<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"> The Smashing Machine (2002) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320512/">5/10</a> <div>This is a documentary about MMA legend Mark Kerr. I was immediately reminded of <i>Southpaw</i> in the initial scene, where Kerr wins a match but then goes to the doctor with all sorts of injuries. He's gigantic: 6'1", 260 pounds. The title of the documentary is utterly appropriate: Kerr is a smashing machine. They spent a large amount of time on the first fight that he lost in Japan, which was later declared a no-contest because the man he was fighting delivered illegal knees to the top of the head while he was down, which were still illegal at the time. Jesus, these guys are messed up after the fight---both are like giant terminator robots, taking so much punishment. The fighter's greatest enemy is lack of stamina. When Kerr succumbs to a painkiller addiction, the focus shifts to his best friend, who is still fighting to preserve his career, despite some setbacks and advancing age (for that sport). His next fight, we can see pretty much naked terror on his face when, despite his own imposing size, he faces off against a man-mountain who looks like a Mexican Gregor Clegane, a man of simply terrifying size. Luckily, the big guy has very little ground game and loses there pretty badly. When Mark gets out of rehab, he has to break up with his alcoholic girlfriend because he can't stick to his program around her. Kerr's comeback match is pretty impressive. He trains hard, gets his endurance up really high, he's strong as an ox. He telegraphs like crazy with this punches and kicks, but if it lands, you're not waking up until Christmas. In his first fight, he shoots the leg in the first second, drops the guy to the mat and starts raining blows. The guy escapes, kicking to the head. They square off. Boom! Shoots the leg, traps arms and legs and starts alternating body blows and headshots, visibly weakening his opponent with each one. Amazing power. His opponent's eyes are swollen shut by the end of the first round and the fight is over. He does the same thing in the next match, just throwing the other guy around, shooting in for a fast takedown, something just lifting the other 200-pound guy up like he weighs nothing. He was very good at ducking under a punch and turning it into a throw. Then he went for a kick, got his leg caught and just turtled. It was kind of sad how quickly he just gave up. His best friend Mark Coleman would go on to win the tournament. The movie was overall pretty thin on material; an extra star for some cool fight footage.</div> The Chocolate War (1988) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094869/">6/10</a> <div>This movie is kind of a Catholic-school version of <i>Lord of the Flies</i>. A new student, Renault, tries out for the football team while at the same time being harassed by The Vigils, who give him assignments to do. All the while, the song <i>We Do What We're Told</i> by Peter Gabriel, plays in the background. The pro-tem leader of the school, Brother Leon exhorts all students to sell 50 boxes of chocolates for $4 per box, $2 per box more than last year and double the number of boxes from the previous year. They are also expired chocolates from Mother's Day. It's a strange little movie, centered around the falling sales of chocolate. At first, Renault---many of the students' names seem vaguely French-Canadian and are almost deliberately mispronounced---is ordered by the Vigil to refuse to sell any chocolate. After ten days, he is free to start selling chocolate, but continues to refuse. The headmaster steps on the neck of Archie, the leader of the Vigils, to get him to get Renault to start selling chocolates. Renault continues to refuse. The Vigils continue to act like the Skull & Bones society, and finally have to back up their menace with actual violence. The Vigils now realize that they need to back the chocolate sales with their whole power in order to defend what people now see as their cause. They aren't actually selling them, though. It's all faked and everyone knows it. Renault continues to refuse to sell anything. Still, the movie's from 1988 and the clothes, the look of the kids, the poverty of some of the neighborhoods---it reminds me of where I grew up. The furniture, the phones, the houses, the roads, the cars, the clothes---it all triggers for upstate New York in the late 70s/early 80s. Archie arranges for a boxing match between the rebellious Renault and a ringer. However, the Vigils have a rule: the Assigner (Archie in this case) has to draw a marble from a box. If he chooses a black marble, then he must replace the person to whom the task was assigned. Archie chooses the black marble and must step into the boxing ring himself. The boxing match proceeds as strangely as everything else in this film: they don't actually fight at first: instead, slips of paper with boxers and punches are drawn and read aloud, and the fighters must play it out. Bizarrely, Renault goes along with this as well. At least for a while, until Archie executes a low blow and Renault pounds him to a pulp, to cheers from the rest of Vigils, who he has---not surprisingly at all---won over to his side. Archie loses control of the Vigils and must now play second fiddle to his former lieutenant, who's drunk with power.