island their son. However. However, the little village, in the spirit of unity, must also do Ramadan with them. The villagers are quickly metaphorically dying of hunger and thirst. But they don’t want to have a plastic baby Jesus, so they’re stuck.

Cecco catches Lupo with a piece of pizza and takes it from him before he can eat any of it. But then Cecco is caught red-handed in the act of licking the paper clean. He must atone. But how? “Un posto dove puo pregare.” Bilal wants a place to pray. So now the church has to make space for a mosque. Half of the apse is filled with the Catholic service. 180º in the other direction is the Muslim service. Like, at the same time.

Next, Cecco reveals the new village sign: it’s in Italian and Arabic.

Bilal, Marta, and Cecco are getting to be friends. Ali has eyes for Cecco’s daughter Maddalena (Laura Adriani), who’s at school in London.

It’s to be a mixed ceremony as well, so the Tunisians are demanding a few changes to the ceremony, to include only the parts of Baby Jesus’s story that overlap from the Koran and Bible. The three of them are at the beach collecting sand for the “desert”. Good Lord, they’re playing in the surf like children—I supposed this is to show that we’re all the same underneath, all getting the most pleasure out of the simple things.

Cecco screws things up when he offends Marta, who’s still a little bit in love with him, despite being a nun. Cecco’s sweet on her too but doesn’t know how to express himself. While Marta’s baking and talking to her giant statue of Jesus, he’s off scuba-diving with Bilal, who’s now his best buddy again, and they have a bit of a heart-to-heart. They barely survive their journey as they’re trapped out at sea overnight.

The Bishop arrives to inspect the preparations for the ceremony. This takes a long time, and there are a lot of broad jokes. Upshot: they get approval.

Cecco’s daughter Maddalena arrives back from London. She is very pregnant. Ali’s still dressed as Joseph. But he’s not the dad, ,,, is he? They show up at a lovely party where everyone’s having fun and drop Maddalena’s pregnancy like a bombshell.

She won’t tell Cecco who the father is. Cecco suspects that it’s Ali. He asks her to be the Madonna. Aïda and Bilal are out, even though they’d prepared a dance to Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, for some reason utterly unbeknownst to me. I guess that rekindled friendship is over again?

Maddalena is a buddhist though, so the sand is out and, for some reason, bindis are in. Also saffron robes. Cecco is trying to drive a wedge between Ali and Maddalena, somewhat inexpertly.

Maddalena is going to have her baby on the stage, near the manger, without an epidural, as she asks for many times. Ali goes to get Marta. They have to take her to a hospital. Bu the island doesn’t have a hospital. The Piaggio three-wheeler is their ambulance; their way is blocked by a herd of goats. Marta is in the back with Maddalena, making conversation,

“E come lo chiami? [And what will you name him?]
Che cazzo le so! [Like I fucking know!]
Ah. Bel nome. [Ah. Nice name.]”

Maddalena’s in the back of a boat with Marta and Ali. She’s still wearing her golden halo. There’s no time to get to a hospital. They stop the boat in a gorgeous bay. Marta is going to have to turn that baby around and deliver it herself.

The baby cries. The rest of the village arrives in boats. Bilal and Cecco have made up again.

Bilal checks things out before letting Cecco in, “E tutto posto.” (I found this to be a sweet, noteworthy gesture, indicating that they really are friends again.) But is it? Ali and Maddalena sit like Giuseppe and Maria but, when she turns the baby to Cecco…it’s definitely Asian. East Asian.

I gave it an extra star because the actors were affable and seemed to be enjoying themselves, which helped some of the broad humor land better. The scene where they were playing a form of bingo looked like it could have been behind the scenes. They were all laughing as if they were lifelong friends making a movie together.

I watched it in Italian with no subtitles (none were available).

King Arthur (2004) — 6/10

This movie purports to tell the true story of King Arthur and his men. It portrays Arthur as a Roman general, from Rome, and his knights as conscripts from the various outland tribes of the Roman empire. We see Lancelot taken from his family when just a young teenager, entering into bondage for 15 years.

