<n>Read the explanation of method, madness, and <b>spoilers</b>.<fn></n> <ol> <a href="#Catholic">Catholic Cowgirl (2024)</a> --- 7/10 <a href="#Ferrari">Ford v Ferrari (2019)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1950186/">9/10</a> <a href="#Chocolat">Chocolat (2016)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4400038/">7/10</a> <a href="#Shining">The Shining (1980)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081505/">9/10</a> <a href="#Instigators">The Instigators (2024)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt24169886/">5/10</a> <a href="#Samurai">The Last Samurai (2003)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325710/">9/10</a> <a href="#Silo">Silo S02 (2024)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt14688458/">7/10</a> <a href="#Sisters">Bad Sisters S02 (2024)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt15469618/">5/10</a> <a href="#Payne">Max Payne (2008)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0467197/">6/10</a> <a href="#Pain">Pain & Gain (2013)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1980209/">7/10</a> </ol> <dl dt_class="field"> <span id="Catholic">Catholic Cowgirl (2024)</span> --- 7/10 <div>Katherine is a clean comic, very pretty but not leaning on her looks for her laughs. Her act is pretty sophisticated, well-constructed, and well-delivered. There's a decent amount of subtlety where there are two jokes, one for those who are listening a bit harder and one for those who aren't. Both are funny, but the former is more rewarding. The kind of audience she's used to playing has definitely influenced her act, but I think positively. She's got a solid set even if it ended a bit abruptly. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H35bMrQLI5o" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/H35bMrQLI5o" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Katherine Blanford" caption="Catholic Cowgirl (Full Comedy Special)"></div> <span id="Ferrari">Ford v Ferrari (2019)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1950186/">9/10</a> <div>I first <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3851">watched and reviewed</a> this movie when it came out in theaters. This must be the at least the third, if not fourth time I've watched it. I love almost every scene in this movie. Nothin' but bangers. Ken Miles (Christian Bale) and Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) are iconic characters.</div> <span id="Chocolat">Chocolat (2016)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4400038/">7/10</a> <div>This is the story of Rafael Padilla (Omar Sy), the son of a Cuban slave. When we meet him, he's playing a savage---a cannibal---in <i>le Cirque Delvaux</i>, somewhere in the French countryside. Théodore Delvaux (Frédéric Pierrot) is a bastard, but he's a sweetheart compared to his awful wife Yvonne (Noémie Lvovsky). The clown in the circus George Foottit (James Thiérrée) is warned by Delvaux that he is not funny enough: the few people who show up are bored with his act. Foottit approaches Padilla to play the patsy opposite him. He trains him a bit, convincing him that he could be good. They become a team: Foottit and Chocolat. The dynamic is clear, though: Chocolat is in the subordinate role, not very much different from playing the cannibal. Their fame grows, with Delvaux growing fat off of them, until Joseph Oller (Olivier Gourmet) shows up to tempt them to the <i>Nouveau Cirque</i> in Paris itself. They agree nearly immediately. They are a huge hit in Paris, with Chocolat becoming the first really famous black clown in France. They are earning good money and it shows. Chocolat spends freely, developing a gambling habit. Yvonne is so angry that they left "her" circus that she tells the police that Raphael is in France illegally. He is thrown in prison, where he meets the Haitian Victor (Alex Descas), who teaches him the way of revolution. Even after they've both been released---with Foottit rescuing Raphael---they meet up to discuss Chocolat's position in society. But Chocolat is a lover, not a fighter. He is a gourmand, a gambler, and a lover. He continues to do his routine with Foottit but his real mistreatment at the hands of the racist police returns to him. Foottit's domination, even though staged, begins to feel too real for Chocolat. Chocolat meets schoolteacher and nurse Marie (Clotilde Hesme) and he and Foottit begin to put on shows for her sick children at the hospital where she works. The next stage of their career beckons but the poster for it makes Chocolat look like an ape. He demands that they change it and storms out. Foottit saw nothing wrong with it. Chocolat strikes back during a show, proving to Foottit that the people will laugh if the black man is the dominator---then he quits. Chocolat goes to Marie, with whom he's now romantically involved, simultaneously descending into even more extravagant and unpayable gambling debts, especially after having discovered laudanum. He is trying to drown his anger at the racist society of Paris. Marie offers him way out by offering him a job a real actor, in a Shakespeare play with her friend's theater company. He wants to act in Othello, a challenging role but also appropriate. He would be the first black man in Paris to play role of Shakespeare's moorish character. At first, things move slowly and poorly, with Chocolat quite distracted. He gets his wheels under him, but is disappointed to see "aka Chocolat" behind his name (Raffael Padilla) on the poster above the theater. He is quite successful on opening night, with several people cheering---but just as many hurling racist epithets at him, driving him from the stage and into the back alley of the theater---where the casino's henchmen await, taking their pound of flesh from his hand. We rejoin him, years later. A much older Chocolat is, once again, working at a country circus. Marie has stayed by his side. He is no longer a clown; he simply cleans up the tent after the performance, hindered severely by his advanced consumption. With not long to live, Marie calls for Foottit to come and bid adieu to his erstwhile partner. They part tearfully, with Chocolat drifting off over the Jordan. I watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles. The original is in French, but only Italian and English subtitles were available. I could have tried in French, but I prefer to have French subtitles. So, Italian it was. Practice, practice, practice.</div> <span id="Shining">The Shining (1980)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081505/">9/10</a> <div>Jack Torrance interviews for and obtains a job as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, deep in the mountains of Colorado. He will be taking care of it through the winter season, during which it will be closed. His wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) will join him in solitude. The Torrance family drives up to the Outlook Hotel in a Volkswagen Beetle. When asked by the proprietor, Jack points to a giant pile of luggage that he claims to have brought with him that's more than a three-row minivan could have carried, to say nothing of a Volkswagen Beetle. When they went into the meat freezer with their tour guide Halloran (Scatman Crothers), you couldn't see anyone's breath. I thought Stanley Kubrick paid attention to detail? While these missing details were a bit jarring, the plus side of this approach is that we don't have to hear an explanation for why Danny isn't in school. We don't have to know why a hotel up on a mountain in Colorado closes in the winter. We don't have to know what it could possibly offer to guests in the summer, so high above the tree line. We don't have to wonder why it's been a month after the hotel closed and there is still no snow, and it looks, at best, like it's only about early fall. They're wearing relatively light jackets at what looks like about at least 3000m up. We don't have to know any of this because it's not important. The first snow arrives. Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and Danny play in the snow, which has somehow already drifted up to the third-floor windows. Probably because city folk don't know how snow works. Jack (Jack Nicholson) captures the desperate, tired menace of a Stephen King character perfectly. He has that quiet resignation to his sleepless fate, when whatever eldritch horror that has leaked through the cracks between worlds takes hold, sinking its claws deep into his vulnerable psyche. You see him resist but it's hopeless---the madness is going to win. You can <i>see</i> the voices talking to him in his head. Wendy finds bruises all over Danny's neck. Jack is in a daze after a horrible nightmare. Jack drifts down to the Gold Room, where he meets Lloyd (Joe Turkel), the bartender. Jack has an unsettling conversation---Nicholson's nearly vibrating with a manic fervor---with Lloyd, who's absolutely not there. There's no-one else there. The hotel has only three human residents. Lloyd doesn't blink as he agrees with Jack that it wasn't his fault, that it was <iq>a momentary loss of muscular coordination.</iq> Wendy finds Jack to tell him that it was a woman in room 237 who'd tried to strangle Danny. It hadn't been Jack at all. Not this time. Cut to Halloran, who's in his bedroom in Florida, watching TV. He has some great decor: two photographs of busty Nubian princesses, with giant afros to match their enormous bosoms. Like, massive cans and one-meter wide afros. He learns through "the shining"---the telepathic gift that he and Danny share---that Danny had been in room 237 and that he'd been assaulted by whatever lives in the bathtub there. Now Jack's in room 237. The lady in the bathtub (Lia Beldam) slowly---achingly slowly---pulls back the shower curtain. She steps languorously out, fully nude, tall as a giraffe, striding slowly toward him. Jacks moves toward her. She is young, thin, but not nearly as thin as his wife. Jack smiles his crooked smile. His eyes shimmer, vibrate even. They embrace. Kiss. He opens his eyes and sees her in the mirror, sees her bloated corpse of a body. She (Billie Gibson) cackles, following him as he stumbles backward. Danny's freaking the fuck out. REᗡЯUM <bq>I have let you fuck up my life so far, Wendy, but I'm not going to let you fuck this up.</bq> The hotel is singing to Jack. There are balloons and streamers everywhere. This is an excellent depiction of how Stephen King books feel, where people see and hear things that aren't there. Those things are about to drive Jack right around the bend. Jack is back in the Gold Room. A giant party is in full swing. <bq>Good evening Mr. Torrance. It's good to see you.</bq> The red bathroom is amazing. It's a "red room", which sounds very much like "red rum." This is where Jack meets Delbert Grady (Philip Stone), who'd spilled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocaat">Advocaat</a>---<iq>a traditional Dutch alcoholic beverage made from eggs, sugar, and brandy</iq>---on Jack. <bq><b>Delbert Grady:</b> You must be mistaken, sir. You're the caretaker. You've always been the caretaker. [...] <b>Jack Torrance:</b> He is a very willful boy. <b>Delbert Grady:</b> Indeed he is, Mr. Torrance. A very willful boy. A rather naughty boy, if I may be so bold, sir. <b>Jack Torrance:</b> It's his mother. She, uh, interferes. <b>Delbert Grady:</b> Perhaps they need a good talking-to, if you don't mind my saying so. Perhaps a bit more.</bq> Chills. Wendy's packing a baseball bat. She finds Jack's oeuvre---a ream of <iq>All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy</iq>, formatted into paragraphs and citations that look like he was writing something else. It probably looks normal to him, it probably does say something else when he reads it. In the real world, without the veiled vision provided by the Overlook Hotel's otherworldly residents, it's the ravings of a lunatic. REᗡЯUM Jack catches Wendy reading his work. <bq>I'm not going to hurt you Wendy, I'm just gonna bash your brains in. Gimme the bat Wendy. [tongue flashes; hands grasp]</bq> Lights out for Jack. Wendy drags a severely concussed Jack to the storeroom, locking him in. Delbert Grady visits. He lets Jack out. The Overlook lets Jack out. Halloran is on his way in a Sno-Cat, having been called by Danny. Danny's crawled out the bathroom window, into the snow. Wendy can't get out. Jack's hacking his way in with a fire-axe. <iq>Here's Johnny</iq> Halloran is there. He's handling the snow pretty well. But it's an older movie, so he doesn't say anything stupid. He doesn't crack any dumb jokes about black people in the snow. Jack gets the drop on him. Hatchet to the chest. Voices whisper. They're excited about the sacrifice. They whisper; they chant. They gain power. Wendy sees them too, now. Danny has fled outside. Jack gives chase. Danny knows the labyrinth; Jack does not. But he sees Danny's footprints in the snow. No-one is cold in the wintry, alpine wilderness of the Rockies at 2,500M. Not at first, at least. Perhaps the terror and thrill of the chase for Danny and Jack, respectively, keep them warm. Danny carefully backtracks in his steps, then dodges to the side, covering his new tracks. Wendy is seeing all kinds of stuff now. Rivers of blood. Danny heads back out of the maze, following his own tracks back. Jack is getting cold. He's in untrod territory, lost, slowing down. Desperation is peeking out from the corners of his eyes. Wendy's made it outside. Reunited. Halloran's Sno-Cat is right there. And Jack? He's frozen, but the hotel welcomes him in its loving arms, immortalizing him in that famous picture, in the place of honor, front and center. <img src="{att_link}overlook_hotel_july_4th_ball_1921_(1).jpg" href="{att_link}overlook_hotel_july_4th_ball_1921_(1).jpg" align="none" caption="Overlook Hotel July 4th Ball 1921" scale="60%"> The major difference from the book is that Wendy had rigged the boilers to blow in the book, destroying the hotel in a fiery blaze.