<n>These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made <a href="http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1323291/ratings">the list</a> of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other---I rate the film on how well it suited me for the <i>genre</i> and my mood. YMMV.</n> <dl dt_class="field"> Trophy Kids (2013) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3231100/">6/10</a> <div>This is a documentary about the middle- to upper-class youth sports scene in the U.S. It is about parents obsessed with using their means to shape their children into sports stars---to realize their potential. To be honest, that potential is not immediately clear. The parents are nearly all off the rails and not very strongly anchored in reality. Neither are they particularly nice---to either their kids or anyone else. One---tennis mom---is off-the-rails religious, with enough contradictory religious and self-help claptrap rattling around in the hollowed husk of her skull to elicit at least some respect that she manages to get anything done at all. Golf dad is clearly unaware of how young his daughter is, cursing horribly under his breath when she makes mistakes.<fn> Football dad is also blissfully unaware of both how militant and unreasonable he is and how untalented his son is. What bleeds through in all of them is that they think their children are God's gift to the planet and have every right to as much of its resources as they can get their previous hands on. Football dad recriminates "Justus" because he didn't immediately ask his coach why he was taken out of the game. His logic is inexorable and, on the surface, reasonable: how will Justus get better if he doesn't know why he was removed? So, yes, he should find out what he did wrong, but <i>not right away</i>. The coach obviously had bigger fish to fry during the game, but Football Dad doesn't see it that way because <i>he and Justus are the most important things in the world</i>. This from a man who, were he a coach, would likely kill any player who dared even speak to him during a game. Basketball Dad is nearly a pure caricature of a New Jersey goombah. Except that I believe he lives in California. They live their lives by stats (<iq>he's 196th in the state</iq>). Most seem to have more than enough money (<iq>I've spent two Lamborghinis so far</iq>) One father says, right in front of his son, that practicing basketball with said son is the only thing that gives his life meaning every day. How can the son say anything after that? Can he possibly say that he doesn't want to play basketball anymore? The material was a bit repetitive but serves as a good warning to all of us, should we encounter the generation raised this way.</div> Dark Shadows (2012) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1077368/">4/10</a> <div>A strong cast and a weak story combine to make an occasionally entertaining movie but one that keeps failing ever harder the longer it goes on. Johnny Depp seems only capable of acting in heavy makeup and with the same gestures and facial grimaces that earned him such acclaim as Jack Sparrow. Michelle Pfeiffer, too, seems more concerned with keeping her face immobile lest it fall off. Eva Green as the evil witch was clearly on some sort of hunger strike which made her overly gaunt though several times the plot hinged or explicitly mentioned how alluring her breasts were. Instead, I could not ignore the incredible overbite she showed whenever she grinned really widely, almost as if she had too many teeth to fit into her mouth. This might have been a nice touch if I wasn't convinced that it was unintentional. Chloë Grace Moretz was utterly and entirely wasted. Helena Bonham Carter was refreshingly <i>less</i> overwrought and nutty than usual, but still couldn't work any magic here. Bella Heathcote's face, while decades younger, was arguable less mobile than Pfeiffer's, expressing little to no emotion throughout the film. She gave us no indication as to her motivation, instead mooning around being ambiguous and being able to see ghosts. She, too, is a woman of the age, weighing about 85 pounds soaking wet and yet we're told that Barnabus (Depp) thinks she has <iq>exquisite</iq> birthing hips. This could only be true if she were to give birth to snakes. The film's primary propaganda seems to be: look, here are some very pretty women whom we haven't fed or allowed to act (some of whom, like Green and Moretz, made me doubt that they even can act, despite other movies as evidence to the contrary). Also, since there are so many famous names, we haven't bothered to write an interesting script or provide any interesting, non-clicheéd dialogue. Tim Burton has lost pretty much of all of his initial charm and quirkiness as a director. Not recommended at all.