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Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.7

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<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="https://www.imdb.com/user/ur1323291/ratings">the list</a> of around 1600 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 and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid <b>spoilers</b>.</n> <dl dt_class="field"> John Wick (2014) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2911666/">9/10</a> <div>I still like the original the best. See my <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=3099">previous review from 2015</a>. I saw it in German this time.</div> Spider-Man (2002) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145487/">9/10</a> <div>I don't have a previous review of this absolute classic, directed by <i>Sam Raimi</i>, who provided us with the vision of what superhero movies could be, before it was swept aside, as usual, by the meaty forearm of homogenizing capitalism. Raimi stuck religiously to the origin story, depicting all of the characters as they'd been thoroughly developed in decades of successful comic books. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is a smart, nerdy kid, living in Queens, New York with his Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) and Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson). His parents had died when he was very young. He is smart and he is poor. He is in love with his equally disadvantaged and gorgeous neighbor Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), whose father drinks. She is in danger of trading on her looks for societal status, thinking of dating Flash Thompson (Joe Manganiello), the high-school quarterback and all-around jackass. Peter is bitten by a spider on a high-school field-trip. He wakes up the next day, incredibly fit and no longer needing glasses. He can shoot webs from his wrists (without a mechanism, perhaps Raimi's only departure from canon). The scenes of him learning to use his powers, learning how to swing from his webs, are exhilarating and would not be improved upon in several reboots. To earn money, Peter starts freelancing at the <i>Daily Bugle</i>, working for the penny-pinching and bombastic J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), who is very much of the school of "journalism is what you make it." Spider-Man's first foe would be the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), who is a sort of second personality born of entrepreneur Norman Osborn's frustration and equipped with his company's military-grade and highly weaponized battle-suit. Osborn's son Harry (James Franco) is Peter's best friend and competitor for Mary Jane's attention. Peter has doubts about his role on the straight and narrow, but his first step off of it is punished immediately when the thief he refused to nab ends up killing his Uncle Ben for his car. Peter can only remember Ben having told him, <bq>With great power comes great responsibility.</bq> The Green Goblin and Spider-Man clash several times before the Goblin eventually accidentally kills himself with his own rocket sled. Harry blames Spider-Man for his father's death. Harry discovers his father's lair and seems poised to take over that legacy as well as taking over his father's company. Peter is forced to tell Mary Jane that they can't be together---but he can't explain why because he can't reveal his secret identity. But he can't let anyone in because then they would be potential victims of his savage enemies. This is how Spider-Man was for my entire youth: poor, scraping by, wise-cracking, with a giant backpack of unrequited love, but dedicated to saving all of the people in the city who easily let themselves be convinced to hate him by Jameson, whose wallet grows fat on Spider-Man photos. All of the actors are excellent and the direction is top-notch. If you hate superhero movies, you can watch this one. It's fine; you won't be psychically damaged.</div> Curb Your Enthusiasm (2022) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264235/">10/10</a> <div>This is a twisted work of genius. How is it possible that, in 11 seasons over 22 years, this is the best one? Who does that? Leon (J.B. Smoove) features prominently and all is right with the world. Jeff (Jeff Garlin) and Susie (Susie Essman) are also in nearly every episode, which is also a good thing. Susie's bile is palpable and hilarious. Larry's TV ex-wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) also features more heavily again. How to explain the plot? Larry and Jeff are making an autobiographical show about Larry's 20s for Netflix. Part of the show is them choosing actors for this. The main thread is that a burglar drowns in Larry's pool, but he didn't have a fence. No-one presses charges, but the burglar's brother Marcos (Marques Ray) finds out and blackmails Larry into casting his daughter in his new show, to everyone's horror---she is a terrible, terrible actress. Larry begins dating a local councilwoman Irma Kostroski (Tracey