</div> <span id="Instigators">The Instigators (2024)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt24169886/">5/10</a> <div>This is an exceedingly odd film that has an uncanny-valley kind of plot, in which things happen, conversations are had, jokes are made, and there is little to no cohesion. Rory (Matt Damon) is an ex-Marine in counseling with Dr. Rivera (Hong Chau). Cobby (Casey Affleck) is a wise-cracking loser who owns a bar, even though that has nothing to do with anything. It's just supposed to be at odds with his generally under-employed, lazy, and alchoholic vibe. The cast is loaded with talent but they're all under-utilized in a weird script that seems simultaneously hurried and drawn-out. There's Mayor Mircelli (Ron Perlman), a nearly comically corrupt mayor of Boston who's just lost his reelection bid. His attorney is played by Toby Flynn (Arnim Zola of the Marvel movies). There's a baker (Alfred Molina), There's a corrupt Boston cop (Ving Rhames) who plays a bounty hunter. It feels as flung-together as I'm describing it. Cobby and Rory try to rob the mayor but all of the money is gone before they get there. It goes horribly sideways but they make it out of there alive. Neither one of them is particularly good at crime. More stuff kind of happens; they always get away. Cobby runs his mouth. He hits on Rory's shrink after she takes a bullet out of him. They go back to rob the mayor again, this time for real. They pose as fire-fighters, triggering a fake fire in order to get access to his safe. Rory's personality is all over the place, with no consistency. Almost everyone is just phoning it in on this. You can just tell that it cost nothing to film. Everything's in easy locations. The car chase was kind of fun but, man, I'm grasping at straws. Cobby is quite funny sometimes but even only about 1/4 of his lines actually land. A lot of the the rest of it feels forced. The diagetic music feels forced, like really awkward needle-drops. The bits of real dialogue are so random that even those feel forced. Is it the editing? Is it the script? It's the script. Who the f@&k wrote thing? It's so formulaic. I'm left wondering whether that's really the actors or whether they're just AI simulacra. I guess it's them; it's not like they were too good to hawk Bitcoin when the gettin' was good. The whole movie felt a bit like it was leaning super-hard on memberberries---hoping that our recognizing actors we like would imbue the film with reflected glory. Maybe the funniest part was that everyone in Boston considered Montreal to be the go-to place to flee when you're on the lam. Cobby, Rory, the mayor, everyone. Damon and Affleck are occasionally fine but they were just too awkward too much of the time. I thought Hong Chau was pretty good, though. She had some charisma and did pretty well, all things considered. Getting some of that Apple money, I guess. Nothing wrong with that, but I didn't need to watch this.</div> <span id="Samurai">The Last Samurai (2003)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325710/">9/10</a> <div>Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is a ex-soldier who's been reduced to selling his story of having conquered the red man, in what appears to be a drunken stupor. He's there to sell rifles. He's not a great salesman but he is a great shot. Zebulon Gant (Billy Connolly) is impressed, despite the obvious drunkenness and the world-weary attitude. He introduces Algren to the Japanese, who recruit him to train their imperial soldiers in using rifles rather then swords. Even after Algren demonstrates that the troops aren't ready, they are urged into a predictably disastrous battle with the Samurai in which Algren becomes the only living captive, having impressed the Samurai with his indomitable spirit (even after he kills one of their own in a sneaky move, made while nearly incapacitated). Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) takes him prisoner because of how bravely he fought. His right-hand man Ujio (Hiroyuki Sanada) wants to kill Algren for not having had the honor to kill himself after losing. Others nurse him back to health---with sake. He self-medicates, mostly to ward off the horrific PTSD visions that he has of the genocidal slaughter of which he was an integral part in the American West. His nurse Taka (Koyuki) is the widow of the man he'd killed on the battlefield. She forces him to dry out, painfully, until he wakes up one morning, clear-eyed and dry. He wanders through the village, seeing the similarities between the rituals and practices of the Japanese warriors and those of the savages whom he'd slaughtered in a former life. He is a crude man, a recovering drunk with dirty boots, and no idea how to speak the language. He lives with Taka, who's also Katsumoto's sister, and her family, where he slowly learns the Japanese language, the fighting style, and the mountain villager's way of life. He is trapped there until spring, when the snow in the passes melts. He gets better at fighting, at understanding Japanese. He trains with Ujio and manages a tie. At a village theater, ninjas infiltrate the village and try to assassinate Katsuhiro. There is an incredible battle in which so many ninjas fall. Algren comports himself well, standing at Katsuhiro's side and defeating the last of the ninjas with him, while Ujio and his men clean up outside. In the spring, Algren rides with Katsuhiro back to Tokyo, where they run into no small amount of trouble. Katsuhiro is arrested while Algren refuses to play ball anymore. He decides to rescue Katsuhiro after defending himself in an excellent sword-fighting scene, in which he just crushes five or six attackers, beheading the final one. He breaks into the compound with Simon (Timothy Spall), a well-integrated Brit who'd helped recruit Algren in the first place. Katsuhiro's son Nobutada (Shin Koyamada) falls in battle but the others manage to escape, defeating rifles with arrows. Algren, Katsumoto and the rest return to the village and prepare for a last stand. Algren tells the story of the 300 Spartans who resisted the 1M-man army of the Persians for two days, until the Persians were weary of the fight. They all died but Sparta would win, in the end. Even if the battle is hopeless, it is still worth fighting. <bq><b>Katsumoto:</b> You believe a man can change his destiny? <b>Algren:</b> I think a man does what he can, until his destiny is revealed.</bq> The battle begins. Many fall. Many, many, many fall, on all sides. The advantage goes back and forth. There are mortally wounded samurai still sitting on horses, holding their swords high. They know that their cause is hopeless. They are samurai. Their intent is not to return from the battlefield. Their intent is to die well. Their final charge is into the mouths of cannons, pistols, and muskets. Their leather armor offers no resistance. Katsumoto and Algren make it through the first line, with Algren killing the odious and honorless Bagley (Tony Goldwyn). The second line loads a gatling gun. They're just mowing down soldiers with no honor. Slo-mo blood flies as our heroes fall. Horses and bodies everywhere. The Japanese soldiers slaughter their own countrymen with no honor. Only one captain (Satoshi Nikaido) calls it off. He had trained under Algren. He has tears in his eyes at the horror of the senseless slaughter. The odious Omura (Masato Harada) calls for it to continue. Algren helps Katsumoto to his knees so that he can die with honor, with the help of his friend and fellow warrior. The Japanese troops close in. The captain kneels out of respect for the fallen enemy; his men follow suit, doffing caps and prostrating themselves. Omura does not kneel. In the field, only Algren remains, deathless. Later, as Emperor Meiji (Shichinosuke Nakamura) is sealing a trade deal with the foreigners, with the Americans, with a leering Omura imagining all of the money that he personally will make, Algren arrives to deliver samurai swords to his emperor, prostrating himself with difficulty, still suffering from only partly healed wounds. He is in his U.S. uniform. He presents Katsumoto's sword. Meiji kneels and takes the sword in the spirit that it is offered. He decides not to enter into a treaty with the British. <bq><b>Emperor Meiji:</b> [Referring to Katsumoto] Tell me how he died. <b>Algren:</b> [Referring to Katsumoto] I will tell you how he lived.