We rejoin him 15 years later, nearly to the day, as he roams with Arthur, eradicating bands of insurgents, many of which are very much like his own family. The first scene is a slaughter of Picts, who’d attacked a Roman coach. We are introduced to the various predilections and fighting styles of all of the men here: Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd), Arthur (Clive Owen), Tristan (Mads Mikkelsen, Gawain (Joel Edgerton), Galahad (Hugh Dancy), Bors (Ray Winstone), and Dagonet (Ray Stevenson), That is quite a cast.

The group rides back to their headquarters, where we see the round table and hear that Bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti) has deemed it their last duty to rescue an important roman family. The group argues about it but they reluctantly agree. What else can they do? Their release papers have been made contingent on doing one last mission, regardless of what their contracts say.

Now we meet the picts, led by Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgård), and his son Cynric (Til Schweiger). They learn that the undefeated Arthur and his knights are coming. The picts surround them but don’t kill them because Merlin (Stephen Dillane) wants them to take out the Saxons for them.

Arthur arrives at the castle of Marius Honorius (Ken Stott) to pick up him and his son Alecto (Lorenzo De Angelis), who’s supposed to be in line to be the next pope. Arthur discovers that Maruis wasn’t being very honorable with his people. They can hear the Saxon drums in the distance but Arthur must discover the secrets of the man whom he’s to take back to Rome. He discovers a filthy dungeon filled with corpses of people who’d been tortured to death. Only a few live: a child and Guinevere (Keira Knightley).

Arthur is this close to killing Marius but he needs to deliver him and his family alive in order to be freed from his bondage to Rome. They head for the pass, the snow falling, with the whole village in tow.

Guinevere coquettes around, pursing her lips super-hard and seeming, despite the nearly deadly torture she’d suffered, to be impervious to the cold. Each of the knights watch her through a window as she bathes. She arranges a surprise meeting between Arthur and Merlin.

The next morning, the honorable Marius tries to kidnap the rescued boy and to kill him. Dagonet fights the men off and Guinevere drops Marius with an arrow to the chest. Fuck that guy. Arthur’s about to become the leader of the Pict army anyway, isn’t he? They disarm Marius’s men.

Onward through the icy pass. The drums beat. The lake ice beneath their feet creaks. Tristan looks at Arthur. It’s time to turn around; it’s time to face the Saxons. On the ice. They are eight against 200. Eight arrows find eight targets. Once. Twice. They force the group tighter to the middle, putting more weight on less ice. Thrice. Four times. Five times. 40 of them gone. The ice isn’t breaking. Dagonet runs out with his mighty axe to break the ice. Arthur chases after him. It works. the Ice breaks. The others fire arrow after arrow. Dagonet falls to a Saxon arrow. The Saxons falls into the cracking ice. The others creep back. More than half drown. Guinevere fires another arrow. It finds its mark. Cynric pulls back.

They make it back. Germanius greets them with their walking papers. He is not greeted with a smile. Dagonet is dead.

Guinevere and Arthur do the dirty deed. The next morning, she’s blue, dressed as a pict. He’s out on the battlefield, facing Cerdic and his army alone. He has granted his remaining knights their freedom. He palavers with Cerdic. They agree to kill each other on the battlefield. The knights return, somehow having magically gotten into not only their own full armor but also their horses, seemingly with no help from anyone.

The picts in the forest fire arrows into the Saxons. Arthur and his knights charge. The picts mop up the first wave of Saxons. They let fire arrows fly into the second wave, lighting moats of oil afire. The picts also have flaming trebuchets. There’s honestly a lot of silly charging about, but the battle scenes are real and not CGI. They put a lot of time and money into this. The horses are gone; now it’s just a straight-up battle on foot.

Tristan takes on Cerdic. Guinevere is snarling her way around the battlefield like a she-devil.[5] Cyrric almost kills her but Lancelot takes him on for her. Tristan is not doing as well as I’d like. He was the coolest knight but he drops to Cerdic’s blade. Tristan gets to see his hawk flying free once more before he’s decapitated. Lancelot and Cyrric kill one another. Arthur and Cedric clash. Arthur rope-a-dopes him.

Smoke billows over a field of thousands of slain warriors. They bury their dead. Guinevere and Arthur marry. Merlin names him King of the Britons

It was decent. Well put-together. A bit long. I’ve seen it now. I watched it in German..

