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Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.9

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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"> Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10872600/">6/10</a> <div>I do not like the Spider-Man (Tom Holland) with the Stark super-suit. This is not a very good treatment of the multiverse. I like Tom Holland as Spider-Man. I do not like the Spider-Man that he has to play. It's quite lame. There is so much shit going on, but Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), MJ (Zendaya), and Ned (Jacob Batalon) feature very prominently. Mary-Jane is incredibly entitled and snotty. But this Peter deserves it. Peter Parker's identity is revealed and his life is ruined, so he goes to Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to ask him to cast a spell to make the world forget. Parker fucks up the spell with his indecisiveness, so the multiverse "leaks". Everyone shows up: Electro (Jamie Foxx), Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Lizard (Rhys Ifans). This couldn't be more of a Disney movie if they'd tried. This is ridiculous. This whole movie is a hodgepodge of deus ex machinae. Norman Osborne is now a good guy. Spidey's suit is all-powerful. They have a fabricator, which can build anything, I guess. Who cares? J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) is now Alex Jones, with a self-hosted podcast rather than a newspaper. Willem Dafoe manages to salvage something, though. His sheer acting talent overwhelms the bizarre script. Everybody else is a confused pussy, while he's a force of nature. Cumberbatch is also quite good. <iq>Nah, still feels weird.</iq> I'm really having a hard time with this Spider-Man/Peter Parker who doesn't feel guilt, but only feels sorry for himself. Now, they're all standing on the rooftop, crying together. Ned and MJ are lurking around in the background. I do like Tobey McGuire. You see how much better an actor he is than the other two (Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland). <bq author="Tobey McGuire">Is that happening? Or am I dying?</bq> Now, we've moved on to three Peter Parkers "doing science". They made all of the devices they need and set them up at the Statue of Liberty and wait for the supervillains to show up. They spend the time shooting the shit out of everything and self-analyzing. I'm honestly not sure who this movie is for. Are there really fans who wanted this? Somehow Peter is no longer concerned about involving MJ and Ned in a highly dangerous "trap". I don't even care. I stopped caring one minute in. The ending drags on a lot. They all end up forgetting who Peter Parker is. All the villains are cured and go home. The other two Spider-Men also go home. I don't understand where all the hype came from for this movie. People were talking about how amazing it was. It has a really high rating. I'm getting a bit nervous about who I'm sharing the planet with. One of the points in the rating for for Willem Defoe.</div> Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9419884/">7/10</a> <div>This was kind of the sequel to <i>Spider-Man: No Way Home</i>. It was also all multiverse-y (it's right in the title). Benedict Cumberbatch is back as Dr. Strange. This time it's Strange who's duplicated rather than Spider-Man. Hey, if it worked once. There's a girl named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) whose mutant power is being able to flit from one multiverse to another, at will. People are after her for her power, obviously. Actually, it turns out to be Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) who's chasing her because she's 100% convinced that she can use Chavez's powers to reunite with her children. She is prodigiously powerful already, so Strange has his hands full. She strong-arms Wong (Benedict Wong) into helping her. Then they have to find some sort of book that will stop her. There are a lot of cool parts where Maximoff just <i>offs</i> people, which is a neat change of pace. The way she killed Black Bolt was clever. Still, this is a Disney movie, so Maximoff sees the error of her ways when her children recoil at what she's become, and she sacrifices herself to destroy the all copies of the evil book from all multiverses. Jesus, as I'm writing this, I'm wondering what level of hypnotism made me rate this so high. Docking a point. It was definitely better than <i>Spidey: No Way Home</i>, but not that much. </div> White House Down (2013) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2334879/">7/10</a> <div>Still a decent flick to have on in the background. See my <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=2907">review from 2014</a>. I saw it in German this time.</div> GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra (2013) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1046173/">4/10</a> <div>Still a decent flick to have on in the background. I watched and <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=2503">reviewed this movie in 2010</a>. I honestly saw no reason to change my rating from a 4/10, although I probably would have been a bit more generous if I hadn't seen the original rating. There are some good actors, but the plot and dialogue are so bad. I saw it in German this time.</div> Outland (1981) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082869/">7/10</a> <div>This is a crime thriller in space, starring Sean Connery as William O'Neil, a space marshal assigned to a titanium-mining colony on Io. There are about 4,000 people on the base. He replaces the previous marshal, whose methods were quite lax---he'd ignored a drastic increase in deaths among the miners over the last few months. Together with Dr. Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), he discovers that someone is smuggling in high-powered and eventually lethal methamphetamines to boost worker productivity. The miners take it because of the bonuses, but they eventually go squirrelly and commit suicide---either by cutting open their own suit to release the spiders that only they can see, by walking outside without a spacesuit, or in a suicide by incredibly accommodating cop. The sets and music are top-notch. This movie holds up very well even today. It's a dingy aesthetic, which I really like. This is actually much more believable than the spic-n-span environments of the Belter mining colonies on <i>The Expanse</i>. It's directed by Peter Hyams, whom I remember reading about in the video essay and article <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/the-unloved-part-82-the-relic" author="Scout Tafoya" source="Roger Ebert">The Unloved, Part 82: The Relic</a> and which wrote, <bq>Hyams was one of the guys who never stopped lighting like it was the '70s, and even then it seemed like he was trying to find some kind of a meeting point between the bleak revisionism of that era and the biting noirs shot by ace cinematographer John Alton. He wanted to find something terrible in the dark, because he knew that's where all our dirtiest secrets were located.</bq> Yeah!</div> The Martian (2015) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3659388/">9/10</a> This movie holds up on a second viewing. See my <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=3185">original review from 2015</a>. <div>I watched it in German this time.</div> The Expanse S06 (2021) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/">7/10</a> <div>I've read the books by now, so I know that there's a pretty good story buried in there somewhere. I don't understand why they can't extract the good bits. In the first episode, they focused on all the less interesting bits. They've converted more characters to women (there were enough, no? Like the interaction between Bobbie (Fankie Adams), Monica (Anna Hopkins), and Avasarala (Shorreh Aghdashloo) was completely true to the book, but Monica's lines were so wooden and stupid and petty. It's great that all of Marco's lieutenants are women now, really. Rosenfeld (Kathleen Robertson) is positively erotically terrifying. But could you also not get so fucking lazy with the story? I miss Miller (Thomas Jane) and Ashford (David Stathairn) quite a bit not because they're men, but because they had good dialogue and well-defined personalities. They chucked Alex (Cas Anvar), but didn't replace him with anyone---even though he's a great character. Amos (Wes Chatham) feels like a shadow of his former self so far. Holden (Steven Strait) is sleepwalking---kind of literally. Naomi (Dominique Tipper) seems lost in her role, just lashing out at everyone. Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) is fine, but feels more cartoonish. Drummer (Cara Gee) is still quite good. The thing that Naomi, Marco, and Duarte all have in common is that they nearly immediately make everything about themselves. It's OK. You don't need to make any more of these. It could have died at the end of the last season.</div> Derry Girls S03 (2022) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7120662/">9/10</a> <div>The final season was cracker. The girls naively help criminals loot all of the computer equipment from their school. They meet Chief Inspector Byers (Liam Neeson), who's pretty good. The girls are the stars, of course, but my secret favorite is Sister Michael (Siobhán McSweeney). The girls think that Erin's (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) mother Mary (Tara Lynne O'Neill) is cheating on Gerry (Tommy Tiernan), but she's really just interested in going back to school because she's bored to tears running the home for a bunch of incompetent ingrates. Clare (Nicola Coughlan) is fine, but the plot focuses on her a lot, and she's really kind of a one-trick pony. She freaks out at everything. There's an episode about a trip to an amusement park, another about the girls clearing out Sister's Michael's country house, another about Mary's class reunion, one about a Fatboy Slim concert that the girls get VIP access to, but from which they're ejected. The final show is about the vote on the Good Friday agreement. It ended with a horseshit moment that had to remind us that the world somehow loves the Clintons, which makes me mad.</div> Daddy's Home (2015) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1528854/">7/10</a> <div>It was definitely much better than expected. Brad Whitaker (Will Ferrell) married Sara (Linda Cardellini) and is step-dad to her two kids. Their biological father Dusty Mayron (Mark Wahlberg) breezes back into town, usurping Brad's life. Even at the Smooth Jazz station where Brad works, Dusty's gusty pipes overwhelm Brad's boss Leo Holt (Thomas Haden Church), so that he uses Dusty's spot to promote his station. The residual checks start rolling in, and Dusty is funded. After Dusty moves in, an incident with handyman Griff (Hannibal Buress) leads to Griff moving in as well. Dusty also knows fertility expert Dr. Fransisco (Bobby Cannavale), who gets Brad and Sara on the way to having a child of their own. Billy Burr cameos as another student's father at the father/daughter dance. The boys end up bringing Billy down with a dance-off rather than fighting him. The finale shows Dusty have married a genius model and moved in to a nearby castle. Her ex-husband drops by---it's Michael Cena. Hilarious.</div> Bad Boys for Life (2020) --- <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1502397/">5/10</a> <div>No surprises here. The dialogue is pretty bad. Mike (Will Smith) is being hunted by a very scary voodoo lady (Kate del Castillo) whose husband he killed. Also, Mike nailed her once when he'd been kidnapped by her cartel. So their son (Jacob Scipio) is the assassin she uses. It's not a problem because they're both indestructible, so they can fill long, long action scenes of incredible amounts of shit blowing up, people flying around, bullets, RPGs, etc. Spoiler alert: they make up and kill mom together. No shit. Oh, also Marcus (Martin Lawrence) is less than totally useless, but also way less funny than he used to be.</div> </dl>