</bq> Algren returns to Katsumoto's village, to Taka, who welcomes him warmly. <bq><b>Simon:</b> And so the days of the Samurai had ended. Nations, like men, it is sometimes said, have their own destiny. As for the American Captain, no one knows what became of him. Some say that he died of his wounds. Others, that he returned to his own country. But I like to think he may have at last found some small measure of peace, that we all seek, and few of us ever find.</bq> The battle scenes were absolutely epic and were 100% in real life; no CGI. My God, you can just tell so much. I swear to God I hope that we are going to just forget at least two entire decades of shitty, muddy, CGI action scenes where ten thousand soldiers attack ten thousand others and you don't care about any of them. This was amazing. I was pretty sure I'd seen this movie before but could find no record of having watched it. I watched it in German this time. More than I'd remembered was in Japanese (with German subtitles). Tom Cruise spoke quite a bit of Japanese, it seems.</div> <span id="Silo">Silo S02 (2024)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt14688458/">7/10</a> <div>The second season isn't nearly as solid as the <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4875#Silo">first season</a>, which I watched at the end of 2023/beginning of 2024. At the end of that season, Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) had just gone <i>outside</i>, refused to clean the camera, and then disappeared over the hill rather than collapsing on the near side of it. All of this was unprecedented for the people in her silo. The scales fell from their eyes and they began to demand answers. Up until that point, as far as they were aware, there had been only one revolution, over 140 years ago. This belief was indoctrinated with heavy brainwashing, both psychological and with chemicals in the water. It was deemed necessary to keep the curious monkeys from killing themselves by going outside or by wanting too many babies or any other freedom. See my notes for the books <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3199">Wool</a>, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3218">Shift</a>, and <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3219">Dust</a>, on which this show is based, if you're interested in more of my analysis. The autocracy in charge of the silo---IT is in charge of Justice, which is in charge of the Sheriff's department---has a book called "The Order", which not only predicted that revolutions would happen, but predicted them with such precision that it prescribes very specific measures to counteract them. The very specific measures are to ... checks notes ... foment sectarian strife between the different sections of the silo, which are divided by functional role. If you're following along, the prescribed way to <i>avoid</i> a disaster is to <i>promote</i> a disaster by getting the absolutely essential functional divisions of society to fight amongst themselves rather than to perform their respective functions. They get real mad real fast. Not a lot of nuance here, is what I'm saying. The government in the silo makes me think of any U.S. administration, but particularly and recently the Biden administration, trying desperately to retain control, even as all of their subterfuge crumbles around them. Or the Cambodians under Pol Pol and Lon Nol, with the unpredictable lunacy of their regimes, where their shit-stirring led to an entire population just not <i>growing food anymore</i>. Like those regimes, where we saw and continue to see disastrous effects as the result of selfish policy, you would expect the relatively small, enclosed, and fragile society of the silo to quickly break down...but nothing really happens! Other than people gathered in the central public spaces---primarily the giant, central, spiral staircase---to protest and fight and spit horribly racist things at each other, everyone looks like they're getting water, food, electricity, plumbing, and <i>air</i> just like before. Society just goes along as it always has! No problems! Writing television shows is so easy! It's more than a bit tedious having to watch IT chief Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) not only pulling all of the strings---with everyone completely aware that IT is doing so---but also somehow gallivanting around the silo with no guards and seemingly at no personal risk to himself at all. The director tries to make Robbin's somewhat cross-eyed and highly lopsided gaze seem menacing but I can't see anything but the bows of his tiny glasses pressing into his plump temples. This leads me to wonder how one obtains such plump temples in a society with severely constrained resources, why one would allow one's plumpness to signal how much more comfort one's elite role allows them, and that, no matter how well you plan your post-apocalyptic society, you're always going to forget something, like opticians<fn>, who know how to fit glasses to your face. It's distracting, is what I'm saying. Bernard foments rebellions and there is never any blowback where he lives---which is, like, <i>immediately adjacent</i> to the areas in violent turmoil because they all live in a <i>relatively small silo</i>. This is due to the seemingly endless cadres of black-armor-suited, cage-helmeted, and truncheon-wielding shock troops available to justice, who seem to serve no other function to the silo except enforcing the autocracy and raining down terror. Perhaps this is supposed to reflect our society, where the elite's violent enforcers serve just one purpose, but in the silo, they'd at least have to have one other function. Such a society simply couldn't tolerate so many superfluous people while still surviving for centuries. Bernard is definitely more fun to watch, though, than Sims (Common), who I find to even more annoying. He's supposed to be menacing but Common is an incredibly wooden actor. I suppose his name fits his style. 🥁 His wife Camille (Alexandria Riley) is a perfect match, arguably even a worse actress, and charged with swanning around the silo, telling everyone what to do and suffering zero consequences. She used to work as a "raider" for Justice, so ... no-one dares cross her? This is just implied and largely unexplained. The show uses her as a battering ram for the plot. Judge Meadows is only slightly more sympathetic, in that she at least seems somewhat concerned about the people of the silo as <i>people</i> rather than <i>animals</i>. However, she doesn't ever---not even once---question the position of privilege that she enjoys within that society. None of the many, long, one-on-one discussions are about what kind of society they have, where humans aren't really able to be humans. For example, what is the point of survival when everything that was important has been lost? Is the point really just to keep human hearts beating no matter what kind of subjective lives the brains fueled by those hearts experience? This would be the perfect opportunity to discuss the detrimental effects of autocracy on human culture and individual autonomy versus the dangers of individual autonomy in an extremely dangerous and fragile world like the silo. If you find this line of reasoning annoying, then you're in luck---it's completely unaddressed in this season. In season one, Judge Meadows was an alcoholic. In this season, she gives up alcohol---just like that! No muss, no fuss. In every scene thereafter, she's clear-eyed and brutally competent, not at all a recovering alcoholic who's had some rough nights behind her. Like, her being a recovering alcoholic literally never comes up again. Who knew it was that easy? 