Triangle of Sadness (2022) — 6/10

Carl (Harris Dickinson) is a model, or wants to be a model. The film opens with what looks like a documentary being filmed in a studio with dozens of male models. They’re like cattle.

Now he’s at dinner with Yaya (Charlbi Dean) who eventually self-describes as “manipulative, but I don’t even know I’m doing it.” She claims that she makes Carl pay for everything because she wants to be sure that he would make a good provider. Bullshit. She is cheap, is what she is. She’s convinced herself that, if she has any non-optimal qualities, those are the qualities that the world has imposed on her and that, therefore, having them is not her fault.

Segue to them on a what looks like a very exclusive and ritzy cruise.

Yaya is the kind of person who has all of her keyboard sounds enabled, and whose camera still makes the shutter noise. She’s a model but she has a long scar down her torso. Carl is reading Ulysses. Oh no. Now they’re starting another conversation about who’s allowed to say hi to which crew members, especially if they’re hot. Is this whole movie just about these two? They are not interesting people. I thought Woody Harrelson was in this.

€28K for an engagement ring. Jesus wept.

Oh, thank God. I finally hear Woody. He’s not coming out of his cabin when Paula (Vicki Berlin) the chief steward tries to get him out. Doesn’t he need to drive the boat?

It’s dinnertime. Yaya and Carl are photographing but not eating the food. Dimitry (Zlatko Buric) is asking them what they do, and why they don’t eat the pasta. “I’m gluten-intolerant” They’re influencers. They mostly get stuff for free. They got the cruise for free. Yaya ignores everyone after the first question, staring into her phone.

Dimitry is telling a story about how he became the kingpin of shit (fertilizer). Yaya is struggling to pay attention to a conversation that is so blatantly not about her. Carl is not far behind.

Outside, Carl watches as a boat docks to remove the crew member that he’d complained about, who’d said hello to Yaya. Actions have consequences.

The tedious Carl/Yaya interactions give way to a painful interaction where crew member Alicia (Alicia Eriksson) puts up with a guest, who insists that they switch roles, where she’s the crew member and Alicia is the guest. She makes Alicia get in the hot tub with her uniform on (the staff isn’t allowed to refuse the guests anything). Paula runs to First Officer Darius (Arvin Kananian) for help, because Thomas (Woody Harrelson) still won’t come out of his cabin.

Darius: I’m not going to talk to some crazy Russians.
Paula: It’s not crazy Russians; it’s very rich Russians.
Darius: Same thing.

Paula gets everyone on the staff to suit up and get ready to water-slide because that’s what the guest wants. They’ve even postponed the captain’s dinner, which, let’s be honest, the captain wasn’t going to make anyway.

Woody finally pops his head out the door. All you can hear is empty bottles rolling around in his cabin. Thomas wants to go watch the crew swim. He’s ready to go. He’s in a bathrobe. Honestly, thank God Woody showed up because this movie has not been as good as it thinks it is.

Everyone’s sliding. The slide exits into the ocean.

The boat is canting a bit during the start of the captain’s dinner. Thomas is standing with Darius. Both smile awkwardly. People introduce themselves. One woman complains about the dirty sails—she’d already complained to Paula—but Thomas cheerfully informs her that she is not on a sailboat, so it’s not possible to wash sails that don’t exist.

She checks with her husband, who assures her that they’d seen dirty sails.

“Magnus says yes? [sotto voce] Jesus Christ. Well, in that case, we will clean the sails.”

A baby is crying. Someone has a baby on this cruise?

Carl and Yaya are with the British couple. He asks what their company does. “Well our products have been employed for upholding democracy all over the world.” 🙃 They start complaining about how the anti-personnel-mine conventions trimmed 25% of their profits, causing tough times.

People are not looking healthy but it’s almost like they can’t even believe that they could possible feel sick, because they’re so rich. The crew encourages them to eat because sea-sickness is worse on an empty stomach. I don’t think that’s true, but OK. Let’s see where it takes us.

The meals looks awful, like French food × 10, just over the top. Thomas gets a hamburger and french fries. “I’m not a fan of fine dining.” I’m starting to suspect that they’ve poisoned the guests. Spoiler: This will never be resolved one way or the other.

