<n>Read the explanation of method, madness, and <b>spoilers</b>.<fn></n> <ol> <a href="#Prada">The Devil Wears Prada (2006)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458352/">7/10</a> <a href="#Boss">Boss Level (2020)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt7638348/">7/10</a> <a href="#Saul">Better Call Saul S06 (2022)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3032476/">9/10</a> <a href="#Footloose">Footloose (1984)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087277/">7/10</a> <a href="#Creator">The Creator (2023)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt11858890/">6/10</a> <a href="#Police">Police Academy (1984)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087928/">6/10</a> <a href="#Papillon">Papillon (2017)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5093026/">9/10</a> <a href="#Divergent">Divergent (2014)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1840309/">5/10</a> <a href="#Severance">Severance S02 (2024)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt11280740/">6/10</a> <a href="#Renaissance">Terminator Renaissance (2010)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0438488/">6/10</a> </ol> <dl dt_class="field"> <span id="Prada">The Devil Wears Prada (2006)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458352/">7/10</a> <div>This is a film that is tediously trying to convince us that Anne Hathaway is a mousy doormat until she learns how to wear expensive clothes and put on expensive makeup. The secret ingredient for attraction is, apparently, pretentiousness. The secret ingredient for enlightenment is, apparently, superciliousness. Hathaway's character Andy is a <i>journalist</i> who is <i>too good for</i> a fashion magazine until she realizes how powerful you can be working for one. Then she learns how to respect endless articles about the right accessories to wear for the season and the right makeup to apply to land wealthy men. She somehow lands a job as the personal assistant to the editor-in-chief of the fictitious magazine <i>Runway</i>, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). Miranda runs her empire with an iron grip and a humorless neoliberal ideology, shitting on everyone to <i>make them become their best selves</i>.. She expects them to emerge from the cocoon of abuse in which she envelops them to become an idealized neoliberal imago if they only kowtow hard enough, if they only acknowledge the unquestionable and flawless brilliance of Miranda. The plot is pretty bog-standard actually: Andy is hired by a complete fashion-cultist Emily (Emily Blunt), whose subjugation to Miranda verges on masochism. She lets that shit roll right on downhill onto the obvious apostate Andy. Andy, being smarter than the average bear---and being much smarter than Emily---quickly passes Emily on the outside and eventually takes over most of her job, even taking Emily's place at the once-a-year, big fashion-show in Paris. Almost needless to say, Andy's relationship with her twee chef boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) suffers, because she's <i>changed too much,</i> which, like, duh. Miranda's fashion god Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) is not only flamboyantly gay but also stoops to mentor Andy when she needs it most. Miranda ends up screwing Nigel out of a promotion that he'd thought he'd all but had in the bag but he totally <i>forgives her nearly immediately</i> because that's just how the fashion world works and he worships Miranda because <i>they're all in a cult.</i> Andy confronts Miranda for her duplicitousness but Miranda throws her betrayal of Emily right back at her. Cat fight. Just kidding. Andy quits in a huff. Luckily for her, her ex-boyfriend Nate forgives her, they agree to remain friends before he leaves to be a sous-chef in a fancy restaurant in Boston while Andy falls into the exact kind of journalism role she'd been seeking before this whole rigamarole. So, like, happily ever after all around. The story's a bit weak but the actors are very good and the dialogue is often funny, so it gets an extra point despite being tedious propaganda.