</div> Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (2015) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2381249/">8/10</a> Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, the top spy in the IMF (Impossible Mission Force). He's once again joined by Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Jeremy Renner---veterans of various other outings in the series. Rebecca Ferguson plays his foil, a British agent working at the edge of the law, like him. They are on the trail of the Syndicate, a shadowy outfit that's trying to change the world, one assassination and terrorist bombing at a time. Hunt spends a good deal of time on the run, especially after Alex Baldwin as the CIA director shuts down the IMF. There's a USB stick that only the prime minister of England can decrypt that contains codes for many, many bank accounts. Hunt and co. fight the Syndicate for it. Nice ending. Good flick. Recommended. Jessica Jones (2015) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2357547/">9/10</a> <div>The eponymous Ms. Jones is a superhero, but a relatively low-key one. She is inordinately strong, but not a particularly good or trained fighter. She's a private detective in Hell's Kitchen and keeps busy taking pictures of adulterers for their jilted spouses. She has PTSD from a lengthy kidnapping she'd recently escaped from, to a certain Kilgrave. Kilgrave can control minds. He's an amoral monster. The story arc in the first season is about their struggle. Jones is joined by Trish, a childhood friend who parlayed her childhood fame into a good gig on a radio talk show and a pretty good life. Luke Cage (Power Man) is also in the mix. The story follows the results of Kilgrave's mind control and his victims and lies and the resulting violence. The story slowly unfolds, revealing more about how Kilgrave's powers work, what kind of abilities Jessica has, where they came from, and so on. Shadowy organizations flit in and out of the plot. Well-shot, well-acted and well-written. Recommended.</div> Mr. Robot (2015) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/">9/10</a> <div>Mr. Robot is a show about Elliot Alderson, a young man with serious computer and hacking skills. He works at Allsafe, with Angela, his childhood friend. They have a shared past, having lost family to the same industrial accident. This is the scaffolding on which the show rests its true story: one of mental illness, isolation, estrangement, hidden relationships, the 1%, the powerful, psychological manipulation, hacking, social engineering and the utter depravity and shocking uselessness of humanity. As of episode two, I was starting to suspect that the similarities to Fight Club are more than I initially suspected when I heard about Mr. Robot's plans to blow up credit-card/debt records. My working theory is that Slater/Mr. Robot doesn't exist. Only in his mind. Plus, the part where the rich dude pays the homeless guy to let him beat him up? Fucked. Up. Dammit, at least Darlene seems to be real---other people can see and hear her. Or can they? Maybe Shayla doesn't exist either? But then who's walking the dog? Or does Flipper also not exist? I'm trying to keep track of who can interact with whom in which scenes to figure out if anyone exists but Elliot. As of episode 4, where he withdraws from heroin, I don't even know how many Elliots there are. That's all the spoiling I'll do. Here are some of my favorite bits. <bq source="Episode 0">Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary of bullshit, masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. <b>Fuck society.</b></bq> First clue. F*society. <bq source="Episode 8" quote-style="none"> <b>Angela:</b> You slummed it all the way down to Jersey in person to offer me a job at the company I'm currently suing? <b>Colby:</b> So, you'll find this out fairly soon, but in business, grudges aren't really...a thing. It's too emotional. <b>Angela:</b> This is a huge class-action lawsuit. They're going to pay millions. <b>Colby:</b> Roughly 75 to 100 million. I mean, that's what their lawyers will settle for---after they exhaust most of your team's legal funds for the next seven years. And sure, that's...that's a lot of money, but not to them, not really. We started a rainy-day fund when the leak happened, just for this occasion. The fund itself has already made five times that amount. <b>Angela:</b> I'm not working there. They killed my mother. <b>Colby:</b> And every fast-food joint around the corner delivers diabetes to millions of people. Philip Morris hands out lung cancer on the hour, every hour. I mean, hell, everyone's destroying the planet beyond the point of no return. Are you really going to start taking all of these things so personally? <b>Angela:</b> Maybe I will. Maybe someone has to. <b>Colby:</b> A suggestion: If you want to change things, perhaps you should try from within. Because <i>this</i> [indicates her current circumstances: jobless, living with father] is what happens from the outside. </bq> <bq source="Episode 9" quote-style="none"> <b>Elliot:</b> No, you're not real. You're not real. <b>Mr. Robot:</b> What? You are? Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. LOOK AT IT! A world <i>built</i> on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills, psychological warfare in the form of advertising, mild-altering chemicals in the form of food, brainwashing seminars in the form of media, controlled, isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You wanna talk about reality? We haven't lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. You turn it off, they've got the batteries, snack on a bag of GMOs while we <i>toss the remnants</i> in the ever-expanding dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers, jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of <i>bullshit</i>, a kingdom you've lived in for far too long. So don't tell me about not being real. I'm no less real than the fucking beef patty in your Big Mac. As far as you're concerned Elliot? I am very real. </bq></div> The Sting (1973) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070735/">9/10</a> <div>I watched <i>Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</i> at the end of last year and, while it was decent, I kept thinking that the <i>The Sting</i> was the real Newman/Redford