The puking has begun.

The Russian lady is chugging champagne to counteract the seasickness. The other guests continue eating. Some leave. But some soldier on, drinking wine and eating seafood.

The boat is canting hard. Back and forth. Back and forth. A wheelchair careens briefly out of control.

Thomas has finished his burger (didn’t eat the bun or trimmings) and drinks his wine.

Dimitry is unaffected and is pretty drunk. He plops down at the now-empty captain’s table. He tells a stupid joke about communists told by Ronald Reagan. Thomas responds with,

“Never argue with an idiot. They’ll only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience. Mark Twain.”

Dimitry doesn’t get the hint. He cites Reagan again. Then Thatcher. Thomas ripostes with,

“The last capitalist we hang will be the one who sold us the rope. Karl Marx.”

Dimitry laughs: “A Russian capitalist and an American communist.”

Much later, they’re playing a drinking game, with cards. Guess the card wrong: drink. It’s not complicated.

Dimitry and Thomas are hammered. Dimitry is in the captain’s cabin, making announcements to the whole ship. The storm has gotten worse. Dimitry announces that the ship is sinking. People are panicking, putting on life vests. Dimitry is chattering on and on about communism and capitalism.

Thomas is getting his wheels under him now, lecturing them about inequality and not paying their taxes. Passengers slide back and forth on tipping decks, lubricated by their own vomit.

The crew is hard at work, cleaning the decks. The toilets overflow. One woman cannot stop upchucking. The ship tips and yaws. Some passengers sit on the deck with their life-vests on. Heavy metal music plays (non-diagetic).

The lights go out.

Thomas and Dimitry are still reading to each other.

It’s the next morning. Thomas reads on. A boat approaches. Rebels. Pirates. A pin drops. A grenade rolls. “Look, Winston, isn’t this one of ours?” Boom.

Hours later, many have washed up on an island. Dimitry is there, of course. He accosts a black man, accusing him of being a pirate.

It is nighttime. It’s raining. An animal barks, again and again. It is morning. A rescue craft drifts ashore. Abigail (Dolly De Leon)—the lady in it—has no advantage once the port is open. She has all the stuff but she’s still being commanded about. Society has not changed. The strata are the same. Abigail is also the only one who knows how to catch food. “I caught the fish; I made the fire; I did all the work; and everybody got something” She takes half of the food for herself. Good for her.

Paula tries to explain how it’s not hers. She’s got a tough row to hoe. She tries to steal the food. She tries to order her around.

Abigail says she’s the captain now, rewarding each concurrence with a piece of tossed food, like trained seals.

Because, like, who’s going to go fishing tomorrow? Paula?

Dmitry becomes a communist immediately, citing Marx, “From each, according to their ability; to each, according to their needs.” There are no capitalists stranded on islands, I guess.

They split on gender lines, with Dimitry being the only male who understands that he has to stay on the good side of the only person capable of finding and cooking food.

We’re back to Carl and Yaya and it’s awful.

Abigail has asked Carl to join her in the lifeboat. She keeps blowing her whistle. It’s hilarious. Yaya does not handle it well. Abigail gave him some pretzel sticks to give Yaya to pay her off.

It becomes a ritual, with the others blowing their whistles whenever Carl heads to the “love boat.”

That loud noise at night? It was a donkey. They smash it over the head with a rock. Again. And again. Until it’s dead. No-one asks why a donkey can survive on the island. Have they even looked around? Did they just kill a donkey on someone’s property? I don’t think they actually ate the thing, though. At least it’s quiet at night now.

Abigail and Yaya take a long hike into the mountains. A vendor hears In den Wolken and tries to sell her Gucci bags, hats, watches. She can only say In den Wolken and he gets annoyed and goes away. They would have been saved.

Abigail and Yaya have found a resort. It was there the whole time. Yaya’s delighted because being rescued means that she gets her power back. Abigail realizes the same thing.

Abigail decides that she’s not interested in going back. She gets a rock. “Abigail, maybe you could come work for me, you could be my assistant.”

Hard pass, Yaya.