Ullman), who has a whole raft of issues and puts Larry's resolve to the test. He's dating her in order to get her to change the local ordinance about fencing in pools, so that he can get out from under Marcos's thumb and finally fire his daughter and save his show. Obviously. Leon was supposed to go on a trip to Thailand with his girlfriend Mary Ferguson, but he had to break up with her for a terrible reason. Because the tickets are non-refundable, he begins a search for a compatible woman with the same name, finally finding someone who ends up screwing him over for the tickets and taking someone else. Larry David has fine-tuned his act from previous seasons to be all the good parts without the excruciating parts. He just cops to his lies now. There are so many more details in this show, but that's why it was so wonderful. You can watch the other seasons first, but you don't necessarily have to. If you love this season as much as I did, then you won't be able to help watching the others.</div> Bill Burr Presents: Friends Who Kill (2022) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20723672/">4/10</a> <div>Bill Burr was fine. His bits were maybe a 7, maybe an 8. He's a funny person. None of his killer friends were funny. It was an embarrassing slop of low-talent awfulness. Just flair-less toilet humor with no punchline, no purpose, no irony, no sarcasm, just dishonest self-deprecation and an airing of psychological trauma and identity as an excuse to demand applause. In order from best to worst, <ul> <b>Bill Burr:</b> decent, nowhere near his best, but a shining light of comedic coherence relative to what would come after. <b>Ronnie Chieng:</b> Decent, but sang instead of telling jokes <b>Ian Edwards;</b> Not terrible, but also kind of anemic <b>Michelle Wolf:</b> Anemic and slow and just waiting on laughs. Too bad, because she's been funny in other things. <b>Dean Delray:</b> Not offensive (like talking about dick-rot or something), but not funny <b>Dave Attell & Jeffrey Ross:</b> I don't even understand how this act has become so big. They're terrible. They do painful crowd-work. They act older and more stoned-out than Steve Martin and Martin Short, who are brilliant. <b>Josh Adam Meyers:</b> I can't remember him at all anymore, but I bet he was bad. He wasn't bad enough for me to remember his badness, so I'll put him in as better than that prat Carr. <b>Jimmy Carr:</b> I know that his thing is being a self-satisfied creep, but he's abysmal. Just shockingly unfunny. His style is also very much "waiting for people to laugh before continuing" <b>Jessica Kirson & Stephanie Tolev:</b> These didn't go on together like Attell and Ross, but they were both equally terrible and painful/cringe to watch and I couldn't tell them apart if you paid me. They take the worst of terrible male comedians and replace "dick" with "vadge". Congratulations, you're not a comedian and you've set feminism back by decades. </ul> Most of these players were terrible---and then they would berate the benighted crowd when they didn't clap enthusiastically enough. A couple of them congratulated themselves on their own cleverness---not in evidence---then chalked up the lack of laughter to the audience's being too stupid to have gotten the intricacy of the joke. It was an absolute train wreck, from the moment Burr's mini-set ended until the bitter, bitter end. Oh, wait. I forgot about Ronnie Chieng at the end. He was the headliner. He's also quite funny, but he didn't have much material. Instead, he sang Katy Perry's <i>Firework</i>. Unfortunately, the idiot who'd gone on before him pranced all over the stage the entire time, completely oblivious to the fact that <i>absolutely no-one likes him or has any idea who he is</i>. I feel like the solipsistic nature of Instagram and TikTok and YouTube leads these people to believe that they're good just because they keep telling everyone they are.</div> Blade II (2002) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0187738/">7/10</a> <div>I've seen this movie several times since it came out. It follows the absolutely brilliant <i>Blade</i>, which introduced us to the eponymous vampire-hunter, played by the born-for-this-role Wesley Snipes, who does all of his own choreography and stunts. Sometimes it's a <i>touch</i> stiff, but damn if it isn't actually convincing. I'm a fan. In this follow-up, Blade enters a grudging alliance with the vampires in order to combat the even-more-dangerous Reapers, genetically engineered vampires which have double-hinged jaws and are absolutely ravenous. They also feed on vampires as well as humans---hence the alliance. I gave it an extra point for the absolutely amazing and convincing physical effects. This time, I saw it in German.