👍 🍾 ✋ How do we know that she's dry now? Meadows demonstrates her dedication to sobriety by doing what we do in our culture: ceremoniously dumping alcohol down the drain of her kitchen sink. I remember similar mistakes from the first season. Why is this a mistake? Because the writers simply don't <i>really</i> consider how differently people who've lived with extremely limited resources for several <i>generations</i> would behave. Is it likely that the people of the Silo would have such a profligate attitude toward useful resources? Of course not. There is no way anyone, no matter how stupid or terrible, would have default behaviors that led to resource waste. In a more well-thought-out depiction of a silo, Meadows would have probably sent the materials to a recycling center for use elsewhere. It would be less dramatic but much more believable. There are two main story arcs with a bunch of subplots involving budding relationships between various characters. One main storyline is that Juliette has broken into silo 17---right next door to her original silo 18---and found Solo (Steve Zahn), who's been holed up there for ... a long, long time. He's oddly childish but this is understandable, as we learn throughout the season that he was very, very young when he locked himself into silo 17's IT section. He has survived alone ever since. Juliette befriends him---to whatever degree he's capable of socializing---and they team up to get her a working suit so that she can return to her silo. Why would she want to do this? Well, Solo had told her that the people of his silo had revolted and had all demanded to go outside after one of its residents had failed to clean. They'd all stormed outside and then soon died. Juliette had seen the sea of corpses spilled from the entrance to silo 17. Is this wildly simplistic? Yes. Does it lean super-hard into the notion that you can write a book like "the Order" that predicts all human behavior and provides a manual for rule? Yes. Yes, it does. Does it give Juliette and Solo something to do for the season? It does that too. Juliette and Solo's missions feel like you're watching someone play the almost-inevitable video game. She needs to dive into water to get an outside suit. It doesn't have a helmet, so she needs to sleuth around for one of those. The water's rising, so she needs to fix the pump 18 levels underwater to get her helmet back from Solo, who's blackmailing her into helping him fix silo 17. Oh, and he saved her from a deadly infected cut with antibiotics that he'd made himself. On her dive, she was forced to come up early, so she had to cure her own bends<fn>, which was mighty quick, before she's shot with an arrow by a completely new person that appears in the silo. Now, she's fixing up her own arrow wound---she's like <a href="#sisu">Aatami from Sisu</a>. She's so good at it that, later, when she's fighting, it doesn't bother her at all. Hell, arrow wounds are so superficial that, when Solo gets shot right in the middle of the back, <i>his wound is completely gone hours later.</i> Don't scream misogyny too soon, though, <i>because so is Juliette's!</i> I cannot even tell whether this an oversight or laziness or a plot point. In the other, personally far less interesting story arc---it bores me because it is executed in an utterly predictable and quite manipulative manner---is that silo 18 is ... wait for it ... rolling along the historical groove predicted by "the Order" along which silo 17 had committed mass suicide. Sims and Bernard are unrelentingly shitty and supercilious and superior. Even though they fight amongst themselves, their stranglehold over events and people and resources remains nearly completely unchallenged. The justice department's shock troops are everywhere and also completely unquestioned and unchallenged, even though their function is simply to exert control and they don't provide in any way to the silo's functioning or to people's survival. Perhaps it's a parable for our times, in which the people that provide actual value---HVAC, mechanical, water, food---just accept that there will be people to keep them in line. They've had generations to learn and inculcate this way of life. Don't worry: the show doesn't try to make you think about stuff like this: I've just made it up to entertain myself. It's weird, though, that the proletariat never rises up when IT and Justice don't want it to, but it rises up <i>immediately</i> with a tiny bit of prodding from Bernard. We're expected to believe that the hoi polloi are docile toward the people stepping on their necks but they're foaming at the mouth against the other "factions"---who are actually their natural allies---that the people stepping on their necks have pointed them at. Wait, that sounds like western society! Whoa....maybe they're onto something here. At any rate, Mechanical shuts off power to show its strength, but always turns it back on again nearly immediately. IT poisons all of Mechanical's food. Mechanical seizes ten more floors in order to capture a farm. There's info-warfare between IT and Mechanical. Dr. Nichols (Iain Glen, who does a great job)---Juliette's father---joins the Sheriff in the "down below". Together, they learn more and more about how the Silo actually works. The Sheriff's wife Kathleen (Caitlin Zoz) is there as well. Unfortunately, she's written and acted quite shallowly as well. Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash) is Bernard's new shadow and he's been tasked to search for the truth behind the revolution of 140 years ago. Who was Salvador Quinn? Nash is a good actor and his role is relatively well-written. I remember that this part was quite good in the books as well. I like a bit of sleuthing. Bernard blackmails a sadly superficial Walker (Harriet Walter) into helping him by simply keeping her ex-wife alive. Sure, OK. Easy as pie. Bernard's got an even easier job of swanning about than Camille does. There are no plots cooking against him. None. This will eventually be turned on him but only after it had been telegraphed six ways from Sunday. Even I caught on early to what was going on. Watching Bernard give yet another speech to "his people" is like watching a White House briefing in which Matt Miller tells everyone that everything they've heard that didn't come from him is a lie, and is being spread by antisemites and Russians. As you can imagine, I spend so much time seeing how poisonous this is for people's actual lives that sometimes I wouldn't mind seeing a bit of escapist fantasy where things are different. I'm not a huge fan of watching of a show where 90% it consists of