They called the movie “Triangle of Sadness,” named after the the furrowed brow that some models inadvertently make. They could have called it “How the Tables Turned” instead. I wanted to like this movie more, and it had its moments, but overall, it was much too long and much too uneven.

A Knight’s Tale (2001) — 9/10

So we start off with a dead knight, a replacement knight, and (rock quartet) Queen playing We Will Rock You playing over a medieval jousting tournament. The people seem to be clapping along to the music. This very modern, rockabilly soundtrack would continue throughout the film.

William Thatcher (Heath Ledger) is squire to the dead knight. He takes his master’s place and does just well enough not to lose, by managing to stay on his horse. He and his co-squires Wat (Alan Tudyk) and Roland (Mark Addy) take their winnings and, instead of going their separate ways, Will convinces them to pool their cash, so that he can train and try his hand at more jousting, in the hopes of making them all some real money.

They meet Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany)—Geoff—on the road to their next tourney. He is buck naked. Chaucer has a gambling problem and keeps losing the clothes off his back. He agrees to prepare papers of nobility that they need to in order to partake in tournaments, in exchange for food and clothes. Bettany is an absolute revelation. His rallying call for Ulrich von Liechtenstein (Will) is glorious.

There are ladies in the mix, of course. The lovely Jocelyn (Shannyn Sossamon) catches his fancy and he hers. The smith Kate is also quite cute.

Will is a good swordsman but a reckless jouster. He’s up against Count Adhemar (Rufus Sewell). His armor is black. His horse is black. He says mean things. He’s definitely the baddie. Will goes up two to nothing but then Adhemar knocks his helmet clean off, for three points, taking the win. Adhemar does not get Jocelyn’s approval, though.

Joselyn’s right-hand maiden Christiana (Bérénice Bejo) appears to invite Ulrich to the celebration that night. Kate asks them to take her as far as Paris and she’ll make him a new set of armor. Chaucer starts to show them how to dance but Kate pops in to show them how it’s actually done.

They have a dance party. To David Bowie. Adhemar sulks and leaves. The sexy lady is supposed to like him. Stamps his little foot.

Kate is making armor. It’s light; it’s thin. Everyone laughs at it. But…they’ve tested it. And it is, of course, amazing. The next day, the crowd laughs at how tiny the armor is. It stops laughing when they see how easily he gets up on his horse without any help.

He’s up against Colville/Edward (James Purefoy), who is in the royal family of England. Adhemar had withdrawn, supposedly out of respect, but Ulrich jousts him, despite knowing who he was, winning the Prince’s respect. Ulrich wins the tournament. Jocelyn approaches him afterward,

“Jocelyn: I came to ask what you’ll be wearing tonight.
Ulrich: Nothing.
Jocelyn: Well, then, we will cause a sensation because I will dress to match.”

They argue and part ways. He thinks she’s superficial because all she’s interested in are clothes and parties. She thinks he’s superficial because all he’s interested in is weapons and jousting. Which one leads to more pain and tragedy?

He misses her, his friends help him write a letter, and she loves it, rejoining the circuit. To prove his love to her, she demands that he lose because, when he wins, it’s a sign of his love for himself, so winning for her proves nothing. Losing for her proves that he loves her.

A snag is that they group just happen to have 50 gold florins riding on him due to a group bet into which Chaucer had talked them. Luckily for them all, Jocelyn frees him of the burden of losing, convinced that he loves her after he’d been beaten to a pulp. He wins that tournament.

Paul Bettany continues to steal the show, even though he has a lot of competition. Mark Addy has some good lines, too. “Each women wants proof….that they’ve made the correct choice … to uncross their legs.” Which, you know, she does, visiting him in his very sumptuously appointed tent, where he is convalescing from his many, many bruises.

They head to London for the world championships.

William visits his father. The tritest thing in this film is that, somehow, Adhemar is there to spot him in the old town, learning of his common origins. Adhemar turns Will in, because he’s too chickenshit to face him at the tilt. Jocelyn visits him with Chaucer to deliver the bad news that he is a wanted man. All five of them—Jocelyn, Chaucer, Kate, Wat, and Roland recommend him to run. He refuses.