</div> <span id="Boss">Boss Level (2020)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt7638348/">7/10</a> <div>Roy Pulver (Frank Grillo) is a ridiculously over-muscled, former member of Delta force (they mention it several times) who's estranged from his ex-wife Jemma Wells (Naomi Watts), who heads a mysterious laboratory run by Colonel Clive Ventor (Mel Gibson). We learn about the others as Roy experiences the exact same day, again and again and again. This movie has a similar premise to <i>Groundhog Day</i> but also leans on <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=4697#Free">Free Guy</a> and <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=3071#Edge">Edge of Tomorrow</a>: Roy is stuck in a violent, video-game-like time-loop. Over the course of many, many flashbacks, we learn that the Colonel had Jemma put him there, using technology that they were developing in the lab. Unfortunately, this is another one of those movies where they saved money---or perhaps friction between actors unwilling to work with one another---by filming a long, long scene in which they are each filmed separately, or with the back of the other person's head in the shared scene (which is obviously faked). Considering how the action scenes worked relatively well, there was absolutely no reason to include this 10-15-minute scene, where Gibson chews the scenery, while Watts seems to suffer in silence. It's a terrible scene that adds nothing that couldn't have been added another way. Grillo is a charismatic leading man, though, and it's nice to see him in his own vehicle. He's actually preferable to Ryan Reynolds's smarmy-voiced guy in Free Guy<fn>. He's also ripped as fuck. Once Roy figures out that he's in a video game and keeps getting killed---while retaining all of the memories---he also figures out that he's being tracked. He lasts the longest when he's underground or in a Faraday cage (like a bar with metal walls). He recruits the help of an NPC at a bar to figure out where his tracking device might be, settling on the great plan of pulling out his teeth until he finds the one with the tiny bug in it. Great. Now he has to repeat pulling that tooth every time he goes through the scenario. But he can also start tracking his hunters. He kills them all, then picks up one of their phones to answer a call from the Colonel's right-hand man Brett (Will Sasso), threatenening to kill him. The first attempt goes poorly. The second attempt goes slightly better---he manages to blow up a lot of foot soldiers---but he's still caught out by Brett. Attempt #3, he pretends to be his doppelganger "Roy #2," waltzing right into the building. He eventually gets a bit farther, very much in the style of a video game with boss levels. One of the characters says, after each kill, <iq>I am Guan Yin (Selina Lo) and Guan Yin has done this.</iq> He eventually meets the Colonel, who accidentally reveals---in a painful, self-indulgent soliloquy---that Roy is stuck in something called an <i>Osiris Spindle</i>, which is the tech that Roy's wife Jemma had been working on, and which the Colonel had no idea is working. Only Roy knows that he's essentially immortal. Roy approaches Dai Feng (Michelle Yeoh) for training in wielding a sword, so that he can finally defeat Guan Yin, kill Brett, and then, finally, the Colonel. Before he dies, the Colonel tells Roy that his son is in danger. Roy arrives on a scene to see his son being carted off on a stretcher, in a body bag. Then, a giant explosion wipes out humanity. After several days of staying in bed and sulking, being killed again and again by the very first contract killer of the day. Soon, though, he's back at it, but, Instead of trying to get the colonel, Roy now just spends the whole day with his son. The day always ends in an explosion that wipes out humanity. He eventually discovers that Jemma was alive for 14 minutes after he awakens in the Osiris Loop, which means, if he can rescue her, she can save the world---and hopefully release him from the Osiris Loop. That was her plan all along; she asks <iq>How many times did it take?</iq> <bq>Just one.</bq> Roy tells Jemma about how much he's learned about his son. I think that they're at least in the same scene but the camerawork is sooooo lazy. OK, so they're holding hands. They were in the same scene together. Roy's going to have to go into the device, possibly sacrificing himself. And the movie ends without telling us! NICE. I would watch this movie again. It was fun. Some of the scenes dragged, especially the ones with Mel Gibson, but it was pretty entertaining. Grillo is charismatic.</div> <span id="Saul">Better Call Saul S06 (2022)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3032476/">9/10</a> <div>Man, Vince Gilligan is just <i>so good at this shit.</i> And Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman is a tour de force. My favorite scenes are in the mall, at the very end chronologically, but scattered throughout the season. They're in black-and-white and give Gilligan every opportunity to show off his incredible eye for composition, for elevating the mundane, for appreciating the everyday, making it seem amazing, worthy of attention. I can watch Jimmy bake and box a Cinnabon all day long. This final season wraps things up incredibly well, delivering a pretty satisfying ending to the questions and plot lines opened in the first five seasons. The world thinks that the execrable Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) is dead, killed in a raid on his own compound in which Nacho's (Michael Mando) information was instrumental. Nacho is now being hunted by the Salamanca clan, moving from safe house to safe house. Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) and Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) are setting up Howard (Patrick Fabian) with various scams, both to destabilize him, and also to make his friends and colleagues believe him to be unstable, perhaps involved with cocaine and prostitutes. His colleague Clifford Main (Ed Begley Jr.) is at first a hard sell, but the "evidence" accumulates. The subterfuges are increasingly complex and convincing, attacking Howard from all sorts of angles. His conviction that Jimmy is behind everything begins to sound more and more like paranoia, given the mounting and overwhelming evidence (all of which is faked). Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis) learns that Lalo is still alive and that Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) was instrumental in setting up the hit from which he only narrowly escaped. Nacho feels the noose tightening, and wants to protect his father from collateral damage, so he and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) concoct a plan where he will go out without torture and where his death might mean something. Mike is set up with his sniper rifle to kill Nacho from afar but he's not needed. Nacho takes care of it himself, committing suicide after having convinced Hector that Gus was not involved in Lalo's assassination attempt. Jimmy's reputation as a regular lawyer was damaged by his having defended Lalo---but his reputation among criminals is sterling. So, after having been kicked out of his office in the nail salon, he scouts and finds a new location. It's run-down and awful (at first) but the clients are lined up around the corner. Kim learns from Mike that Lalo is alive and looking for them. Gus and Mike have a huge operation underway to find him before he finds them. Lalo closes in, while Kim and Jimmy's scams against Howard spiral to new heights. This culminates in Howard going to Kim and Jimmy's apartment to confront them, only for Lalo to find them at the same time. This ends with Howard dead on the floor. Lalo then tries to blackmail them into doing dirty work for him, like killing Gus. Kim ends up going to do the hit. This goes sideways as Gus is prepared, with Mike intercepting Kim. However, Lalo had only sent Kim as a distraction, in the hopes that she would reveal the entrance to Gus's meth lab. Gus hurries to intercept, with Lalo initially having the upper hand, but Gus using a hidden pistol to finally kill Lalo and remove him from this world. This was a great moment that you really felt like celebrating, as the story had built Lalo up as such a chaotic, nearly unstoppable, immoral force. He's finally extinguished. Mike buries Lalo and Howard under the dirt floor of the meth-lab construction site. The fallout of all of this is that Kim leaves Jimmy and gives up her lawyer's license because, although she thinks Howard deserved his fate, what it did to her was unacceptable damage. Jimmy accepts this but then leans into his Saul Goodman persona. This is more-or-less the end of the pre-<i>Breaking Bad</i> era part of the story. We rejoin Jimmy McGill in 2010, <i>after</i> he's no longer Saul Goodman, after he's become Gene Takavic because he's on the run from Gus and the Salamancas. As well as running a Cinnabon, he also starts scamming again, coming up with an elaborate plan to steal merchandise from a department store. This is a wonderful, wonderful episode---a true work of art. He perpetrates more scams, fleecing moderately wealthy and overconfident men by dosing them with barbiturates, then entering their homes, stealing stuff and taking their identities where possible. The last target has cancer, which causes Gene's/Saul's/Jimmy's partners to back out but Gene perseveres. Gene gets away but things go awry in other ways, with his remaining partner ramming a cop car, then the partner's mother (an original mark of Gene's) learning who Gene really is when he asks for her help to get her son out of jail. Gene is on the jump again after she calls the cops. Gene has managed to contact Kim but, although she's deeply unsatisfied with her modest and somewhat pathetic life---they show her go on a deeply unsatisfying date that ended up in bed but so perfunctorily that you couldn't help but feel sorry for everyone involved. When Gene refuses to turn himself in, Kim turns him in by providing Howard's widow with all of the evidence she needs to prove that Jimmy and Kim destroyed his reputation with malicious premeditation. Gene is arrested and is looking at seven years. He pretends to try to implicate Kim but instead gives up literally everything he's ever done: his participation in gaslighting his horrible brother Charles into killing himself, his premeditated plan to ruin the horrible and supercilious Howard's life, his deep involvement with Walter White, the Salamancas, and Gus Fring. Kim goes scott-free forever, while Jimmy gets 86 years in prison. In prison, Jimmy enjoys comfort for his notoriety and for his skills as a lawyer. Kim visits and they share a cigarette, her gratitude for his sacrifice unexpressed but implicit.