</div> Ad Astra (2017) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2935510/">6/10</a> <div>This movie about space is boring. It's not boring in a "space is boring" good kind of way. There's a crazy moon-dune-buggy chase in it where Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) fends off attacks by moon pirates (I shit you not). He's on his way out to Neptune to talk to his dad (Tommy Lee Jones), who seems to have maybe reappeared after having disappeared long years ago, having presumably gone mad and dropped off the radar. Donald Sutherland is in this as a guy who accompanies Roy for a while and he is fun, as always. From the Moon, Roy travels to Mars, stopping to help suppress a baboon uprising on a research space station (I am not making this up), which is kind of well-done and scary and sad, but seems wholly separated from the plot. I suppose it's to show just how calmly Roy deals with adverse situations. He gets out to Neptune and finds his dad's ship. It's full of dead bodies. He plants a nuclear device to blow it up. His dad is still there, alive and mostly well. The research station has determined that humans are alone in the universe, resolving the Fermi Paradox once and for all. (I guess?) Roy's dad commits suicide in space rather than go back to a planet he no longer considers home. Roy goes back to Earth, somehow heartened by the whole experience.</div> The Leftovers S03 (2017) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2699128/">9/10</a> <div><bq author="Kevin Garvey Sr." caption="S03E03">No, Grace, you're not crazy. You just got the wrong Kevin.</bq> I can't recommend this series enough. I didn't give it a 10 because, oh, I don't know. I guess I felt like maybe I was overreacting to the wonderful combination of writing and dialogue and music choice and directing and photography and close-ups of people's faces while they talked for long scenes, which was all wonderful and impactful and manipulative, so I dinged it a point for making me feel like I'd been manipulated into liking it because I suspected that it was only pretending to be something great, but isn't that what all great things are? Selling themselves to you with their purported greatness? Maybe I should just change the rating to a 10, but I'm already all the way down here, so what the hell, I'll let it stand where it is and just remember how great it was. If I change it to a 10, then I have to erase this paragraph, which I'm loath to do. Anyway, this show's arc follows each of the major characters <i>going through some heavy shit</i>. Like Nora (Carrie Coon), who drags Kevin (Justin Theroux) to Australia on a hunt for scammers who are pretending to be able to help the families of <i>The Departed</i> heal or see them again, or something. At any rate, she's not buying it...until she does. Until she so very much does. Until she's begging them to let her do the experiment they promise will take her to the other side for real. Until she throws a fit when they reject her, refusing to take her money, because they tell her <i>she's doing it for the wrong reasons</i>. They're right, of course, but what the <i>fuck kind of a scam-artist cult won't just take her money?</i> That's Nora. She's funny and sexy and dark, but markedly less sexy and more broken by now. Some people might find that even sexier, but I'm not going there. She gets the experimenters to accept her money and let her climb naked into a hamster ball that will whisk her away to the alternate universe just before she drowns in the fluid that pours in from below. And you know what? It works. It totally <i>fucking works</i>. No explanation of the technology. Just does it. I dug the hell out of that. She went there and she found her kids and they were super-not-happy. In fact, no-one there was really happy. You wanna know why? Because, because, because, while in our world, 2% of the population "departed", sending psychic shock waves through humanity that made it even more susceptible to cults and magical thinking than it was before (which was an <i>assload</i> BTW), in <i>their</i> world they were dealing with %98 of the population just disappearing. Yeah. Imagine that. We'd just spent three seasons working through our crybaby feelings about not being able to collectively get our wheels under us <i>ever again</i> because 2% of the population disappeared and here is the <i>other half of the story</i> just sitting there, asking us if we're going to be OK, because like that must be a real tragedy, losing 2%, really. That must be just awful. 98%. Damn, that's like a whole other series, a much, much darker one, filled with crop failures and no power grids and suffering and reversion to the damned darkest of dark ages. But it just kind of blipped in at the end of the last episode and <i>that was awesome</i>. God, it was so nice to get something that wasn't explained to <i>death</i>. It was like a classic sci-fi short story from the Golden or Silver Age. And then. And then, and then, and then Nora sought out the scientist who'd invented the damned device, who'd been one of the first to cross over. She told him who she was and with her powerful Nora personality made him just invent the damned machine <i>again</i>, but on the other side, because <i>there was no place for her in that world</i>, so she was gonna <i>fuck off right back to where she came from.