</div> Cool Hand Luke (1967) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061512/">8/10</a> <div>This is the story of Luke, played by Paul Newman, a small-time criminal who's sent to a chain gang for two years. He was caught by the police in the middle of cutting off the heads of parking meters, blind-drunk. He is introduced to the chain gang, among them Dragline played by Geroge Kennedy. They're out working in the ditches on a very hot day when "Lucille" appears, dressed in only a short cotton shift and nearly popping out of it---<iq>held on with only a single clothespin</iq>---she comes out to wash her car. This goes as expected, with the whole chain gang incredibly distracted and she deliberately provoking them. I mention it only because the scene is famous. Later, Luke and Dragline argue because Dragline won't shut up about her. The next day, they fight with gloves. Dragline is much bigger and clobbers the hell out of Luke. Luke will not stay down, though, and gains their grudging respect. Anti-authoritarian to the core. He keeps throwing punches, then taking them, then getting back up. Some can no longer look; others are morbidly fascinated. In the end, Dragline walks away rather than beating him more. On visiting day, Luke's Mom shows up to say goodbye. Her health is not good and she's resigned to never seeing him again. On the next job, they have to work on a whole road. Luke takes the initiative and the gang follows him, taking pride in their work and working like mad for "the boss", but really for themselves. This reminds me a bit of <i>One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich</i> by Solzhenitsyn. The bosses are immediately suspicious but the frenzy continues. They finish two hours early and can enjoy two hours outside with no more work to do. That night, when no-one can sleep because of a torrential downpour, Luke interrupts a conversation to say that he can eat 50 eggs. Luke can. He finishes just under the wire, sprawled in his underwear like Jesus on the table. Soon after, Luke's mother dies and they put him in the box, to prevent him from running off, but really to preemptively punish him for being different. He escapes anyway. They catch him. <bq>What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it.</bq> He escapes again. Even with chains on his legs. Gone for days. They catch him. Beat the life out of him. But not the spirit. They put him in the box. The men see him as a God now, but he shrugs them off, telling them to live their own lives. They put him to digging a grave-like hole in the yard and filling it back in. They made him dig it again. They beat him to the ground. He gets back up. They tell him to fill it back in. The other boys are watching, playing inspirational music for him. He collapses in the hole. He begs for his life, and seems broken. The men think he is broken. They lose faith. No-one catches him when he collapses after he is allowed back in to the barracks. He yells <iq>where are you now!</iq> then has to climb back up himself. The hero dynamic is very much like McMurphy from <i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest</i>. Now we see Luke helping the boss-man, just like a dog, even fetching the turtle the boss-man kills. He holds up the turtle, which has its jaws in a death grip on the stick, <iq>There he is, boss, deader than hell but won't let go.</iq> They send him to cook up the turtle for lunch. With a grin, he says <iq>Yes, Boss</iq>, then steals the keys from all the trucks and takes a truck. Dragline jumps in with him and they drive a bit, then cover up the truck. He exults that they'd never really broken him. Luke retorts that they had of course broken him, that you can't fake something like that. Dragline says, <iq>But you planned to break out again, right?</iq> Luke: <iq>I ain't never planned nothin' in my life</iq>. Luke tells Dragline he's going to go off on his own, that they have to split up. Luke goes into church and asks, <bq>I know I got no call to ask for much... but even so, You've got to admit You ain't dealt me no cards in a long time. It's beginning to look like You got things fixed so I can't never win out. Inside, outside, all of them... rules and regulations and bosses. You made me like I am. Now just where am I supposed to fit in? Old Man, I gotta tell You. I started out pretty strong and fast. But it's beginning to get to me. When does it end? What do You got in mind for me? What do I do now?</bq> Then Dragline busts in, followed by a bunch of cops. He says he's fixed it so Luke just has to turn himself in. Luke grins and asks the ceiling, <iq>Is that Your answer, Old Man? I guess You're a hard case, too.</iq> Luke leans out the of the church door, grins, and starts to deliver the speech, <iq>What we've got here is... failure to communicate.</iq> The eyeless man (mirror sunglasses) shoots him in the chest. The boss takes him away, the long way, so won't be saved in the clinic. Very reminiscent of <i>Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</i> as well. George Kennedy and Paul Newman are both very good. Recommended.