</div> <span id="Footloose">Footloose (1984)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087277/">7/10</a> <div>We begin with feet. Feet dancing. All sorts of pants. All sorts of shoes. The credits flicker over these lower legs. Segue to Rev. Shaw Moore (John Lithgow) preaching as we cycle through a montage of smalltown USA, then focus on the church interior. The reverend is really getting into it, all hellfire and brimstone. His wife Vi (Dianne Wiest) looks on. The reverend's daughter Arial (Lori Singer) briefly meets newcomer Ren (Kevin Bacon) before taking off with her friends Rusty (Sarah Jessica Parker) and others. They barrel down the road, racing Ariel's boyfriend Chuck (Jim Youngs) in his truck. Ariel straddles the vehicles and narrowly avoids being hit my an oncoming Mac truck. She's a tad reckless, to put it generously. Ren drives a yellow VW Beetle and listens to Quiet Riot (Bang Your Head) as he pulls up to school for the first time. He's wearing a tie. He meets Willard (Chris Penn) when he bumps into him. Ren tells him, <bq>I like that hat. They sell men's clothes where you got that?</bq> They are immediate friends. Ren continues to learn about his new environs, as he clashes with Chuck and gets a job at the mill. Barely, because he's an outsider. But he's persistent. At lunch, Ren learns that dancing is illegal in his new town. Next, he's working out on the high bar with Willard, where he learns more about the people in town. Ren is really good at the high bar. Chuck has challenged Ren to a game of "chicken" with tractors. Ren's never driven a tractor before. Chuck starts his ever-present boombox. <i>I'm Holding Out for a Hero</i> by <i>Bonnie Tyler</i>. Ren's shoelace gets stuck on the gas pedal; he wins the game as Chuck bails into the nearby canal, with his tractor following him. After his step-dad blames him for everything that's been going wrong in the town since Ren showed up, Ren takes off to an abandoned factory. Cigarette. Beer bottle. Slamming his frustrated hands on the steering wheel. Throwing his beer bottle. Breaking into dance. He's blowing off steam, just dancing his little heart out. There are gymnastics in this montage. He is accompanied by <i>Never</i> by <i>Mitsuyo Nemoto</i> (<iq>The song is best known for a scene in the film when an <b>angst-ridden</b> Ren McCormack <b>punchdances</b> around an abandoned warehouse.</iq>) Arial shows up, trying to stand in front of the train. She's crackers. Just loopy and dangerous. Also, not nearly as hot as she thinks she is. Ren is thrown off of the gymnastics team for having dallied about with Arial. Ren and Willard talk, then Ren comes up with a plan: have a dance in the stupid town anyway. He takes a group of the kids across state lines to show them what they're missing. <i>Hurts So Good</i> by <i>John Cougar Mellencamp</i>, <i>Waiting For a Girl Like You</i> by <i>Foreigner</i>, then <i>Footloose</i> by <i>Kenny Loggins</i>. Willard gets his clock cleaned by a guy who was dancing with his girl Rusty---because Willard doesn't know how to dance. That's a Chekhov's Gun right there. Ren is almost beaten up by Chuck and his crew for trying to plan a dance. His friend Woody (John Laughlin) steps in and shuts that shit down. He tells Ren that he's going to have to convince the seven-member town council to get his dance approved. Ren swears that, if he has to speak in front of the council, then Willard will have to learn how to dance. Cue another montage. <i>Let's Hear It for the Boy</i> by <i>Denise Williams</i>. Willard is wearing his walkman everywhere, learning how to keep a beat, bopping along behind Ren as they wander the school hallways. The meeting about the dance approaches. Someone from town throws a brick through Ren's sister's window, terrifying them and enraging his step-dad, who tells Ren to stop his crusade. Ren's mom had lost her job that day; step-dad's business is losing customers. The day of the meeting comes. Ren's speech is impassioned, littered with references to Psalms from the Bible brought to him by Arial. It doesn't matter. He loses the vote. His boss Andy (Timothy Scott) tells him that, right next to the mill is the county line. They could have their dance there, close to town, but across the county line. The reverend starts to see the light. He meets with Ren. His partners on the council start burning books, appalling him. He puts a stop to it. <i>I'm Free (Heaven Help the Man)</i> by <i>Kenny Loggins</i> accompanies a montage as the kids set up the barn for their prom. Then, ...they have their prom. The Reverend and Vi are in the field, watching from afar, but not too afar. Andy rides up on them. <bq><b>Reverend:</b> I'm still not sure whether it's the right thing. <b>Andy:</b> Comes close.