</i> And ya know what? I didn't even think until this very second about how hard it would have been to even build that machine in a world depleted of 98% of the world's population and probably all of its manufacturing base and whatever you would need to actually produce stainless steel and giant hamster balls and circuitry and wormholing technology...because <i>it's not relevant</i>. It didn't matter. It was an awesome story. And Nora was back in the original world-strand (my word) and in Australia and just chilling and ignoring the world and trying not to be found by anyone and catching pigeons for a nun who scammed newlyweds into thinking that the birds were carrying their messages all over the world but they were really just flying right back to Nora's coop, where she scooped them up and brought them back to the nun for her to scam the next couple. Nora made some cash and rode a bike with a trailer and she looked older and she had a long, thick, silver braid now. And then Kevin found her. He was just so sure he'd found her. But she told him, no, he didn't know what he was talking about and then they fought and then they didn't because they ended up together, but it wasn't like that, it wasn't cheesy, even though awesome music swelled to manipulate you, but it felt right and Nora and Kevin <i>had seen some shit</i> and they knew that it wasn't going to get any better apart and it couldn't be worse together and it was time, time to just put the past behind them and row forward, into whatever. So that was Nora. Jesus.<fn> What about Kevin? Kevin <i>died</i> a couple more times, is what Kevin did. He even did it on purpose the last time, in what is, I suppose, <i>technically suicide</i>, but he's proven so good at coming back from the dead that it's more like a superpower at this point. Kevin met his dad Kevin Garvey Sr. (Scott Glenn), who was in Australia hunting down the last piece of a song that would heal the world and prevent a repeat of the departure of seven years before, the anniversary of which was fast approaching and which imbued the whole situation for all of the characters with a sense of urgency. Kevin Garvey Sr. was looking for a dude who knew the last sacred dance and song and he needed him to teach it, but then <i>that dude somehow departed</i>, which is why Senior was telling his son that he needed to die again because that's where Kevin goes when he dies, apparently, he travels interdimensionally to the other world-strand (my word, not theirs) and so Kevin is the hero the world needs because he can take messages over and hopefully bring them back and all he has to do to travel is die, which, compared to getting scanned at the airport seems not even so terrible, to be honest, but I'm drifting. So Kevin dies again and he meets one lady's kids and gets the answer and he meets another guy's wife and gets another answer, but he just. can't. get. to. the dance/song guy for his father. He just can't do it. There's a complicated bit of fantasy where he's actually the president and he has to not only scan his retina, but also his dick, and then he gets into the war room, where his Secretary of Defense is none other than Patty (Ann Dowd), who advises him to launch all nukes at whatever dirty enemies are out there, but Kevin hesitates, but then <i>Kevin shows up</i>, but it's the other-other Kevin, who's the one from the other world? Or another traveler? Whatever. It's a super-spy Kevin (who he'd actually played before in S02 when he'd died the first time) and they're going to enact <a href="https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/daily/2017/08/10/news/what-is-the-fisher-protocol-and-why-is-it-getting-attention-after-trump-s-nuclear-comments--1107525/">The Fisher Protocol</a>, wherein the president can only get the second key to launch nukes by chopping it out of the chest of an innocent man, which should make him pause and consider whether it's actually worth it, but Kevin goes for it, even though it's his Doppelgänger, but Kevin is nothing if not determined and he gets the key and sets off the nukes and the world comes to a goddamned end, but he's whisked back to the other world, where he wakes up again, alive, and realized that it's stopped raining, which means that the flood was never going to happen anyway, which means that it doesn't matter that he didn't get Christopher Sunday's (I <i>finally</i> remembered that dude's name) song for his dad, who was going to use it to avert the flood (which never came). Matt (Christopher Eccleston)---along with his other apostles, Laurie (Amy Brenneman), John (Kevin Carroll), Michael (Jovan Adepo)---also went through his own shit. He'd gotten quite a bit more bitter (especially after he drove away his resurrected wife Mary (Janel Moloney)). And he swore a lot more. He and his crew flew to Australia to get Kevin because they needed their savior---he'd come back from the dead and Matt and John had written a book about his Jesus-like role in the events of the Departure and everything that ensued, and now that I'm writing it out, I realize that their names are <i>exactly</i> those of the apostles from the Bible---to come back to the U.S. in time for