They appear in the ring to uproarious cheers. He is arrested. They of course let Adhemar in to his cell, where Will is helpless, bound to stocks, to get his licks in. The next day, William is in the pillory. His friends are all there. Lots of vegetables being thrown. Prince Edward reveals himself. This is an amazing scene. “I dub thee Sir William.” Goosebumps. Just out of this world.

I’m honestly kind of happy for Adhemar’s hype man, who’s learned more than a thing or two from Chaucer. He has a shitty boss, and has the shitty job of hyping Adhemar.

You’re not going to be stunned to find that William defeats Adhemar and looks like he’s going to live happily ever after with Jocelyn.

El Verdugo / 100 Rifles (1969) — 6/10

Part of the appeal of this film is clearly that it’s a show of incredible horsemanship. They show difficult horse-riding like a martial-arts movie shows fighting skills.

The very significant, other part of the appeal is Sarita (Raquel Welch), who is not a great actress but she is quite ravishing and she’s pretty good at action scenes. Ex-NFL player Jim Brown as Lyedecker, the cop/bounty hunter was probably also a big draw at the time. We’ve also got Burt Reynolds as Yaqui Joe, and Fernando Lamas as Verdugo, the bad, bad Mexican general, so the ladies are definitely showing up to watch this movie in 1969.

Joe is a so-called “half-breed”—half Yaqui Indian and half white man—and he’s robbed a bank of $6,000 and has fled back across the border with it. When lawman Lyedecker catches up with him, he’s not got any of the money on him. Why? Well, rather than a venal bank-robber, he’s actually quite a dedicated rebel and has purchased the titular 100 rifles with it, stashing them away for safe-keeping.

The rest of the movie is about how those rifles help the Yaqui gain their freedom from Verdugo’s iron, racist, and, quite frankly, genocidal, grip, while Lyedecker is dragged further and further into their orbit, via a friendship with Joe, and a sexy-times relationship with Sarita.

First, there’s an overland journey—by horse, naturally—to get the rifles where they’d been hidden. Armed with their rifles, the Yaqui indians take over Verdugo’s ranch, killing and then replacing all of the Mexicans by stealing their uniforms. When other Mexicans return with kidnapped Yaqui children, the Yaqui waylay them and easily take their children back.

The celebration is legendary, The booze flows.

What is it with 1960s Westerns and rape scenes? Sarita bandages Lyedecker’s arm, then plants a kiss on him. He grabs her and starts to upgrade the interaction. She screams and says, “No, not like this. [pause] Not with you.” He actually stops, taking the signal that she’s willing but would rather it not be violent (!). She collects herself. He approaches her, seconds later, and this time… it’s fine. More than fine; she’s very into it. Now they’re making love.

I don’t know where they’re making love, though, because the Yaqui have set the entire ranch on fire. I thought everyone was at the same ranch, but I guess Sarita and Lyedecker were elsewhere. The Mexican Army, with Verdugo at its head, returns to find a burned-out husk with a courtyard full of dead soldiers. One drunken Yaqui remains, lying in a water trough, singing the name “♪ Lyedecker ♪”

Now they’re going to take over a Mexican train, loaded with ammo and more weapons. They use their 100 rifles, popping up from holes in the ground, and from inside the water tower. Sarita distracts the engineer by washing herself under a shower built under the water tower. This literally stops the train. It’s Raquel Welch in only a wet shirt; of course it stops the train.She starts firing when they get close enough. They take over the train but Verdugo isn’t on board.

They take the train and drive it to the town where Verdugo and his troops are waiting. A cannon shot derails the train as is enters town. This is a pretty spectacular scene. The derailed train is full of Yaquis, armed to the teeth, and more than willing to die in a frontal assualt. Many die on both sides in what amounts to trench warfare. Lyedecker unhorses Verdugo with a well-placed shot, depositing him in the middle of a crowd of Yaqui, who tear into him.

So many people died, Mexicans and Yaqui. Including Sarita. Lyedecker saddles up to go back to the U.S., for “one more shot” at becoming a lawman. Joe realizes that he’s the leader of the Yaqui. The end.

I watched it in the original English and Spanish (maybe 1/5 Spanish).