</bq> In the hall, they're playing <i>Almost Paradise</i> by <i>Eric Carmen</i>, sung by the lead singer of <i>Loverboy</i> and backed up by Ann Wilson of <i>Heart</i>. It's awful. Almost no-one is dancing. Chuck shows up and he and his crew get their asses karate-kicked by Ren and farmer-stomped by Willard. They go back inside and everyone tears it up to the titular theme song. It's back to <i>Let's Hear it for the Boy</i> as the credits roll.</div> <span id="Creator">The Creator (2023)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt11858890/">6/10</a> <div>Joshua (John David Washington) is an ex-soldier in a world in which, in 2055, an AI had attacked Los Angeles with a nuclear weapon. Although the western world bands together against AI, most of Asia is not convinced that there is a path forward without it. Joshua is coerced with promises that his wife Maya (Gemma Chan) might still be alive. He infiltrates a compound in "New Asia" (yeah, no kidding) to find their "secret weapon". The weapon turns out to be Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), a child-like robotic AI with the power to control technology. She's kind of like the kid in <i>The Golden Child</i> but, instead of eating lotus blossoms, she makes machines go boop. There is a lot of backstory about how Alphie is actually based on Joshua's unborn child and that his wife actually is alive but in a coma and the daughter of the AI architect par excellence in New Asia and that Joshua will have to make a lot of difficult choices amid a lot of nice-looking action scenes in order to end the war between New Asia and NOMAD and to bring humanity to peace and co-existence with AI robots, I guess. It was all a bit much, and I must admit that my attention wandered a bit. I think you'll excuse me because here's the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creator_(2023_film)" source="Wikipedia">summary of the finale</a>, <bq>Captured again, Taylor is coerced into killing Alphie with an electroshock weapon. However, Andrews later discovers this to be a ruse, allowing the pair to escape. Boarding a lunar shuttle at the Los Angeles Interplanetary Air and Space Port, Alphie forces the spacecraft to dock aboard NOMAD as Andrews orders a large-scale assault on remaining AI bases. <b>Taylor plants explosives; ejects Alphie by escape pod when Andrews activates a robot that prevents him from fleeing; and reunites with a simulant bearing Maya's likeness, activated by Alphie with Maya's memories from the drive that Taylor gave to her as a necklace.</b> They embrace as NOMAD explodes, killing Taylor, destroying Maya, and shutting down the missile guidance system, saving most of the targeted AI bases across New Asia.</bq> Holy shit, what? I mean, it more-or-less made sense in the context of the film but there are a lot of moving parts. I might need to watch it again but I probably won't. This movie was not as bad as I'd expected it to be but it also wasn't particularly memorable. It's pretty. It's perhaps also a bit more relevant now than ever. The kid was pretty good. I watched it in German.</div> <span id="Police">Police Academy (1984)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087928/">6/10</a> <div>I first saw this movie when it was released or at some point in the 80s, since it's rated R and I wouldn't have seen it in the theater if my Mom had anything to say about it. Anyway, I was in my teens. I had to have watched it a couple of times with Dad on the USA network. Let's see how it holds up. The movie starts off showing the terrible jobs with which the soon-to-be academy enrollees are currently pissing away their lives. Tackleberry (David Graf) is s security guard, Mahoney (Steve Gutenberg) is a parking-lot attendant, Larvell Jones (Michael Winslow) was arrested for ... something, Leslie Barbara (Donovan Scott) works in a standalone photomatic booth, and many others. George Martin (Andrew Rubin) shows up in a carful of girls. Karen Thompson (Kim Cattrall) is from a well-off family and shows up in a limo. There's giant Moses Hightower (Bubba Smith) and tiny, quiet Laverne Hooks (Marion Ramsey), who, at some point, gets loud. They all meet their Lt. Thaddeus Harris (G.W. Bailey) and Commandant Eric Lassard (George Gaynes). Mahoney works very hard to get thrown out. The next day, they meet Sgt. Debbie Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook), who's a bad-ass drill instructor with, well, a