the seventh anniversary of the Departure because <i>shit was going to go down</i>. Everyone thought so, they just disagreed on what kind of shit. Anyway, they ended up on a boat from Tasmania when their plane was rerouted from Australia and this boat had been completely booked out by a sexed-up crew of people who worshiped a lion named Frasier. Episode three was particularly riveting, a mini-movie worth more than ten superhero movies. The final five minutes were pure magic, from pacing to close-up filming, to Grace (Lindsay Duncan) and Kevin Sr.'s (Scott Glenn) amazing acting. The emotion in those faces, the reverence with which the camera captured it. The lonesome piano keys plinking out the melody of the theme song. Just wonderful. Just wonderful that someone is still making art that speaks to the soul, that takes the time to tell a story, to build characters, to make us wait for a giant payoff. <i>Chapeau</i>. This season just got stronger and stronger, with Matt going a bit off the rails, but absolutely believably so. The music, oh God, the music. So wonderful.</div> The Mummy (1999) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120616/">10/10</a> <div>I watched this for the umpteenth time and it's still amazing. Rachel Weisz and Brendan Frasier for the win. This is a movie about archeologists and treasure-hunters competing to unearth an ancient tomb/burial site. Amun-ra is buried there. He slowly starts to come back to life, gaining more and more corporeality with every victim. Long story short, the good guys team up to defeat him, burying him (forever?) and his treasure as well. I'll watch it again.</div> Bill Burr: Live at Red Rocks (2022) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21106500/">10/10</a> <div>Magnificent. The show is at the Red Rocks outdoor amphitheater just outside of Denver, Colorado. At about 75 minutes, it was quite long, but it was exceedingly well-crafted and funny and insightful but, most of all, funny. Because that's what he's up there to do. One of the funniest people in the English-speaking world doing what he does best. His ad-libs on his podcast and on other shows are better than the best in this show, but the overall quality of this show is better than that of any podcast. There's no downtime here, unlike his podcasts. Will watch it again. From the reviewing, about <b>10:00</b> from the end, <bq>In every relationship, there's the person that does the dishes and the person that let's them soak. Right? They don't let them soak. They know you're gonna do 'em. They're just waitin' you out. And after a while, you just fuckin' take it anymore. They're just sitting there. You gotta go start going them. Then what do they do? They sit in the other room and they wait, like they don't know what you're doin'. And they wait 'til they hear pots and pans, and that's when the show starts. That's when they come runnin' in like, 'What? I was gonna do those!' And you're like, 'No, you weren't! They've been sitting here eight hours! I got my hands in room-temperature water with scrambled eggs floatin' around. Don't gaslight me. You're a fuckin' animal. You were raised by animals. Get out of my sight.</bq></div> Stranger Things S04 (2022) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4574334/">8/10</a> <div>Loooonnnngg and self-indulgent, but mostly saved it in the end. Lots of good performances. Some of the episodes were 90 minutes long, so the season had a couple of full-length movies thrown in there. The 7th episode with the reveal was excellent, though. This season was about how everyone is separated into different locations. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and El (Millie Bobby Brown) are mooning about. Mike is still an utter waste of space. Will (Noah Schnapp) is in love with Mike, but can't express it. Mike's hot garbage, personality-wise, but two people are in love with him. They're teenagers, so it checks out. The main story arc is the reveal of where Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) came from. Spoiler alert: he's #1 where El is #11. More backstory is filled in, people die, people live, silly things are done. Hopper (David Harbour) is in a Russian prison, getting his ass kicked. Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Murray (Brett Gelman) rescue him, with the sorta-kinda help of Meanwhile Erica (Priah Ferguson), Steve (Joe Keery), and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) join forces with Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Eddie (Joseph Quinn) to try to prevent Vecna from getting to Max (Sadie Sink), the final victim he needs to realize his final plan. Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) does essentially nothing. But Steve, Erica, and Nancy are really quite fun to watch and they save it from getting too boring. Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) also reveals stuff and has stuff revealed and ends up being on the side of good. Kudos for the all of the practical effects. +1 point.</div> </dl> <hr> <ft>No pun intended. You'd get that if you'd watched the season.</ft>