</div> The Hustler (1961) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054997/">8/10</a> <div>Paul Newman plays "Fast" Eddie Felson, a salesman on his way to Pittsburgh with his partner. They stop for a drink and spend the afternoon playing pool, running a con on the locals. Felson pretends to be too drunk to play, loses money to his partner, then hustles the locals. They get to Ames, Iowa, looking for Minnesota Fats. Eddie plays the fat man for over a day straight, but is hustled in the end, not only by Fats but also by his own drunkenness and lack of discipline. Eddie drifts around, meets Sarah, a lush, and moves in with her. Charlie, his erstwhile manager, finds him and begs him to forget about Fats and come back on the road with him. He refuses. A little while later, he meets Bert Gordon---who was at the game with Fats---who tells him he's really good, maybe the best he's ever seen, but that he has no character. Bert offers to manage Eddie for 75%. Eddie strikes out on his own, trying to build up enough of a stake to take on Fats again. He hustles another hustler but his friends beat the crap out of him, breaking both of his thumbs. He crawls back to Sarah. It's a languorous movie, taking its time to get to the point. They spend a lot of time on Sarah's relationship with Eddie. We move on from there, as Eddie realizes he won't make it on his own. He looks up Bert, who takes him on at the previously offered 75%/25% cut. They head to their first tournament, where a hustler (Findley) asks them out to a party at his house. Sarah has a tremendous amount to drink, even for her. Bert hits on Sarah, although it's hard to tell whether he did it as a ruse. The host plays billiards rather than pool, and Eddie's never played before. Eddie's about even when they move from $100 to $500 a game. Eddie keeps losing and Bert wants to bail out. Eddie steals $500 back from Sarah to play again, but Findley beats him. He begs Bert for money, Sarah interrupts, Eddie yells at her to go back to the hotel, but Bert agrees to back Eddie when he sees he might have some backbone after all. Eddie pounds Findley for $12,000. Bert's instincts paid off. Eddie's learning character. He didn't drink a drop, either. Eddie walks home. Bert takes a cab. Bert goes to Sarah's room and tries to pay her to leave. She knows what's going on, telling him he needs to win everything, own everything. They embrace, kind of struggle, he leaves. She goes to his room, asks for a drink. We see her leave again quite a while later, in dishabille. She writes "perverted" on the mirror and kills herself. Eddie is devastated and attacks Bert. Eddie returns to Fats's hall in Ames, Iowa. Bert is there. They don't say a word to each other. Eddie wants to play Fats, who offers $1,000 per game, as predicted. Eddie ups the ante to $3,000 a game---all of his life savings on one game. <iq>What's the matter, Fats? All you gotta do is beat me the first game and I'm on my way back to Oakland.</iq> He tells Bert, <iq>bet on me, Bert, I can't lose</iq>. He delivers a speech to the room as he's pocketing one ball after another, about how he acquired character by seeing the woman he loved dead on the floor after having taken her own life because she'd drunkenly slept with her lover's manager. Character-building, indeed. <bq><b>Fats</b>: I quit Eddie. I can't beat you.</bq> George C. Scott as Bert, Paul Newman as Eddie and Piper Laurie as Sarah are all very, very good. Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats is superb as well. When it's good, it's really good, but it takes a while to get going. Filmed in black and white. Recommended. Now I want to see <i>The Color of Money</i> again, where Eddie Felsen makes a comeback, despite Bert having banned him for life. </div> Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1945) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037824/">7/10</a> <div>This is Sergei Eisenstein's black-and-white classic. It starts with the coronation of the new Tsar. The costumes and sets are extremely elaborate and intricate, the quality quite high for such an old film. The synchronization is quite good, as well. It is 1945, though, so everybody is wearing a ton of makeup and opens their eyes really, really wide. It's really quite a modern-feeling cinematography, with long shots, action shots, dollied cameras and so on, giving it a more dynamic feel than even movies that came 20 years later. The next scene---Ivan's wedding---could have come straight from a <i>Game of Thrones</i> episode. Intrigue abounds. The people attack the castle, the Kazan rebels invade. Speeches are made. The Kazan leader presents Ivan a knife with which he should do everyone a favor and kill himself. Instead, Ivan marches on the Kazan capital and lays siege. Ivan's army digs under the walls of the city and lays in explosives, then blows the wall. Wow, this is a really elaborate attack scene---seriously, it's extremely well-done. Peter Jackson copied this for Helm's Deep. How did they make this in 1945 Russia? Ivan returns victorious, but extremely ill. He is thought to be on his death-bed. He wants his court to swear allegiance to his own son, but they have other ideas, to swear allegiance to a Boyar leader instead, Ivan's cousin, who is an idiot. Ivan is really chewing the scenery on his deathbed scene here. It lasts long minutes and includes several speeches, curses and entreaties before he finally keels over, seemingly dead, but probably just exhausted from all the shouting. Before dumb-ass Vladimir can be coronated, Kurbsky is told that Ivan lives. Ivan returns and rewards those who stood by him. Now the Tsarina falls ill, but court intrigue leads Ivan to accidentally poison her. During his wife's funeral, Ivan receives bad news from every corner of his empire, of losses and defeats on all fronts. He asks God is this is his punishment? He pleads with his dead wife to tell him if he is on the right path, but she cannot answer. Ivan descends into paranoid---it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you---plans to maintain his empire against all comers and has delusions of grandeur. <iq>By the people's summons, I shall gain limitless power.