very fit form and quite outsized breasts. The movie rolls into one madcap antic after another. Mahoney keeps hitting on Karen. There are parties. There are boobs. There are butts. There is the <i>Blue Oyster</i> gay bar. There is a giant bonfire. There are more boobs. Thaddeus ends up flying head-first into a horse's behind. Hightower steals a tiny Honda Civic and gets a driving lesson from Mahoney, passing the driving test the next day with flying colors. One of the more-racist trainees calls Hooks a very racist term, so Hightower flips the dude's car over---and is thrown out of the program for it. Mahoney is thrown out next for fighting. A riot starts in the city and the academy sends its fresh cadets. The riot is mostly foot-soldiers with clubs, bats, and sticks. Only one guy has guns---because he plucked them off of too-green recruits. His name in the credits is Main Bad Guy (Doug Lennox). Hightower shows up to save the day. All of the recruits graduate with flying colors because of their amazing performance during the riots. Hightower and Mahoney get an award. This was a popular, successful movie. It was obviously made for a song. It's not a great movie, but it gets an extra star for nostalgia. It was one of the first movies I saw with boobies. The U.S. was a very repressed place. I think we have lost something along the way, though, in that this movie was fun and dumb---but inexpensive---and probably a lot of people enjoyed it. I watched it in German.</div> <span id="Papillon">Papillon (2017)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5093026/">9/10</a> <div>This is a pitch-perfect remake of the original, staying true to the book. It stars Charlie Hunnam as the titular Papillon (Henri Charrière), who is a safecracker but is framed for murder. Despite having a solid alibi, he's convicted and sent to Devil's Island in French Guiana. The boat ride is hellish. Filthy. Papillon defends Louis Dega (Rami Malek), a slight, bookish forger. They become fast friends and partners, with Papillon focusing laser-like on escape from the very beginning. The first breakout attempt comes spontaneously, when Papillon clubs a guard over the head for whipping Dega. It is an unplanned opportunity so his wild run into the jungle results in a relatively quick re-capture. He is sentenced to two extra years for the escape attempt, luckily escaping a death sentence because the guard was not killed. "Lucky" is perhaps not the right word, as his two years are to be served in near-starvation, filthy conditions, in total silence and in solitary confinement. Halfway through, the guards discover that Dega had been arranging extra rations for him. Refusing to give up Dega's involvement, Papillon is reduced to half rations---which would be about a quarter of what he'd been getting before---and he nearly starves. He goes a little bit mad. But there is a strong fiber at the core of the man that will neither bow nor break. In fact, after his two years are up, he uses his release from solitary to feign more madness than he actually feels. He reconnects with Dega, allowing only him to see that he's not nearly as unwell as he makes himself out to be. Dega is doing the warden's books, so he is well-placed to both plan and finance another escape attempt. This time, they are with two others---Maturette (Joel Basman) and Celier (Roland Møller)---the latter of whom is savage and wants to sacrifice the injured Dega---he broke his leg jumping off of a wall that everyone else survived just fine---but Papillon once again serves as his champion, giving Dega the opportunity to kill Celier. Their boat is wrecked in a storm that washes them up on Colombian shores, near a convent where nuns nurse them back to health. The authorities root them out again, killing Maturette in their raid and collecting Papillon and Dega. Dega is sent to Devil's Island, which is completely cut off from everything and doesn't even have any guards on it, because where are you going to go? It's nearly a fate worse than death. Papillon gets <i>five years</i> in solitary confinement, serving <i>all of it</i>. He emerges an old man, bowed, but not broken. He is sent to Devil's Island to serve out the remainder of his sentence. Dega has made his peace with confinement, having made a life for himself on Devil's Island. Papillon has one goal in mind: escape. The cliffs of Devil's Island are high; you can survive the plunge but the swim is far too far, the currents too strong. You need a craft of some sort. He fashions a raft from a bag of coconuts, one of the only foodstuffs brought to the island. He takes a tearful farewell from his lifelong friend Dega, who is neither interested in escaping---though perhaps a spark awakened for a moment, sustained by Papillon's unfailing fervor for freedom---nor is he capable of surviving the fall to the ocean---which soon extinguishes whatever fire Papillon's passion can awaken. Papillon throws his bag of coconuts in the water, watching it bob in the waves and then slowly begin to move away from the island, as hoped and expected. He plunges after it, surviving the fall and clambering aboard the raft. It carries him to eventual safety and freedom. He would write an excellent and gripping book, which my mother recommended to me, and which I read a long, long time ago, back in the 90s. Based on a true story, in case that wasn't obvious. Highly recommended.