showing the people I actually like getting their asses handed to them, while the people I hate ride high and enjoy their victories. That's a tough tight-rope to walk, and a quite a bit beyond the skills of this show. Even if I know that they'll get their just desserts in the end, I don't especially enjoy watching them revel in it. It feels manipulative---outrage-farming and hate-watching---and it's not very interesting to me. Sometimes I like to watch the good guys win. They can have setbacks, of course, but I don't need to be watching long episodes full of powerful assholes gloating about how they're never going to lose. We get it. The end of the season was a bit better, although it was very, very uneven. Lukas Kyle is great---he discovers the true secret of the silos simultaneously with Juliette, who discovers the same with Solo/Jimmy from papers that his parents left for him. Sims and Bernard stay completely shitty. The triple-subterfuge in the rebellion was quite nicely done, if I'm honest. Juliette gets back just in time to prevent everyone from going back outside---exactly as was prophesied. The two people in the final scene---which was between two people in "now"-time---were not good actors. I hope that improves but I'm sometimes shocked by what passes for acting these days. Nobody drank anything---as usual; even if they'd ordered something, they wouldn't have touched it---but she asked for the check, in a whisper, in a crowded bar. There's just literally no effort made at all. We were supposed to focus on the awesome <i>click</i> noise that the Pez dispenser made as the <i>entire story fell into place.</i> Sure, OK.</div> <span id="Sisters">Bad Sisters S02 (2024)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt15469618/">5/10</a> <div>This season is nothing like the first one. This one should have been a two-hour movie. In this season, nobody can keep their gob shut, despite the presence of a lot of Nosy Parkers, including a positively sociopathic Angelica Collins (Fiona Shaw) and the shockingly intrusive Detective Fergal Loftus (Barry Ward) and his new partner, the even more breathtakingly disrespectful Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham). They just ask inappropriate questions at inappropriate times and they get answers from utterly naive people. The police just sashay into people's homes as if privacy and warrants simply don't exist in a modern, free society. Perhaps they don't, in Ireland; I'm no expert. Or perhaps this is just another show that's determined to train the populace that the police can just swan around your property and drift through your home whenever they like. This show could have been named, <iq>Ah, the door was open, so I let myself in. Hope that's OK? You got a cup on?</iq> The original sisters are all back---Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Becka (Eve Hewson), Bibi (Sarah Greene), Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), and Eva (Sharon Horgan)---but they're considerably diminished after two years. They're not as saucy and strong as they were, and are instead more maundy and fragile. Eva, especially, is horrid and boring and <i>basic</i> instead of funny and sharp, like she was in season one. She was the smart one, seeing through everything; now, she's makes one terrible, poorly considered decision after another. Grace remarries, to Ian (Owen McDonnell), with whom she fights one evening after she tells him that she'd killed her previous husband. This is only the first of many nearly completely unprompted confessions, usually in response to unbelievably bold questions that should earn more of a punch in the nose than an answer. And they all keep moaning on about poor Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), who has all of the personality of an old dishcloth and whom the show delivered not only one awful husband in season one, but also a mooning never-to-be-requited lover Roger (Michael Smiley) and a <i>second husband</i> Ian (Owen McDonnell), who gets over her pretty quickly and starts angling for Eva (Sharon Horgan) instead, even though they're all pretending that's not happening. Blanaid knows. Angelica knows. Dude: <i>everybody knows</i>. Roger, too, is over Grace before her ashes have even cooled, propositioning both Ursula and Eva in what is so ham-fisted a manner that you've got to wonder whether he's on the spectrum. You've also to to wonder why the show spends so much time on Roger, who went personality-shopping at the same store as Grace. I would be remiss if I didn't point out how ungodly irritating it is to watch the police---<i>Garda</i>---just walk into people's homes whenever they feel like it---and no-one says anything about it! They never throw them out! They never try to stop them from entering. They are never too busy to drop everything and just do what the Garda wants. Instead, they offer them a tea. It's <i>unreal</i>. It's so off-putting and distracting that I can barely pay attention to the scene that follows because I'm still thinking about how they shouldn't even <i>be there</i>. Not only that, but they're cheerfully just barging in on people's birthdays, on the day someone get's his dead wife's effects---and just start peppering people with questions. And everyone answers them! No warrant, no arrest, no lawyer---<i>solicitor</i>---and the people who actually have something to hide just answer every single question. It makes the job of the police <i>so easy</i>. Speaking of jobs---does anyone in this show have one? Are they all just independently wealthy? We know that Ursula is a nurse but I think she was let go for stealing drugs from the hospital. This crime is so beneath notice that they don't even spend a second worrying about whether she'll get charged with it. It's just completely forgotten, as is the fact that her means of support is gone. I guess she's on the dole? We don't know. Her family is completely non-existent in this season, which focuses instead solely on Blanaid, whose personality is just as boring as her mother Grace's. Look, I kind of like Fergal Loftus's (Barry Ward) young, new, female partner Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham). She's very pushy but that's the role. Fine. But everyone makes it so easy for her to get what she wants! They just answer every question like she's somehow <i>hypnotized them.</i> Maybe I find it annoying to watch an entire cast full of morons or monsters but I have a hard time sticking with a show where I don't even respect anyone's game. And, by episode seven, it's been made completely clear that "pushy" is the sum-total of Una's character, which means she's just a cop chasing a big case, no matter whether she gets it right nor not, which makes her an unsympathetic character---just like everyone else. Blanaid's (Saise Quinn) written as a superficially bitchy teenager. Hey, Blanaid, just because you lost your mom doesn't give you the right to treat everyone you know like shit, and then run into the arms of the most obvious sociopath in the show, Angelica Collins (Fiona Shaw), who, like Una, simply gets away with every scheme she tries. This season very much has the feel of a bad action movie or a WWE match, where the ostensible heel---Angelica---wins and wins and wins until she'll almost certainly lose big at some point. Which she does but also in the most anticlimactic way. If Angelica weren't so insufferable, then it would be fun to watch her make the titular sisters squirm so hard. They are not a clever bunch and can't get out of their own way long enough to protect their secrets. They have so many foibles between them that there's no way that whole passel of fools won't unravel and incriminate themselves. A lot more happens in this season but I didn't feel too entertained by it. I kept thinking of the snappy repartee and good writing of the first season. The magic was a bit gone. Here's what happens: the ladies take Angelica out for a boat ride. She takes one on the bean from the boom and falls in the water. With Angelica lost at sea. Ian helps the ladies cover things up, but then it turns out that he's actually setting them up. He's not who he says he is; he's an ex-cop with a second family and a history of sexual abuse. He's the real sociopath, not Angelica! 