Paddington in Peru (2024) — 6/10

Paddington Bear (Ben Wishaw) has become a Briton, passport and all. He’s still living with the Browns. They all take a trip to Peru to find Paddington’s aunt. There they meet Hunter Cabot (Antonio Banderas).[6]

Cabot has a Gollum/Sméagol thing going on, with his dead relatives haunting him to make the worst possible choices at every opportunity. Look, there are more details, like that he has a daughter and he has to choose between her and the gold, and that the mother superior isn’t quite who she says she is (Spoiler: she’s also a Cabozo), but none of it is particularly surprising nor does it really matter because this is a kid’s movie, and stuff is going to happen.

They’re searching for his aunt but the others are searching for the city of El Dorado, with all of its gold, gold, gold. They find the city but it’s full of orange trees and bears. The bears are Paddington’s original clan. He’s an El Dorado bear! He hangs out for a while but then returns to London to live with the Browns. Everyone, as you can well imagine, ends up living their best life.

Hugh Grant’s character from the first film has a very brief cameo at the very end—where he gets to meet dozens of bears visiting from El Dorado—which reminded me what was so much better about the previous movie, Paddington 2.

As in that movie, the animation is top-notch and seamlessly integrated with the live-action players. The CGI is nearly unnoticeable; it was more apparent on the cliffs of El Dorado, where things looked a little weird, as they always do, when things fade off into the distance.

I was tempted to take away a star because the ending was incredibly trite and easy. But it’s a movie for kids, and it’s a solid entry for them. If you’re under 10 years old, this movie is 100% for you. Even if you’re a bit older, it’s got a soothing plot without too many sharp corners, while still being interesting enough.

This one felt so much like a repeat of the first one—combined with having seen the trailer—that I was second-guessing for the first 20 minutes whether I’d already seen it.

I watched it in English, with German subtitles[7] (partly on the indoor bike).

The End of the Tour (2025) — 7/10

This is the story of a five-day book-tour interview/road-trip that reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) had with David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), author, essayist, philosopher. He is most well-known for having written Infinite Jest[8]

They talk about everything in the world. Much of it, as I recall from having read him, is brutally predictive of our current moment. Try this one on for size.

“Foster Wallace: Yes, you’re performing muscular movements with your hand as you’re jerking off. But what you’re really doing, I think, is you’re running a movie in your head. You’re having a fantasy relationship with somebody who is not real… strictly to stimulate a neurological response. So as the Internet grows in the next 10, 15 years… and virtual reality pornography becomes a reality, we’re gonna have to develop some real machinery inside our guts… to turn off pure, unalloyed pleasure. Or, I don’t know about you, I’m gonna have to leave the planet.
Lipsky: Why?
Foster Wallace: ‘Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier… and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable… to sit alone with images on a screen… given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses, but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die.
Lipsky: Well, come on.
Foster Wallace: In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.”

Not literally, of course. Psychically, morally, … your soul will shrivel, and will die, starved to death as you’ve slowly replaced yourself with the superficial dreams injected through your eyeballs. Foster Wallace was very aware—in this movie as well as his writing—of what an addiction to television—or any televisual media—does to a person.

Foster Wallace doesn’t drink, so Lipsky refrains as well. But they both smoke all the time. Foster Wallace dips too. Foster Wallace was incredibly self-aware and introspective.

“There’s something nice about having somebody who kinda shared your life, and that you could allow yourself just to be happy and confused with.”

He talks about being “confused” more than once.

They’re talking about his Alanis Morissette poster,

“Lipsky: She’s pretty, alright…
Foster Wallace: Yeah, but in a very sloppy, very human way. That squeaky, orgasmic quality in her voice? Here’s what it is: A lot of women in magazines are pretty in a way that isn’t erotic because they don’t look like anybody you know.
Lipsky: True.
Foster Wallace: You can’t imagine them putting a quarter in a parking meter or eating a bologna sandwich. But her, I don’t know, I just find her absolutely riveting.”