</iq> He abdicates the official throne, preferring to be the Tsar of the people. There's a great scene of him outside a temple, preparing to return to Moscow with hundreds of extras as followers. The sets and costumes are consistently good throughout. Eisenstein makes nice use of intricate shadows to lend grandness to otherwise mundane scenes. He loves to make his actors and actresses hide all but their eyes behind a cowl, to make them look sneaky and scheming. Lots of starkly lit shadows and low-to-high angles on faces. The dialogue, too, is poetic. Hard to recommend, but happy I saw it. Extra points for being so well-made despite its age. Saw it in Russian with English subtitles.</div> Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790627/">7/10</a> <div>This movie is mostly single-person interviews---soliloquies delivered by male actors---that seem to be part of a study by Sara (Juliette Nicholson). She is apparently coping with a breakup by interviewing men to figure out what they think women want. Some of the "interviews" are just overheard conversations. The "hideous" part is that the men are mostly brain-dead about women, thinking of them not as fellow human beings with the same exact weaknesses and strengths as men, but as a species to be tricked into having sex with them. Timothy Hutton plays the graduate student Sara's boss, a man whose "interview" is when he tries to tell her about how he and his wife married too young, before he'd really had a chance to see the world---you can imagine what his point was, right? Will Arnett's interview was his overheard conversation with a closed door as she passed him in the hallway; he was pleading to be let back in, but fucking it up royally, with the same condescending implication in everything he said that the person on the other side of the door was to be conquered by subterfuge. John Krasinski (of <i>The Office (US)</i>) was not malicious, but still clueless. Will Forte (<i>Last Man on Earth</i>) claimed to love and worship everything about women---and noted many details that really did show that he cared deeply---but this act of idolizing, of putting women on a pedestal, is simultaneously dehumanizing. Joey Slotnick told his story amazingly well, but also missed the mark by a wide margin, Clarke Peters (Lester from <i>The Wire</i> and Big Chief from <i>Treme</i>) told a lovely story about how sensitive guys also get it all wrong by focusing so hard on their partner's satisfaction that they don't allow their partner to be their equal, they expect their conquest to just lie there while they (the man) provide pleasure. This is, in his eyes, worse than the man who just takes what he wants, rolls off and goes to sleep. He goes on to say what a man should really do, but is faded out... Bobby Cannavale (Joe from <i>Station Agent</i>) was an unapologetic New Jersey goombah who discussed in detail how he used his missing arm to trap and guilt women into sleeping with him.<iq>I get more pussy than a toilet seat</iq>. Chris Meloni (<i>Law & Order: SVU</i>) told a lovely sensitive story of a woman he'd consoled at an airport whose lover had jilted her, then ends the story with an emphatic look at his colleague's unspoken question...which he answers with an evil grin and <iq>you have to ask?</iq> Frankie Faison told a story less of women and more of his father, who'd worked as a restroom attendant, suborning himself to the man for his whole life. The father was proud of what he'd achieved for his family whereas the son had trouble seeing anything noble in that sacrifice---a difference of context, of expectations, of generations. In another segment, we see the mealy-mouthed and unstable Max Minghella as Kevin, one of her students, who claims nobility in his desire to shock her into believing that she hasn't really lived unless she's experienced a life-altering horrific incident, like a rape or attack, then claims that he is channeling the rage he feels from his sister having been attacked by five men, then claims that it was him who was attacked, but in the end reveals himself to be another sick sadist man who can't figure out how to deal with a woman to whom he's attracted but cannot control or make like him or revere his work. More and more of the end of her relationship with John Krasinksi is revealed in his long story about his dalliance with a girl to whom he claimed sexual attraction but nothing else because her intellect was unworthy, so somehow that makes it OK? That he didn't really betray anything because it wasn't really with a woman but a husk of a human being? He continues, revealing without knowing he's revealing it that instead of him conquering her---because he's the super-intelligent and articulate one---she conquered him with her lifestyle (granola) and did it in a way so that he didn't even notice, although the sadness of the whole situation is apparent to anyone who hears him tell the story, even if it's not apparent to him, even as he tells it. He bought the other girl's story, hook, line and sinker, all the while admiring his own depth of generosity for being open-minded enough to accept her story. And his story is exactly the kind of story that a man wants to hear about how a woman can find something good in even the most horrible abuse, very similar to the stories that her graduate student was telling her. The stories are all about how heroic the man is for even acknowledging that a woman is a human being. When she doesn't quickly accept his awesomeness, he lashes out and closes her out, making her the bad guy, even though he cheated on her with a granola who'd hoodwinked him with a really good story. His contempt for his conquest is intact---he believes the other girl stupid---so that he doesn't even notice he's lost. He continues to yell, angry at Sara for not saying a word, for not forgiving him. This part was quite intricately written, I thought. Of note was that there were only two black people in the the film (Clarke and Frankie). It was very noticeably just upper middle-class white people whining about their inability to connect with women.