😱 😱 😱 Angelica's a total sweetheart now and she was <i>right all along about Ian.</i> Eva bangs Ian, then gives him $100K for Blanaid, then realizes her mistake. He gets the better of them, then they get the better of him, after Angelica shows up and beans him. Oh, yeah, Angelica is back from the dead and has had a complete personality change. She's no longer interested in bringing them down, nor in kidnapping Blanaid. In fact, no one ever mentions the super-creepy bedroom she'd prepared for Blanaid or how she'd been grooming her relentlessly. The show just whipsaws around and declares to us that we were all fools for not having known that <i>Ian is the obvious enemy</i>---the Prick Part II---and it turns out that Grace had been running from <i>him</i>. Officer Houlihan ends up helping them make sure that Ian stays quiet and goes away forever. Becca has her baby. Everyone lives happily ever after. My problem with season two is that it's hard to watch a show where the main stars are insufferable. It's even harder to watch a show where pretty much everyone is insufferable. This can work, but it has to be smart about it. This storyline is not smart about it. Instead, the storyline jaunts from one <i>deus ex machina</i> to another to fill out eight episodes. It should have been a two-hour movie. That would have been pretty good.</div> <span id="Payne">Max Payne (2008)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0467197/">6/10</a> <div>I watched and <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=2488#Max">reviewed this movie in 2011</a>, where I kept things relatively short. As I noted in that review, the aesthetics of the film captured those of the video game extremely well, even including bullet-time in several scenes. The harsh lighting and deeply muted colors are spot-on, too. The building interiors are trashed, graffitied---dark and harshly lit at the same time. When snow's not drifting down, it's raining buckets. It's almost always nighttime. The only time it's sunny is outside of a funeral home.<fn> Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) is a good cop but a broken man. He's not interested in drugs or women, not even when Natasha (Olga Kurylenko) throws herself at him. After the death of his wife, he's in a dark, dark place. He pairs back up with his old partner Alex Balder (Donal Logue) to track a strange series of deaths in the underworld of the city they live in. The victims have wing tattoos on their wrists and see giant, flapping, dark shadows before they die. That collaboration is doomed when Payne finds his partner dead at home, where Payne is then nearly killed in a blurred, confusing attack. He's thrown out of Alex's funeral by his widow. Outside, Jim Bravura (Ludacris) from IA picks him up, wondering why Natasha had his wallet when she'd been killed. Brooding and on everyone's shit list; this is how Max Payne rolls. Natascha's sister Mona Sax (Mila Kunis) tracks Max down, wanting revenge for her sister. They end up working together. Mila Kunis is hardcore, better even than Max Payne. Payne is unstoppable in searching for his wife's killer---kind of like the Punisher. Mona is the same now. He discovers that the pharmaceutical company Aesir has built a super-soldier serum. Jack Lupino (Amaury Nolasco) is a savagely sadistic user of this drug---Max discovers that it was Jack who'd actually killed his wife. Lupino is juiced and likes standing in the snow, sweating, doing drugs, and killing people. Max dukes it out with him but his boss (Beau Bridges) shoots Lupino, then sets Max up to make his own upcoming death look like a suicide. Max gets away, but is wounded and frozen, so he ends up taking the super-soldier serum to save his own life. He is high, like sooper-high. He is <i>seeing shit</i>. We are now on the "unstoppable march to revenge against all of the crooked cops who have wronged him" part. It's kind of cheesy, and somehow even less believable than the video game. I watched it in German.</div> <span id="Pain">Pain & Gain (2013)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1980209/">7/10</a> <div>Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) works at a gym. He's pretty dumb but that doesn't mean he's not successful. After all, he drives a T-top Fiero. He thinks he should be more successful. He lives in Florida, to no-one's surprise. He wears a fanny-pack completely unironically. When he hears super-scam artist Jonny Wu (Ken Jeong) giving his spiel, he thinks <iq>this guy gets me.</iq> He works with Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), who's even dumber than he is. It almost goes without saying, but they are juicing day and night. They hatch a plan to steal one of Lugo's clients Victor Kershaw's (Tony Shalhoub) money. Victor is a douchebag and a fool but he's a pretty successful businessman. They get Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) to help them, who's even dumber than the other two. He's very religious, thinks he is very disciplined, but isn't even close. He has a serious coke habit. Adrian has a erectile dysfunction from juicing; he goes to nurse Robin (Rebel Wilson) and Dr. Bjornson (Peter Stormare) to get fixed up. Robin is not very professional at all. Neither, really, is Dr. Bjornson. But Robin is <i>highly</i> unprofessional. Our crew goes shopping for weapons and then plan their first mission to kidnap Victor. They show up on Shabbat, when he has at least a dozen guests. The fools show up in face-paint and ninja costumes and have to scurry away. Next, the fools fail to capture him in a parking lot because they're absolute fools: they block in the wrong car. Third time's the charm but they almost kill him with tasers. They're too dumb to notice that their plan isn't really working. I can't tell whether Victor is also just as dumb or whether he's manipulating the idiots who kidnapped him. Paul, with his low IQ and obsession with Jesus is eminently manipulable. Speaking of low IQ, Lugo's stripper girlfriend Sorina Luminita (Bar Paly) is also not the brightest bulb. She is spectacular but dumb in the sense that she would starve to death in a room where the doorknob turned the other direction. Lugo finally gets Victor's money by torturing him into signing papers that turn over his fortune to the crew of fools. The bank requires a notary. Lugo's boss John (Rob Corddry) is a notary but he won't break the rules---until Lugo promises him to finance