On the bandanna[9], insecurity, expectations, perceptions, self-perception,

“Lipsky: So, I gotta ask: What’s with the bandanna?
Foster Wallace: What? What do you mean?
Lipsky: People think it’s a way you’re trying to connect with the younger reading audience.
Foster Wallace: Is that what people think? I don’t know many Gen-Xers who wear ‘em. Jeez. I don’t know what to say. I guess I wish you hadn’t brought this up.
Lipsky: Why?
Foster Wallace: Because now I’m worrying that it’s going to seem intentional. Like if I don’t wear it, am I not wearing it because I’m bowing to other people’s perception that it’s a commercial choice? Or do I do what I want, even though it’s perceived as commercial − and it’s just like one more crazy circle to go around.”

Lipsky isn’t supposed to become friends with him, but they’re pretty compatible. Foster Wallace seems to be a little miffed that his grad-school friend Betsy (Mickey Sumner) seems quite enchanted with Lipsky, but Lipsky is likewise miffed that Foster Wallace spent 25 minutes on the phone with Lipsky’s wife.

Lipsky’s editor is harassing him to ask about heroin use. It’s not going to come up organically.

Instead, they focus on Foster Wallace’s obsession with pop culture, how he doesn’t have a TV but he can’t look away when there’s one in the hotel room. They go to the Mall of the Americas to soak up more pop culture. They meet the two ladies—Betsy and Julie (Mamie Gummer)—to watch a movie, Broken Arrow (starring John Travolta and Christian Slater).

They fight. They both think that the other is being fake, faux.

“Foster Wallace: I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer.
Lipsky: Why?
Foster Wallace: Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.”

In the car, he continues,

“Foster Wallace: I don’t mind appearing in Rolling Stone, but I don’t want to appear in Rolling Stone as somebody who wants to be in Rolling Stone. If you see me like, you know, a guest on a game show in a couple of years…
Lipsky: [laughs].
Foster Wallace: To have written a book about how seductive image is, and how many ways there are to get seduced off any kind of meaningful path, because of the way the culture is now…? What if I become this parody of that very thing?”

At home, Lipsky had already gone to bed. Foster Wallace comes in again,

“There’s a thing in the book: when people jump out of a burning skyscraper, it’s not that they’re not afraid of falling anymore, it’s that the alternative is so awful. And then you’re invited to consider what could be so awful, that leaping to your death seems like an escape from it.

“I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with this kind of thing. But it’s worse than any kind of physical injury. It may be what in the old days was known as a spiritual crisis. Feeling as though every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you can’t fucking function. And it’s really horrible.

“I don’t think we ever change. I’m sure there are still those same parts of me. I’ve just got to find a way not to let them drive. Y’know?”

The dogs wake Lipsky up. Before he goes home, they walk the dogs through a stark, Midwestern winter field. The sun is low, the air frigid. They go out to McDonald’s—someplace nice—for breakfast.

They’re friends again. Foster Wallace is going to go dancing that day. He dances to 70s disco at the local Baptist church.

It’s time for Lipsky to go home. The five days are over.

“Foster Wallace: Hey, before you leave, I would really like it if maybe we should exchange address data.

“[Pause]

“I should start carving an ice sculpture out of my car. It’s like Antarctica.”

Lipsky quickly catalogues his home, but more reverentially than greedily, then just as quickly packs and goes outside.

“Foster Wallace: Driving that rental of yours? The feeling of gliding? This shit box doesn’t even have shock absorbers.
Lipsky: What is it?
Foster Wallace: ‘85 Honda Civic. I know it doesn’t look like much, but, man, this thing starts. It’s actually a problem.
Lipsky: Why?
Foster Wallace: I gotta get a new one but I can’t junk this.
Lipsky: Why not?
Foster Wallace: It’s my friend.[10]”

Foster Wallace is gone. He had fought his demons for as long as he could, and had decided to stop. Lipsky is speaking to an audience at a bookstore, reading from his interview.

“We are both so young. He wants something better than he has; I want precisely what he has already. Neither of us knows where our lives are going to go. It smells like chewing tobacco, soda, and smoke. And the conversation is the best one I ever had.

“David thought books existed to stop you from feeling lonely. If I could, I’d say to David that living those days with him reminded me of what life is like – instead of being a relief from it… and I’d tell him it made me feel much less alone. ”

This was a deeply touching film, an excellent homage to a complicated, complex, brilliant person.