</div> Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946; released in 1958) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051790/">6/10</a> <div>This movie picks up where part I left off, in 1564, with Ivan the Terrible in self-imposed exile, preparing to return to Moscow to reclaim his throne. The current ruler of Russia, Kurbsky, is planning to turn over Russian territories to Poland. Ivan returns to thwart these plans, entering an ornate door that looks too small to hold his seemingly immense frame. Eisenstein uses framing and angles throughout the scene of his return to make him seem immense, God-like, terrifying, unstoppable. Ivan tells his life story in a series of flashbacks, how he saw his mother killed by traitors, Boyars, orphaning him. He is crowned Arch-Duke of Moscow and warring factions seek his approval for a treaty. We see how he is so young that his feet don't touch the ground before his throne, but he speaks up and demands that it is time to take Russia back from the Boyars and traitors. He fights with his old friend and spiritual advisor, who tells him to heal Russia's wounds by making peace with the Boyars. He descends into paranoia, desperate for a friend, for someone with whom he can share the weight of empire. Ivan struggles to retain power over his subjects. There is a long section of discussion about how Ivan will combat the church. He seems to eventually give in, merging with the church and nominating his idiot cousin Vladimir to the throne. It was a ruse, though, as Vladimir is assassinated, taking a knife meant for Ivan. Ivan's aunt is exultant, until she realizes her own son has been killed. Having conquered all internal enemies, Ivan can now focus on Russia's real enemies, with a united country behind him. This part was definitely not as exciting as part I, with no battle scene and most of the long conversations taking place in the main castle. Still, it was interesting to see Eisenstein's choices on how and when to use color---this film is not exclusively black and white---and again how he juxtaposes characters for size, making Ivan even larger and more terrible than the actor playing him would be (although that guy is a tall drink of water, no matter what you say). Minus a star for dragging on a bit. </div> The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1951266/">5/10</a> <div>Speaking of dragging on a bit: this movie has that in spades. The first part of this third installment already felt far too long for the amount of material that it contained and now this second part was 136 more minutes, consisting mainly of largely insignificant actions by the stars of the show in a war being fought by others. Katniss embarks on a mission to kill president Snow by traversing a highly dangerous capitol city. She is accompanied by an elite troop of warriors, largely composed of her fellow victors, like Finnick and Peeta. Special twist: Peeta is now a brainwashed psycho who's already tried to kill Katniss and will likely do so again. Doesn't make a lick of difference to Katniss's devotion to him. Gale is also along for the ride, but knows he will lose Katniss---had, in fact, already lost her the moment the glorious Peeta reappeared. They wend their slow way through the capitol, with deadly traps everywhere---like super-elaborate traps that must have cost so much more than bombs, which would have been more effective. Katniss and Co. make their way forward, dropping into the mysteriously un--booby-trapped sewers, then running from the "mutts", which are some sort of human/dog/zombie hybrid that are just mindless killing machines. They lose a few key members of the crew here, but Katniss continues onward. She and Gale end up in a crowd, headed to the capitol gates. Gale is swept up; Katniss makes it close enough to see what the rebels are calling capitol drones dropping bombs on undefended civilians. The capitol citizens give up when they realize that their own city would kill them rather than help them. Joke's on them, though, because it was the ruthless president of the resistance, Coin, (Julianne Moore) who executed this masterful stroke---and the one after when she ordered a "double-tap" strike on the rescue workers and remaining victims, taking out her own people in the process (including Katniss's sister Primrose, <i>who was the most important person in the universe</i>). After the capitol has fallen and Pro-tem President Coin has declared that the pro-tem period would continue undemocratically indefinitely, there is a big execution party for President Snow. Katniss asks to be allowed to do the honors, but she's super-clever and shoots an arrow into the traitorous and power-mad Coin's heart instead. Guess what? She is pardoned, gets to return to District 12 and finds Peeta planting <i>prim-fucking-roses</i>. I shit you not. Fast-forward several years and they have two kids and are living in sunshine-y bliss and peace. HOORAY. BARF.</div> </dl>