a body-building contest at his gym if he stamps all of the documents. STAMP. STAMP. STAMP. They have the money. Now they have to get rid of the man. They try to kill him in a faked car accident but Adrian had put his seatbelt on. GODDAMN THEY'RE SO DUMB. Amazing. This is <i>based on a true story</i>. Lugo sets the car on fire. They strut away. Victor exits the car behind them. He's still alive, patting out the fire. Paul runs him over forwards. Then backwards. He's still not dead. Victor's in a hospital, in shitty shape but spitting mad. The police don't believe his story about the kidnapping and attempted murder. He is an <i>asshole</i> so they just kind of tune him out. Victor calls private detective Ed DuBois (Ed Harris) for help. The team of idiots shows up at the hospital but can't find the ICU because ... the map is too complicated for them. They find out that the police didn't pay any attention to Victor and leave without killing him. Montage of Adrian & Robin, Paul & Sorina, and Lugo all spending money like absolute fools. They figure out that Victor is on their trail, so they decide to hunt him down. Again. They're absolutely spiraling out of control. A lot of these scenes look like they're straight out of GTA---complete with NPCs walking around, up and down the stairs---and right down to the Vice City-style sets and set pieces. The only people dumber than the three guys are their marks---like Frank Griga (Michael Rispoli) and his pneumatic wife Krisztina Furton (Keili Lefkovitz). Luckily, while Paul and Adrian are entertaining Krisztina with push-ups and pony-rides, Lugo flips out on Frank because he called him a "scheiss Amateur". His flipping out dropped a 45-pound plate on Frank's head. Lugo starts curling to clear his head. They force a nearly senseless Krisztina to give up the code for the safe that she and Frank have at home...but they get it wrong...then Adrian accidentally kills her with some of his drugs. Their next plan is to chop up the bodies. The chainsaw doesn't work, so it's the hatchet, I guess. Just an absolute spiral. Lugo and Adrian are back at Home Depot to return the chainsaw, which has blood and hair on the chain. They only notice at the store. Actually, they don't notice but the lady at the returns counter does. <bq><b>Home Depot Customer Service:</b> Entweder sind Sie blöd oder blind. Das ist Fell. Suchen Sie einen anderen aus.</bq> Meanwhile, Paul is grilling human parts outside while flirting with a neighbor/security guard. <bq><b>Lugo:</b> Bist du wahnsinnig? <b>Paul:</b> Was ist das Problem? Die Scheisse muss man draussen grillen.</bq> They dump the rest of the body parts into the Everglades. In barrels. While the barrels help the bodies stay below the surface, they won't decompose. If they'd weighted the bodies down with rocks, the alligators would have disposed of the bodies in less than a day. Instead, the bodies are there to be discovered...later. <bq><b>Lugo:</b> Ich fühle mich gut. Ich muss ein bisschen pumpen.</bq> We're back at the beginning, with Lugo on the run. Paul and Adrian have already been arrested. Lugo is in his giant, orange-and-green cigarette boat. Victor finally reveals to DuBois that he has more accounts in the Bahamas. DuBois is pissed and tells him that he's a very difficult client. Victor is a supreme asshole, retorting that having an account in the Bahamas is Finance 101 and that DuBois should have guessed. Wow. Lugo's in the Bahamas, searching through Victor's lockbox, which has only useless mementos in it. DuBois spots him and gives chase, clipping him in the leg. Victor spots him and plows into him with his car, slamming him through a wall. Lugo still doesn't quite get it, chattering in the helicopter about how long it took to grow his physique. <bq><b>Lugo: </b> [sees all of the cops at the airport] Die Leute sind alle wegen mir da? <b>DuBois:</b> Ja, die wollen wissen, warum du das alles getan hast. <b>Lugo:</b> Naja, weil ich ein <i>Macher</i> bin.</bq> This movie was very obviously directed by Michael Bay. I liked it better the second time around.</div> </dl> <hr> <ft>These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the <i>genre</i>, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid <b>spoilers</b>. Links are to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/user/ur1323291/ratings">my IMDb ratings</a></ft> <ft>In the <i>Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i> "trilogy", there is a race of people called the Golgafrinchans, who try to optimize away what they consider to be the useless 1/3 of their population, which included telephone sanitizers. After a brief period of quasi-flourishing, the entire species was wiped out by a virus that spread through telephone handsets. See the excellent summary in <a href="https://everything2.com/title/telephone+sanitizer" author="Robotech_Master" source="Everything2">telephone sanitizer</a>, which I cite below in full (it's from 2002 and I'm afraid it will disappear at some point; internet erosion is real). <bq>The telephone sanitizer in Douglas Adams's HHGTTG book and radio series was provided as a textbook example of a useless occupation. The idea was that the Golgafrinchans realized that a substantial portion of their population was completely useless, and so they got rid of them by making up a story of impending planetary catastrophe and sending them ahead on a space ark that was supposedly the first of several. (This is similar to the trick that the Tallest play on the useless Irkan Invader, Zim, in the first episode of Invader Zim.) The joke turned out to be on the Golgafrinchans, however, when they were wiped out by a plague contracted from a horribly dirty telephone. The telephone sanitizer was clearly meant to be a humorously-exaggerated example of sheer uselessness--perhaps the most useless occupation that Adams could possibly conceive--so as to depict the others with whom the telephone sanitizers shared the ship (advertising executives and hairstylists and lawyers and so forth) as being even more useless (and annoying) than their popular stereotypes. This being the case, it is strangely ironic to consider that Cornell scientists discovered in 1997 that many public surfaces--ATM keypads, computer lab keyboards, doorknobs, bus handholds, and, yes, public telephones--were contaminated with a whole host of virulent and nasty disease-causing microorganisms. So, perhaps a telephone sanitizer might not be so useless after all.</bq></ft> <ft>I feel like they're playing fast and loose with embolisms and what causes them because I don't think the air pressures make sense. See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_sickness#Ascent_from_depth" source="Wikipedia">Ascent from depth</a>, It feels like the air that she's breathing is being pushed down from up top and isn't at high pressure like in scuba equipment. Maybe by the time it's absorbed in her body, the gas is at higher pressure because of the depth, but I'm not sure. At any rate, her quick stop at a slightly lower depth, after having been so very far down for so long, almost certainly wouldn't have prevented much worse bends than she showed.</ft> <ft>Which is one more scene than a film with a very similar aesthetic <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401792/?ref_=nm_flmg_knf_t_1" author="" source="IMDb">Sin City</a> had.</ft>