</div> <span id="Divergent">Divergent (2014)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1840309/">5/10</a> <div>Tris (Shailene Woodley) lives in a world that combines the dystopia of <i>Hunger Games</i> with the genetic predetermination of belonging to a clan of <i>Harry Potter</i>. Tris, however, is <i>divergent</i> and doesn't show a genetic predisposition to any of the clans specifically---she could be any one. She chooses the "feroxes", which are a warrior clan full of meatheads who value foolhardiness above every other characteristic. It's like they're all in <i>Starship Troopers</i> but they're completely unaware that it's satire. Her mother Natalie (Ashley Judd) turns out to have been a ferox, but that's only revealed much later and it's supposed to be significant but it is, somehow, not. One of the other ferox candidates is Christina (Zoë Kravitz), who's so tiny that it's inconceivable that she would survive in a warrior clan but YA movies are nothing if not unrealistically inclusive. Peter (Miles Teller) is another candidate who's pretty much a doughy asshole who's completely unconvincing as a macho badass. Caleb (Ansel Elgort) is just as unconvincing. It almost goes without saying that the doughy Woodley also cannot sell herself as a warrior. Her fighting style is bizarre---although many of the girls fight with their elbows forward, which looks ridiculous---and she telegraphs every weak blow. She also can't act her way out of a paper bag. Eric (Jai Courtney) is the only really hard-looking dude, even though he never really fights. At least he looks the part. One of these feroxes is Four (Theo James), a character whose name I didn't know was literally the number four because I watched the movie in German and I just thought it was his name. They didn't translate it. The only ostensibly good actor in this movie is Kate Winslet, who plays Jeanine, a leader of some brainy clan that wants to manipulate the feroxes into being their own private army. She is pretty much Neil Patrick Harris's character from Starship Troopers. Tori (Maggie Q) helps Tris deal with her divergence, I recognized Mekhi Phifer in there, as well as Ray Stevenson. The entire middle of the movie is about Tris training to become a ferox. I cannot begin to explain how long and drawn-out this part feels. It feels like about 90 minutes of the movie is about Tris's long, painful road up the ladder, seemingly moving up without showing any real gain in skill. This movie has a couple of moments but it's really incoherent and not very good. It seems to be playing on a sequel, which it got but only because every single one of these types of movies were getting sequels at that time. I watched it in German.</div> <span id="Severance">Severance S02 (2024)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt11280740/">6/10</a> <div>In season two, we are introduced to a few more dribs and drabs of information about their parent company Lumen and its cult-like origins and continued operation. After having broken out very briefly at the end of season one, the severed crew is eventually back at work. We see both sides of our quartet---Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro). Their enigmatic/weird/tedious below-sides boss Milchik (Tramell Tillman) is back and wreaking havoc. Burt (Christopher Walken) makes a few token appearances in a mostly non-speaking role, and Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) is back and just as quirky as ever, as she vies for control of the severed floor with Milchik and Helly's "outie". Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) is an enigmatic and chronologically ambiguous Asian---I use the term as pejoratively as the writers clearly intended; she is severe and no-nonsense and she looks to be about 14 years old---who works with Milchick. Mark's sister Devon (Jen Tullock) and her weird author-husband Ricken (Michael Chernus) are still in the picture, and Ricken is being pulled deeper into Lumon's web by the mouth of the unseen and unheard Board, represented by Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander). This season feels perhaps more like <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=3339#Westworld">Westworld</a> than the first one. It's building the world a bit more and I'm not sure it wasn't more interesting when everything was unknown and more mysterious. I have a feeling that their explanation for the severance floor is going to be disappointing but I'll be delighted to be wrong. The explanation is a long, long time coming. This show was definitely <i>not</i> directed by Vince Gilligan. It is largely visually uninteresting and rides shamelessly on the coattails of the first season's success, which was much more captivating. There is a long, long sequence "outside", where it is cold and there are just long sequences of people talking to each other in the cold. Two cameras, one on each face. Nothing moves. It might as well be a <i>Nightline</i> interview. What are they doing with all of the money that these shows cost? Anyway, we learn that Harmony Cobel is the inventor of the severance procedure and technology and that she's being screwed out of her legacy by Helly's company, Lumon. It takes a long time to learn this, I guess because it's pretty important, so you have to reveal it slowly, like watching Charlie unwrap a chocolate bar to see if there's a golden ticket in there. Mark is trying to undo his severing---<i>reintegrate</i>---and it's starting to work, though it's not as straightforward as he'd hoped, which is exactly what the lady helping him told him would happen. There is an outdoor team-building exercise, which Mark and Helly think is the perfect opportunity to consummate their love---in a tent in the freezing cold on a company retreat. The next morning, Irving outs Helly as a mole, causing her to briefly revert to her outie---calling Milchik by his real name---but ultimately getting Irving fired. Irving reverts to his outie. He looks up Burt and meets his partner, where they discuss whatever oddities they can remember about the severed floor. There's that weird, weird dark tunnel in all of Irving's paintings. Mark's wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is trying to get free, but fails to overcome severance. Her fate is somehow tied up in the <i>final file</i> that they have to process, called <i>Cold Harbor</i>. Is she gonna die when it's finished? Is Mark going to finish it anyway? Mark ends up arguing with his own innie about how to proceed. Outie Mark wants innie Mark to finish the file and then rescue Gemma from Lumon. Innie Mark realizes that it's a suicide mission for him and <i>bails</i>. Some version of Mark is going to have to end up choosing between Gemma and Helly, I guess. Is this going to be the purpose of the show? Is this all that they're going to ever be able to reveal about why Lumon even exists or what it's doing? Like, are we just going to be treated to several seasons riffing on "is it killing a person to reintegrate?" I guess we'll find out in what is almost certainly going to be season 3. This season could have been considerably condensed. I don't understand how we went from the 70s and 80s, where this kind of story would have been a longer short-story or, at most, a novella, and now we're on 20 hours of television and there are more open questions than ever. Like, I welcome that you're making shows and movies about the stuff I grew up on, but <i>stop ruining it and stop dumbing it down.</i> You don't have to wrap it up <i>too</i> quickly, but this season could have been 3 or 4 episodes tops.</div> <span id="Renaissance">Terminator Renaissance (2010)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0438488/">6/10</a> <div>I'd already <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3242#Terminator">seen and reviewed this movie in 2016</a>. It wasn't any better then in English than now in French. It was good practice, though. The French action-movie channel doesn't include subtitles but I accepted the challenge. It wasn't as hard as I thought it'd be because a ton of the dialogue is on the level of <iq>Il y a une problème,</iq> which I can understand even when I'm typing in English. As I'd already noted in 2016, it's a shame that the script wasn't commensurate to the gravitas of the cast: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Michael Ironside, Helena Bonham Carter (who shows up bald and beautiful), Bryce Dallas Howard, Anton Yelchin. Common was also there, an actor who possesses the appropriate level of acting talent for the overall quality of the film. I had completely forgotten the gigantic Transformers-style robot with what looked like mantis-shrimp-like claws issuing from its groin. It is unclear why it had those because it had more than enough high-powered rockets anyway. The scene where Christian Bale knocks out a Terminator-motorcycle and then hijacks it was pretty sweet. The original title is <i>Terminator Salvation.</i></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>Which was fine, but Reynolds has, like, one character now.</ft>