collaboration movie to watch. I had remembered correctly. This is the story of a young grifter, Redford as Johnny Hooker, who teams up with an old hand, Newman as Henry Gondorff. They both were friends with another grifter, who'd just retired before being murdered by Doyle Lonnigan, a big-shot gangster. They set up a glorious sting operation to take him for all he's worth. Cons within cons within cons, with people begging to have their money taken left and right. It's the 1930s and some things are easier because the world isn't as connected as it is today. I don't want to spoil the plot because it's really important that you be surprised by it, but rest assured that it holds together like almost no other grifter film---<i>Ocean's Eleven</i> perhaps comes close; <i>House of Games</i> tried like hell but you could see that one coming a mile away. In this movie, you just don't know how Gondorff is going to escape or how Hooker is going to avoid turning him in to the Fibbies or whether he's really considering it or whether they're just operating at a totally different level. Probably the last one, right? Lovely soundtrack, excellent acting, good direction, a wonderful and well-executed story. An all-around good time. Highly recommended.</div> Blindness (2008) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/">7/10</a> <div>This movie is based on the book of the same name by Josè Saramago. It follows the plot of the book pretty closely, making only minor adjustments to the timing of plot points to make them occur at the same time or to accelerate the telling of the story. The story is of a man who is suddenly struck blind, seeing only a wash of milky whiteness. Others soon follow, as it becomes clear that the blindness is caused by a communicable disease. Soon enough, everyone has it and the city is filled only with the blind, All, save one lady---the doctor's wife, played by <i>Julianne Moore</i>---who is unaffected by the blindness, but not by its horrific effects (she lives in a world of blind people). The effects are as you can imagine, if you were to think about it: a city filled only with the newly blind, fumbling about, looking for food, looking for shelter, for a place to urinate or defecate. Before everyone has succumbed, the government ruthlessly quarantines the initial afflicted in a mental asylum. Food is delivered sporadically but relatively regularly. The place becomes nearly unbearably filthy. As more and more people arrive, an element finally arrives that understands that societal rules no longer apply. They take all the food for themselves, rationing it out to the others in exchange for the last of their worldly possessions. When those run out, they naturally demand that the other wards send their women. After several days, the women volunteer for this horrific duty, even the doctor's wife. Afterwards, though, she's had enough and takes a pair of scissors she found to kill the ringleader, threatening the remaining pirates that she will kill more if they don't give up. Another woman, traumatized by the rapes, finds a lighter and sets the pirates' den on fire, taking them all out. At the same time, the doctor's wife takes her small group outside to ask the soldiers for help. They are gone. There is no authority remaining. All is chaos and anarchy, with only the blind to fill the power vacuum. The small group escapes back to the city, the doctor's wife the only witness to the utter horror of the place, overrun by people who can no longer take care of themselves. They survive better than most, with the doctor's wife's sight helping them find food that others have missed. They return to the doctor's home and settle in for a somewhat better existence than they had in quarantine, but one still bereft of true hope. And then, just as quickly as it left, their sight returns. The end.</div> Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3302820/">7/10</a> <div>The core message is important: animal agriculture accounts for over half of all greenhouse-gas emissions, a lot of that far more dangerous than CO₂, Unfortunately, I found the presentation to be very repetitive for the first hour or so. The actual information is pretty thin---I just summarized it in the first sentence of this review---and the same information is liberally sprinkled throughout several interviews. The presenter, Kip Anderson, is a bro-sounding, unshaved, baseball-hat--wearing dude who spends the first half an hour thinking there's a conspiracy because no-one wants to talk to him. I wouldn't want to talk to him, either. A lot of the people he did manage to interview were very interesting. But I don't trust him not to spin some of these interviews. E.g. when he finally got an interview with one of the larger environmental organizations, the NRDC, he drops in his U.N. report facts and then cuts the interview to make it look like the person was hiding something because she didn't just take his information at face value. When a conspiracy theorist asks: how could she/he/they not know? Why is no-one talking about it? ... a perfectly valid answer is: "because it's not true? Or not as important as you think it is?" The Markegaards were an interesting interview, but their views were kind of all over the map. On one hand, they said that areas that cannot sustain grass-fed cattle should not be eating beef. On the other, they think that their cattle have no carbon footprint. The dairy farmer was very honest about the insustainability of his business. Another guy talked about the sheer level of externalized costs in animal-based products. If those costs were internalized, then the now-cheap foods would be considerably less attractive and the corresponding environmental destruction would reduce naturally. A strong argument and one most likely to gain any traction, since an appeal to economy always trumps an appeal to morality. Michael Pollan was briefly interviewed to say that he thinks that the major environmental organizations don't talk about the impact of animal agriculture because they don't want to offend their members or big agriculture. Another person said they don't want to scare away people by promoting lifestyle changes. But these same organizations been assailing an even more powerful industry for decades---Big Oil---and promoting an even bigger lifestyle change: driving less. While it's an enticing argument, but there must be more to it. I wish they'd presented something to address that problem with the logic: why is Big Ag so much more powerful than Big Oil? Another guy talks about how it's against the Patriot Act to publicly talk in a way that affects Big Ag's profits. Is that true? A fact-check would have been nice. As well with the guy who says that environmental groups are the #1 terrorist threat, according to the FBI. Is that true? Show us the top-ten list. Kip claims several times that there are <iq>almost 9 billion</iq> people on Earth, but there were 7.13 billion people in 2013 and we're not expected to hit 9 billion until 2043. That's being needlessly fast and loose with information. I didn't like Kip because he wasn't very credible and seemed incapable of expressing himself eloquently (e.g. when an industry lobby agrees to talk to him, he points out that Greenpeace wouldn't talk to him and then notes sagely, <iq>now that's saying something</iq>. What? What is it saying? Why do you keep talking about every refusal to talk to you as further evidence of conspiracy? When he talked to a couple of people who said he's in danger for even making this documentary, he takes the opportunity to reflect on what a bad-ass he is for not giving up. Barf. Is this how a mind raised on documentaries like <i>Loose Change</i> works? Stop intimating at monsters in the shadows and out with it. He eventually does---or at least his interviewees do---but his style detracted from the presentation and makes it hard for me to recommend this documentary heartily.</div> Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085474/">6/10</a> Eddie Murphy's first stand-up special is still pretty good, but some of his material is too broad and, hence, dated. A lot of the introductory material broadsiding homosexuals ("faggots") isn't very funny and seems mean-spirited, but he excuses himself by saying he's just kidding. I'm sure the material killed at the time, but over 30 years later, it's dated, not timeless. We can excuse this lack of timelessness by the fact that Murphy was only 22 at the time, though. Taking that into account, you have to admire his poise and confidence. It's decent but nothing you have to see. Return to Algiers (2000) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0242627/">5/10</a> This is an Italian documentary about the director of the <i>Battle of Algiers</i>, a great film about the revolution against French colonialism. He returned to Algiers to interview people on the street and in positions of power to ask them what had changed in the 30 years since the revolution he documented in that movie. It's a bit repetitive and not very interesting. Only one of the university students near the end had anything really interesting to say. You don't need to see this. Ted 2 (2015) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2637276/">5/10</a> Mark Wahlberg and Seth McFarlane return as "Jawnny" (that's Johnny in a Boston accent) and Ted, a teddy bear come to life. Ted is married to Tamy-Lynn, who loves him despite his being a foul-mouthed teddy bear unable to reciprocate her sexual gifts. Giovanni Ribisi inexplicably returns as Donny (pronounced "Dawnny"), the guy who wants to kidnap Ted for his very own.<fn> Patrick Warburton is back as their gay friend Guy and Michael Dorn is his husband Rick.<fn> I have no idea what sort of bet Morgan Freeman lost to make him show up as an über-lawyer. Oh yeah, Mila Kunis was the clever one who bowed out. She was replaced as the love interest for Jawnny by Amanda Seifred, who was extremely good-natured and relatively good.<fn> I wonder when McFarlane will have worn out his welcome with all of his friends and they'll stop taking part in his increasingly terrible movies. Thin story, thin dialogue, nothing like the first one, which at least had some great scenes. Not recommended. </dl> <hr> <ft>At first I wasn't sure how manipulated this inner monologue of his was, but it happened a lot. And you have to imagine that he signed off on the film, right? Or that he would have sued for misrepresentation? It's hard to imagine him seeing this and thinking that it puts him in a good light (i.e. "you see how mad she makes me? What I have to put up with?")</ft> <ft>Inexplicable because why on Earth is Ribisi wasting his considerable talent on such a stupid, shallow role?</ft> <ft>Dorn was clearly chosen so that they could make him dress up as a Klingon at the Comicon convention. Warburton went as "The Tick", naturally.</ft> <ft>One of the few good jokes was when she asked whether she had "fuck-me eyes". Ted responded that she had "don't take my precious" eyes. It's funny because it's true. The joke would return a few more times. McFarlane never met a joke he couldn't tell ten times.</ft>